WHY THE PC WILL BE THE NEXT HOME ENTERTAINMENT CENTER COMPONENT

Richard Silverman, vice president of marketing at Trident Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. believes that a $1,200 PC will be the next entertainment center component to find its way into the home. He says there are economic reasons as well as technology reasons combining to make this happen.

One major economic reason pushing for a PC solution is the marketing might of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash. and Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. The former dominates the operating system and the loyalty of most all software developers writing programs today. The latter commands the hardware platform and the loyalty of manufacturers building systems and components that interact with these systems.

Silverman reasons that with so much R&D on Windows software and Intel hardware, it will be hard for new software and hardware architectures to compete on price-performance. Microsoft’s current success with Windows NT displacing Unix combined with Intel’s success replacing workstations in corporate applications illustrates the power of this argument.

Consider the problem confronting game makers. DFC Intelligence, suggests a scenario in which systems from 3DO, Nintendo, Sega and Sony each have from 20% to 30% of the market. The San Diego, Calif. market research firm believes this situation would be difficult for developers, retailers and consumers.

The situation could set the stage for the emergence of a common standard by the year 2000. Already, among game developers, more are writing software for the PC platform first then porting the games over to the most popular game platforms.

The technical argument for PC dominating the set-top box market is similar. In the video game and set-top box scenario, the consumer must purchase separate hardware for games, network connection and mass storage.

“Instead of a $500 network device, I think you’re going to see someone come in next year with a fully loaded PC in the $895 to $995 range,” Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies Research International, in Santa Clara, Calif. says. “Such a low-end PC would likely sport a minimum of 8 Mbytes of RAM memory, at least a 500-Mbyte hard drive, a Super VGA monitor, modem, 3.5-inch hard drive and CD ROM drive, and a 75MHz Pentium-level processor.”

Silverman says his company and most likely other semiconductor makers are creating chips for the PC that make the PC a more attractive solution with more functionality than the game or set-top can offer. The company’s latest ProVidia and Cyber chips for desktop and notebook PCs, respectively, provide 3D graphics acceleration and video enhancement features.

The chips also have a TV out feature that allows a PC to drive a TV monitor with flicker-free NTSC-PAL signals. In addition, the chips can display two video windows simultaneously thus supporting two-way video conferencing. With current video conferencing solutions selling for under $200, two users each spending $200 can video conference over the Internet.

With the PC solutions, users can play CD ROM or on-line games, browse the internet, download and store information from the network, hold video-conferences, and with the addition of a DVD player, watch prerecorded movies all with surround sound audio.

<BACK