Digital Media Set Top Boxes
Digtial Set-Top Boxes bring the world to your living room
Digital Media set-top boxes are the new breed of devices for the home theater. These are home system components where the conventional stereo system meets computer technologies. Such devices blur the line between home theater, PCs, digital storage and home computer functionality. Essentially, any home theater component with a hard drive or network connection designed for storing video or audio for playback on your home system is a digital media device; this includes the PVR.
These are truly the direction of home entertainment, although the entertainment industry as a whole has generally tried to stall the progress of this medium because it effectively turns their product into data that is easily transportable and shared. There are efforts in place to curtail illegal sharing and distribution of intellectual property. Digital copy protection measures like Digital Rights Management or DRM used by Apple's iTunes encodes MP3s so that when the customer purchases a music file it's made for that instance of iTunes and that iPod only. Measure like DRM can be implemented and used across media playback devices (like PCs and iPods) but they can also be cracked and removed from the purchased files.
HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is another copy protection measure implemented as a component connection between devices. HDCP is a protocol developed by Intel for the purpose of allowing digital devices to communicate on the digital domain only with other HDCP-compliant devices (which ensures copy protection). High bandwidth digital communications formats like DVI and HDMI are HDCP-compliant and are the first-ever fully digital audio/video formats that allow completely uncompressed communication between devices and stand to really assist the proliferation of digital media.
The advancement of digital media devices means the days of media being purchased on silver discs (any optical storage method like CD, DVD or even HDDVD) could be coming to a close. Why would anybody want to have rows of CD or DVDs on shelves that can be physically damaged or lost when they can be stored as data? The idea of storing entertainment as files on a drive has opened different ways of distributing files and keeping it profitable. The more clever ways business can keep distribution of entertainment profitable, the more freedom of choice will be offered the consumer.
So far, we're only seeing it in the realm of MP3 and music file distribution. It's only a matter of time before the same ideas spread to movie downloads. Ideas like Yahoo Music, which is a typical subscriber service that allows you to pay for and download copy-protected music files. Another idea is the new-look Napster, which is a subscriber service that allows you to buy music and they'll keep it stored for you - as long as you retain your subscription, you have access to it and don't have to use your own storage. Some of these ideas will fail but some will definitely prosper. Ideas like Napster's are likely doomed as storage by the gig gets cheaper and cheaper.
Soon, all home entertainment will be stored in a digital format and not need to be handled on plastic discs. We can only hope this is sooner than later.
