Networked Entertainment: Just Say No

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes has been writing about technology for the past two decades.

The overarching message from January's Consumer Electronics Show was pretty much the same as it has been for the last couple of years: Sooner or later everybody will be using wired and wireless home networks to seamlessly shuttle entertainment from room to room.

My message: Bet on later. Whenever I hear it applied to technology, the word seamless always has me in stitches.

True, home networking parlor tricks are available right now. Lots of devices permit you to stream tunes from your PC to your home stereo, or to show computer-stored photos and videos on a living-room TV. Some ReplayTV and TiVo video recorders let you access shows from a unit elsewhere in the house. How cool is that?

Not very, thanks to snags such as these:

Speedy obsolescence: Compressed music files incorporating digital rights management technology--generally the only files the music industry will let you download legally--come in at least four incompatible formats from Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, and Sony. Right now, only Microsoft's WMA and the ubiquitous MP3 tend to play well with networked stand-alone players.

Buy or rip music in the wrong file format, and you're likely to end up buying or ripping it again. And if you spend your money on one of today's low-definition DVRs or DVD recorders, you're sure to head back to the store someday for a high-def replacement.

Illustration by John Cuneo

Inadequate bandwidth: 802.11b wireless networks have plenty of bandwidth to handle music if you're not doing some other data-intensive job at the same time. But for low-definition video, you'll need 802.11g, and even that may not work well. In the short run, high-def over wireless is likely to be a story of hiccups, pixelation, and breakup. And if you're entertaining thoughts of ripping up walls to put in ethernet cabling, revisit Manes's First Law.

Half-baked products: Media-streaming boxes sound like a great idea until you try one. Most require you to massage your library to fit their software's ideas of organization. Most respond sluggishly to the remote control. Crashes abound. How do you avoid these problems? Use a plain old CD or DVD player!

Geeks will probably delight in whiling away countless hours networking their entertainment. Normal folks who have enough trouble figuring out today's increasingly baffling TVs will stick with systems that don't crash and won't quickly turn into buggy whips.