How are people using media in their homes?

How are people using media in their homes?

Jeff Colen (President, A Sharper Home, Inc.) gives expert video advice on: What one component should I not skimp on and why?; How are people using media in their homes?; What types of control systems are becoming popular? and more...

We are seeing more and more media rooms. What we're also seeing a lot more of is distributed audio and video across the house. People are buying their iPods, and they want to hear them around the house, and there's a lot of neat enabling technology that'll allow that to happen. We're also doing a lot of retrofits in people's existing houses, putting audio across the house so they can enjoy music again. It's a really nice thing. It really is. So, that's big, and then integrating your computer with your TV is another big area. People want to use their monitor as a giant screen for their computer or their laptop, and being able to sit there in your comfortable theatre chair with a wireless keyboard and mouse, surf the net, check out YouTube, www.youtube.com, and do other things like that, is a great thing. We're seeing more convergence along those lines. With the hi-def DVDs and the Blu-Ray DVD players, there's a lot of merging between watching something on the screen and then getting background notes, for example, on the movie. Something that's coming (it's not here yet) is the ability to watch a DVD and then, say, press a button to say, "Would you like to view another one by this artist, or by this director?" and then download that video from Blockbuster or Netflix or some other provider of DVD material. That's coming; where these things will merge together and there'll be less of a distinction between a computer, a stereo, and a TV.