Home computers are usually relegated to the home office. But digital media is making computer technology a desirable quality in consumer devices, too. In an effort to combine computer technology and digital media, vendors are starting to produce products that I call digital entertainment appliances. These products bring the computer media experience out of the computer room and into the living room. In the first generation of entertainment appliances, vendors attempt to abandon the roots of the business—the computer-savvy technical user, who can appreciate what these companies are trying to do—in favor of the broad consumer market, where these devices will have difficulty getting traction because of cost, complexity, and a difficult-to-explain benefit to the average consumer.

A Media Organizer
Hewlett-Packard (HP) introduced the Digital Entertainment Center de100c in 2001 (you can read a review of this product, "HP Digital Entertainment Center de100c," at http://www.connectedhomemag.com/audio/articles/index.cfm?articleid=24111). HP designed this stereo-rack component to do for the home entertainment center what your computer does for your digital media experience—collect, create, and organize digital media. The HP de100c uses your TV set as its display device and lets you play CDs, rip thousands of tracks to a local hard disk, burn your own CD mixes—both as audio CDs and MP3 data CDs—and access Internet radio. It provides built-in networking capabilities for buyers who already have networks set up and an internal 56Kbps modem to connect to the Internet.

Despite having built-in networking, the HP de100c doesn't make sharing or using your existing digital media easy because it can't directly play media stored elsewhere on your network. You first need to push content to the de100c's local hard disk from network-connected computers. The HP de100c is HP's attempt to branch out of the computer and peripherals market into consumer electronics.

All-in-One Control
The AIVA Home Entertainment Library from Interact-TV (http://www.interact-tv.com), scheduled for release in June, takes home entertainment in a different direction. Combining features from products such as TiVo, Microsoft UltimateTV, and the HP de100c, the AIVA lets you control all digital media options, including TV, Internet radio, and MP3 playback.

Like TiVo, SONICblue's ReplayTV, and UltimateTV, the AIVA system will serve as your personal video recorder (PVR). AIVA can pause live TV broadcasts, has a picture-in-picture feature, and lets you record one channel while watching another (if you have multiple tuners). You'll be able to customize your viewing experience with personal favorites and channel-surfing options. Beyond what the other PVR products can do, AIVA will let you stream media to CD- or DVD- recordable media, so your lifetime goal of a complete collection of episodes of The Simpsons on CD is now attainable. You can use the AIVA—as you can the HP de100c—to store and play back your CD collection, ripping the music to AIVA's local hard drive, which the company reports (at press time) will be no smaller than 60GB. Unlike the HP de100c, the AIVA lets you play back that ripped content from other audio devices connected to your home network. And, like MSN TV, the AIVA will let you surf the Web and read and compose email from the comfort of your couch by using a wireless keyboard and mouse and by using your TV set as the display.

The goal of the AIVA is to replace your VCR, your DVD player, your CD audio, and your PC music-ripping tools. It can do this because it's a PC. Interact-TV built the original models on HP Pavilion PCs that ran Linux and used off-the-shelf hardware components with Interact-TV's custom software—optimized for the underlying commodity hardware—to run the whole shebang. (The final shipping product probably won't use HP computers.)

AIVA's target is the high-end audio/video (A/V) installers who would bundle the AIVA as another component in their A/V offerings. The prerelease price in the $2000 range reflects that goal. (Interact-TV expects the price will come down depending on which PC hardware provider the company chooses.)

Despite the AIVA's computer ancestry and the unit's ability to share its content with other network systems, at press time Interact-TV representatives weren't sure whether the final product would be able to access other digital media on a home network. The company did consider allowing access to NFS mounts on other computers and using Samba (an open source software—OSS—suite that provides file and print services) to access shares on Windows-based computers, but at press time, Interact-TV hadn't yet made the final call.

The first generation of the product will use standard NTSC tuner hardware, which means no High-Definition Television (HDTV), no built-in satellite, and no digital cable support. AIVA can receive an analog signal from any of the aforementioned devices or from set-top devices. But it can't receive a digital signal, so the first-generation product won't allow digital-to-digital media copying and storing (beyond CD-ripping abilities).

Given AIVA's target market, the product is more an evolutionary product than a dramatic change to the home entertainment business. It's a PC with custom software that does some cool things. But Interact-TV designed the AIVA so that installers could hide its PC-ness, burying it among the other A/V devices the customer wants and making the TV the interface.