HD1080 - Convergence Continues

Hi - sorry i was out of office for several weeks. But we are back and there is news to relay to you.

The Mixing of Media
We have been watching the market evolve, and getting inside a few things, most notably watching who reads this blog and noting that they sometimes reference it as confirmation that their strategy is solid. Thats a good thing, but please do excuse our typos, we dont have a lot of time for this blog. Our informal focus groups have responded with a resounding YES & I WANT IT NOW for the advent of hometheater - internet convergence and simple access to more and better stuff. There is no doubt in my mind ( and the others in HD1080i labs ) that ON DEMAND is way more important to them than TV schedule in terms of desired content.

Physical tests have indicated that people will use a wireless mouse preferrable to any IR remote, so we bought a laptop ( 1920 x 1200 17" ) with an HDMI 1.3 connector for screen 2 and tested it.
HOW? - wireless. with what? A LAPTOP.

Basically a wireless laptop connected to the HDMI port on an HDTV reaches out to the wireless router in the house, and plays fullscreen 1920 x 1080 on the home theater. We made friends at Vimeo awhile back and asked for HD 720p in that site to do some testing, and LO and Behold, they did, using BitGravity as thier provisioning network over the web. So basically now we can upload and view nice 720p on our home theater.


Van Nuys - SIXX AM debut Performance from CTN GREEN on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/1473953

SWEET 720p

Of course hooking up an HD laptop to an HD screen is not rocket science. but ...

The byproduct is that some text is a bit small to read so 2 things happen. Firstly, move the couchs and chairs closer to the HDTV. Secondly, use the zoom on the lower right of IE7 to make pages bigger when surfiing, ( doesnt always work though, and is often clunky ) and/or just prefer webpages with larger text. This turns out to be a huge plus when using VIMEO since its nice and big and easy and perfect for hometheater convergence usage. Our system upscales at the HD Monitor nicely and the laptop has a blu-ray player for comparison to a std max quality, and of course, we edit HD here so we have a lot of VC-1 ( wmv ) files in our network and accessable to the laptop.



Amazon Video On Demand on BRAVIA Beta
of importance is that the Sony people ( thanks for those that read this blog ) have noted the same thing, and for them, enabling their HDTV with a section of wireless laptop motherboard inside is not a real big problem, they did it, it worked, they showed it off, everyone loved it. AMAZON's Unbox ( which i tootally bashed as awful in a past post ) is upgrading its stuff to plug and play with the properly equipped BRAVIA.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/bravia

Note this is a beta and not really intended to be public, the link may die on me.

ITS WAY BETTER than using the Ps3 or XBOX to reach the web. BRAVIA is a great line and its a no-brainer to want one if you already have a nice fast web connection. https://internet.sony.tv/customer/template/faq.vm?lang=en

If you dont have a fast connection ( like 700kbps or better ) then maybe you want to ask your provider if they can supply you with faster download speeds. Usually they can.