Business Wire - According to ABI Research, personal computers are destined to play an ever-increasing role in the management, distribution and playback of multimedia content in the home. The research firm predicts that home theater PCs will grow to an installed base of 25 million by 2013. Steve Wilson, a principal analyst for ABI adds: "There are two primary ways the PC can be incorporated into the digital living room. One has a PC directly connected to a client device, a home theater PC, or in the form of a PC integrated with a display. The other involves using an embedded client to extend the PC output to a TV." The article further states that Microsoft's Media Center (bundled with the Vista operating system) will help solidify the role of PCs in future living rooms, and clients running over home networks and extender technologies will be by far the leading way to connect a PC to the TV. There will still be a small market of home theater PC enthusiasts who buy custom-designed home theater PC systems resembling consumer AV equipment. While all-in-one systems are a bit bulky today, in the future we will see more optimized designs for converging the PC and TV.
Do you use your PC in your home entertainment system? If so, please leave a comment and let us know.
Comments
I don’t use a computer directly in my home threather system. I’m not a big fan of all-in-one units, I would rather have a small dedicated machine that I can play material from both my hard drives and off the internet on the big screen and pipe the audio through the sound system. and have it on the wireless network too
My Home Theater PC is my TV tuner, PVR, CD/DVD player, MP3 player, internet radio, picture viewer, net browser, gaming machine, etc.