Second Coming

Remember WebTV? Microsoft's accountants sure do. The software superpower spent $425 million to buy and promote a system that married the brains of the personal computer with the entertainment value of television, allowing people to surf the Internet and watch Seinfeld on the same monitor. Like a lot of doomed info-age ideas, it had its own buzzword: convergence, a concept that predicted the blurring of boundaries between smart boxes (the PC) and dumb ones (the TV). Problem was, people loved their idiot box just the way it was, idiotic. So the PC stayed in the living room, a disappointed Microsoft renamed WebTV as msn TV in 2001, and convergence was relegated to the Internet-boom graveyard, next to Pets.com and retiring before 30. Pass the remote.

Sometimes, you can't keep a good buzzword down. The microchip is once again creeping toward the living room. And this time, thanks to a wave of new products and digital-appliance advances, convergence seems ready to take hold. Your TV viewing — indeed, your entire home-entertainment experience — may never be the same.

A Miami-based company called Alienware makes a custom PC called Navigator starting at $1700: an entertainment-dedicated unit that runs Microsoft's new Windows XP Media Center Edition and plays TV, records like a TiVo, and runs Internet content, DVDs, CDs and digital music, either on its own monitor and speakers or by channeling the media to your TV or stereo. It could take the place of every component in your entertainment system. Hewlett-Packard, Gateway and Cyberpower are also building PCs dressed up in consumer-electronics drag. They even come with the all-important remote control, so you can manage and play CDs, MP3s, DVDs and music files and record TV programs from your couch.

Don't believe these devices will sell? They already do. In techno-savvy Japan, a recent survey showed that 50% of desktop PCs sold in January 2003 came with built-in hardware and software, allowing them to handle TV signals. In other words, the Japanese get it: they are plugging computers into flat-panel displays, forming a home-entertainment center with no idiot box required.

For now, few will be initially willing to pay a converged price; an 81-cm Sony flat-panel TV and a Netvigator Pro media PC clock in at a combined $7,000. Prices won't remain so high forever; analysts expect PCs with media-center capabilities to be available for $600 in the next couple of years, while flat-panel TV prices should drop in 2003 as companies ramp up their production. The microchip has infiltrated the living room and it's here to stay, at least until wireless streamlines everything else away. Does this mean we can finally order pizza through our TVs? Now that's progress.