2003 and Beyond

At Home

Some of the most exciting technology changes, however, will be in the home, where new hard drive-based products and PCs will distribute digital entertainment wirelessly to TVs and stereos anywhere in the dwelling.

Discrete recorders such as ReplayTV and its rival TiVo should continue to sell well in the next few years, but they will face new challenges from media-savvy PCs equipped with TV tuner cards and Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition or Sony's GigaPocket software. These systems enable you to perform such tasks as changing channels, recording programs, playing music, and clicking through digital photos via a TV-style remote control.

Home Broadcasting

Most people don't want to watch television and listen to music on a PC--or lug their PC into the living room. But high-speed home networks can obviate these issues, combining the storage and processing power of a PC with the convenience and simplicity of consumer electronics.

This was evident at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, where CD3O, HP, Linksys, Motorola, Pioneer, Prismiq, Rockford Fosgate, Sony, Yamaha, and other companies launched products that bring digital music or images to a stereo or TV.

In the living room, technology companies increasingly will deal with customers who have no wish to spend hours configuring a home network. Fortunately, Universal Plug and Play technology, introduced in the first generation of media receivers, allows all devices on a wired (ethernet) or wireless network to detect each other and set up relationships automatically.

Eventually, UPnP should appear in a wide range of devices, including printers, scanners, digital cameras, televisions, and stereos.

Prior to that--and well before the end of 2004--Intel expects to deliver a wireless media adapter design to manufacturers for use in products that cost-conscious consumers can use to connect existing PC and CE devices through standard jacks and inputs. Linksys recently became the first company to announce a product based on the Intel design.

The first waves of wireless products, already starting to appear, use the 11-megabit-per-second 802.11b standard, which lacks the bandwidth to transmit video (though music and photos are not a problem). But when the second-generation products show up next year with faster 802.11a or 802.11g wireless standards (the latter backward-compatible with 802.11b), streaming video could become a killer app. Apple's new notebook computers, which were introduced in January, already have built-in 802.11g capability.

The Big Picture

Using UPnP over either an 802.11 or a Bluetooth connection, you'll be able to send pictures from a digital camera to a printer, burn them to CDs and DVDs, and display them on a TV--without ever touching the PC. Of course, this will also sidestep computer software for tweaking the appearance of photos; some of these functions, however, will move into digital cameras with onboard software for tasks such as color correction and detail highlighting.

Dramatic price drops will encourage the digital camera boom. Greg Young, director of imaging for Sony, expects 5-megapixel models to sell for under $500 by the end of this year and perhaps for even less in 2004. By that time, most high-end digital cameras will be around 8 megapixels.

But digital photographers will probably continue to refine and organize their shots on a PC. And that takes us to a final (daring?) prediction: PCs will remain at the center of your digital universe for many years to come. Not only do they offer the most power, but they have the flexibility to incorporate new technologies as they emerge. Two decades from now, when we predict even more dramatic innovation, we expect still to be writing about PCs.