P!!!: Changes Nothing

Electronic News, April 5, 1999 by Peter Brown

San Jose

Oh high and mighty Intel with its Pentium III processors. They claim that it will be a godsend for the Internet and for enabling video and audio experiences beyond what has generally been done with PCs in the past. Intel has been boasting about enabling digital television pictures and other consumer applications on PCs with these faster processors.

But at the risk of being called a heretic or blasphemer, the introduction of the PIII really changes nothing in consumer land. There is a lot of talk about the digital television PC or the broadcast PC but it may end up just that, talk. The consumer market is already well populated with numerous competitors, each with a certain strategic plan and various business offerings covering the entire CE market. These companies are targeting applications in the home, not in the office space where most computers are still being used.

How many executives are going to want to watch television, let alone enjoy the benefits of digital television, on their desktop at work while crunching numbers or developing strategic plans? And by the time people get home they want to be able to watch the television, not wait for a PC to boot up, let alone crash on them during ER or Friends.

The PIII brings lot of things to the table indeed; faster performance, higher bandwidth and eventually faster memory with Rambus. However, some analysts say all of these features are best suited for applications on PCs and I tend to agree. Until the PC brings something of value to digital television or another CE application that can't be found on a regular DTV or consumer appliance, a clear separation will always still exist.

This doesn't rule out the possibility of including a hard disk drive or a DVD-ROM with a set-top box which may be mighty successful, but that is another story.

Peter Brown is Senior Editor for Electronic News. Please write to him at pbrown@cahners.com.