Intel VIIV, the digital home

Imagine the kitchen with no radio, a lounge with no VCR or DVD player or a bedroom with no CD player. Your coffee table actually has space for coffee now that the numerous remote controls have disappeared. You have no television stand to bang your knee against or a cascade of different media players for the dust to settle on. Most importantly, there are no cables for your pet vermin to masticate and there is no longer any need to come out from the comfort of a warm blanket on a winter evening to change the DVD.

Life would then only be school, work and play – useless, in other words. Now, imagine all the clutter that has disappeared fitted into one solitary box – your computer – and accessible via a single remote control.

Credible enough? Intel has made sure it is. Intel's VIIV technology, hyped as the evolution of a digital home, is a platform to replace the numerous pieces of hardware cluttering up precious desk space in a house with a single box. Powered by the Intel Pentium D processor with the help of the Intel 945 Express chipset family, VIIV provides high-definition graphics with up to 7.1 channel surround sound while playing your DVDs and MP3s straight from the PC without any need for separate hardware.

The package collectively referred to by Intel as VIIV, brings together a fast, dual-core processor, designed to withstand a strenuous workload and multi-task efficiently while using Windows XP Media Center on the software side to allow users to make their experience entirely digital.

The Intel Pentium D processor features two processing cores that share the same packaging and run at the same frequency, but operate as distinct execution cores. The two cores provide more resources for higher throughput and simultaneous computing. Twin-core processing allows users to multi-task efficiently and tasks such as rendering a home-made video and burning a DVD that would have drained the life out of a single-core processor can now have separate processing cores assigned to complete the task faster.

Intel VIIV technology-based PCs support the Intel Quick Resume Technology Driver. It allows the PC to behave like a consumer electronic (CE) device – after an initial boot, customers can turn their PCs on and off amazingly fast, just like they do with their televisions.

Intel High Definition (HD) Audio is integrated audio that delivers the features and high-end performance of an add-in audio card. All Intel VIIV technology-based PCs support at least 5.1 surround sound and offer multi-streaming capabilities, allowing users to send two or more different audio streams to different locations around the house. This means users can listen to a movie in surround sound in the family room while another user can listen to music streaming from the same PC in the kitchen.

Intel Matrix Storage Technology provides users better protection against losing valuable digital entertainment files. It also offers enhanced performance whether users have one or multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition brings the powers of an operating system and offers two user-interfaces – the standard desktop interface and an alternate menu-driven system that provides easy access to media. With Media Center, you can play DVDs, MP3s and recorded media off your hard drive, watch and record live TV, view your photo collection or create slideshows with music of your choice in the background, listen to radio stations as well as watch online movies via subscriptions.

Intel VIIV technology is a new platform for home entertainment. It offers its customers performance for playing multiple media files simultaneously and connectivity for the latest online entertainment.

So how does the digital home work if you have a powerful PC with masses of storage space, HD graphics and 7.1 surround sound? What makes VIIV a package for the future?

With the help of a Digital Media Adapter (DMA), your mother can sit in the kitchen and watch Jamie Oliver’s recording from the night before while your father watches live football in the living room. At the same time, little Johnny can watch cartoons from his room. And if that wasn’t enough, your aunt can shuffle through the family’s MP3 collection while working in the shed. In the end, all these users are accessing one computer from remote locations within the house.

DMAs allow the media box to be placed in a central location, such as the living room and have remote terminals (LCD screens and remote controls) scattered as and where required. All Johnny would need to do to view the cartoons is use the remote control and flick through the channels on the screen with Windows XP Media Center as the portal. Chef mum can do the same with the screen and remote in the kitchen as she prepares dinner just like Jamie did the night before. The aunt uses the remote control to browse through the music collection and select what she wants to hear. She can also turn on local or internet radio straight from the remote if she were to get bored of the MP3s. Dad, meanwhile, enjoys the couch to himself while his team creams the opposition. And while the goals keep on coming, Scrubs season five is being recorded in the background to be viewed later.

For the remote (wireless) functions of VIIV to work one needs to have a decent broadband connection, a phenomenon little known to home-users in Pakistan. Downloading and streaming of various multimedia files require a fast connection to work efficiently. Also, for the media and the internet connection to be shared around the house, a broadband connection is somewhat of a necessity.

However, as a stand-alone entertainment PC with Windows Media Center installed, you don’t need an internet connection at all. The user can simply view their own video and photo collection, play DVDs, listen to music and have a photo slideshow on a single screen. With a TV card installed in the PC and a terrestrial antenna or a cable connected to the back of it, the user can view, pause and record live TV. It can then be edited if required and copied on to CDs or other PCs for personal viewing.

So that is Intel VIIV technology, the evolution of a digital home. With or without the DMA, the VIIV technology is sure to be a hit across the country at least amongst the gadget-worshippers. Or would it?

Not at this point in time, according to the views reflected by Intel Pakistan. Intel is not too keen on promoting and advertising VIIV at the moment because broadband is not a household name in the country and there is an absence of media content providers in Pakistan. It is due to these facts that VIIV will not be able to fulfill the promise and potential it holds and users will not be able to appreciate its capabilities to the extent Intel want them to.

The blame lies with PTCL’s infrastructure and usage policy that has hampered ISPs’ plans to provide a high-speed broadband connection to home users. Due to PTCL owning the telephone lines and the fibre network across the country, it can afford to charge premium rates for the flow of data. A study recently revealed that the cost to ISPs in Pakistan for transferring 100 Kbit/s is 1600 times more than the cost in South Korea. Keeping this figure in mind, it comes as no surprise that home users here are still dependent on dial-ups and shared cable networks.

As a result, Intel is not too keen on pushing their VIIV-enabled boxes out into the market just yet. “VIIV technology is all about access to digital content over a broadband connection and without a decent connection it’s just a stand-alone fast PC with extra storage,” says Junaina Saulat, marketing program manager for Intel Pakistan.

However, Wateen Telecom, a sister concern of the Abu Dhabi-based enterprise Warid Telecom, plans to lay a comprehensive telecommunications infrastructure that would consist of an international optic fibre network linking Pakistan with China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, India and Iran. In addition to this international linkage, a 5,000 kilometre wholly-owned nationwide optic fibre transmission network is to be laid. This, together with a 3.5 gigahertz wireless access network infrastructure in selected metropolitan areas will have the potential to facilitate Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, broadband internet and virtual private networks (VPN).

The new infrastructure is planned to be in place towards the end of 2006 and, according to Intel, that is when VIIV will be ‘launched’ and promoted to home users in Pakistan. Intel is also in lengthy discussions with WorldCall who plan to launch an online content service in Pakistan in early 2007. That is good news not only for manufacturers and distributors but also for the technology-obsessed in our very own country who could previously only read about such things happening in foreign shores.

With all the hype and excitement that VIIV has created, there are some who still think of it as nothing but a convergence of hardware and software that already exists. Pakistani users will have to wait till the end of this year at least to see what it actually is. Until then, whether VIIV is worth the hype and the wait will remain a question in our minds.

© Faras Ghani 2008. Published in Spider Jul 2006

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