Entertainment: The battle for your living room
Tech companies are coming out with an array of products that can turn a living room into an entertainment ecosystem.
Tech companies are waging “a war for the living room,” said Erik Kain in Forbes.com. What was once a battle limited to video game consoles has escalated to one in which “each player is attempting to create a living room ecosystem of connectivity.” The well-known contenders—Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony—are still in the game, but now there are newcomers, like Nvidia, Samsung, Apple, and Valve. “These players want you to fashion your entire entertainment ecosystem out of their products, from phones to set-top boxes, to tablets, to who knows what else.” But they have different approaches. SteamOS, the new operating system from Valve, is “devoted almost solely to games,” and hard-core gamers are welcoming it as “a way to get away from Windows, build cheaper PCs, and have theoretically more game-optimized systems.”
With SteamOS, Valve is “spooling up a tactical nuke and painting a target on Microsoft’s, Sony’s, and Nintendo’s backs,” said Matt Peckham in Time.com. In a direct challenge to the -makers of traditional game consoles, SteamOS can run on different machines, much as Windows 7 runs on different PCs. The Steam gaming community, already 50 million users strong, can stock up on better storage, memory, video cards, and new peripherals instead of waiting for an established gaming company to launch a new console version. But that could have a downside, too. With consoles, “developers can predict exactly what sort of experience players are going to have.” Different users running SteamOS on different machines—with different configurations—could pose a challenge for game developers and for players confronting “a potentially confusing array of third-party” Steam machines. “Welcome back to the paralyzing world of choices.”
The choices are not limited to video game platforms, said Joshua Brustein in Businessweek.com. There’s also a war over streaming video among Roku, Apple TV, and Google’s Chromecast. “The heaviest users of streaming video love Roku,” which offers more content than its competitors and allows users to stream video from the Web and mobile devices. Yet Roku still lags commercially behind Apple, which lets its customers connect with their televisions “through iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks.” That means Apple’s streaming device doesn’t have to be technically better to take a potential sale away from Roku. Chromecast isn’t yet a real threat to Roku, said Adriana Lee in ReadWrite.com. It is cheaper and allows viewers to watch YouTube on their television sets, but Roku still has the edge for users who want to stream content from Hulu, Amazon Instant, and HBO Go. For now, at least, Chromecast is “still a nascent phenomenon.”
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