Playing Net movies on your TV
Technology researcher Michael Cai saw the promise of media convergence firsthand more than two years ago, when a friend treated him to a home viewing of the hit movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
"The film was pirated off the Internet and broadcast from a PC to a big-screen TV using wireless technology from X10," the Parks Associates senior analyst laughed, referring to the maker of tiny wireless video cameras whose pop-up ads once blanketed the Web. "It worked pretty well."
As 2004 comes to a close, the world is at once very different and much the same for video enthusiasts wanting to take movies from the Internet, store them on their PCs and shoot them over to giant TV screens. What's new is the growing list of devices coming out that can connect the two worlds, either wirelessly or with cables. But one thing that hasn't changed, Cai said, is the dearth of high-quality legally available content that would justify the investment for most people.
