By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide
Some big steps have been made recently in the race to dominate the convergence of digital media, and it's coming from the gaming industry. It makes sense, I suppose - in any business endeavor you need to follow the money, and the video game industry is larger and certainly more robust than either the movie or television industries.
It all started with the Xbox 360, which allowed users to connect to the Internet for online gaming. A small step, but one that introduced Internet-based gamer communities, and showed that game consoles were really no different than any other Internet client.
Sony raised the ante recently by giving its Playstation 3 the first commercially available Blu-ray high-definition DVD player. For the first time, electronic consumers could view DVDs in high def, and it was through a video game console, not a stand-alone player for the television crowd. When a consumer electronics giant like Sony sees the gaming community as the prime place to launch new technologies (and, of course, an opportunity to re-package its enormous movie catalog), there is a sea-change taking place.
Nintendo announced this week that its new gaming console will not only allow users to connect to the Internet, but it will be equipped with an email client and an Opera browser so that users can watch movies, play games, send emails, and browse the Internet all through the same console.
Will game consoles be the winner of the convergence race, getting to the Holy Grail before the computer hardware industry, the television industry, et al? With systems and applications increasingly being designed to be shared across the Internet on a distributed model, CPU processing power becomes less of an issue and our children's little game boxes start looking more and more like a viable "computing" platform.
How long will it be before you go to work and find yourself sitting in front of an Xbox? See, I always knew the future would be all fun and games!
