What they need to fix about home entertainment

The content

The confusing hardware just isn’t enough, apparently. Content – the very stuff you watch and listen to – has also become increasingly variegated and baffling. Variegated? Yes, because the same thing can appear in many different forms.

Let’s take Doctor Who. You can watch him on TV, buy the DVDs, the Blu-ray, stream him off the web via ABC iView, watch him over on the BBC, rent him via one of several online streaming services, even buy him on iTunes. You can watch the tardis materialise via two kinds of spinning disc, via hard drive, a thumb drive, or waft it across the air on a WiFi connection.

And it won’t look the same on all these formats. Blu-ray will be crisp and intense, DVD typical, and the online forms will all be compressed to some degree.

The worst thing you can do with a big expensive home theatre system is just sit there watching standard definition TV broadcasts and DVDs. You won’t even know what you’re missing, because your AV Receiver and TV will both upsample this content to 1080p. It won’t look as good as a native Blu-ray, but will you – 21 inch CRT still steaming in the garage – be able to tell the difference?

The plethora of formats assaults your brain’s decision-making centres from every possible direction. This one has better picture, this one better sound. This one is optimised for distribution online. This has been resampled so it plays on an iPhone. And so on.

The good news here is that almost every format is now very, very watchable. If you’re getting better colour and clarity than you’ve ever seen before, why worry that your TV can do even more?

As broadband internet speeds improve, and the screen pixel density of portable devices increases (in line with and beyond Apple’s Retina display on iPhone), the mix of formats should thin out somewhat. Most devices will play 1080p video, and compression algorithms and other nerdomythopoeia will fade into the background. Let the embedded six-core CPU handle that.

This has already happened with music, to an extent. Every playback device has – compared to 20th Century tech – a quality DAC and lots of storage. So make sure you rip those CDs at ‘lossless’ quality, okay?

The future

We may be reaching a plateau of standards. Maybe. Every new TV worth buying now does 1080p and has a digital receiver built in. Portable devices are insanely powerful and can play any format. The chance of being saddled with $5000 worth of kit that’s too sparsely-featured to even be sold any more is decreasing. Maybe.

We keep saying maybe because the home entertainment industry – and consumer electronics in a wider sense – has just spent 15 years making big, big bucks on the back of technological change and advancement. Why upgrade your perfectly good 720p TV? Because now you can get a 1080p TV, and for $1000 less than your old TV cost! Sure, it’s still another $3000 off your home equity, but look at all those vertical lines!

The point is, the industry is unlikely to switch sales tracks. A cynical observer might say, though, that the new features of the last year or so are becoming increasingly, shall we say, discretionary? HD was a revelation, 3D is a luxury. A flat panel TV gave you back valuable floor space in your tiny flat, but does it really need to go on Facebook too?

New gadgets, new features, new tech, it’s all good fun and it’s the lifeblood of this website. But just because they introduce a radically new technology every year doesn’t mean you necessarily need to change your once-a-decade buying habits. Remember: early adopters get the bragging rights, but the leapfroggers get the cheap, well-designed and fully featured kit. Just ask anyone who paid $24,000 for a 40 inch plasma in 1997. Shudder.