March 25, 2008

25 Million Home Theater PCs Installed Worldwide by 2013

We came across a great article over at ehomeupgrade referencing a study saying that by 2013 there will be 25 million home theater PC's installed worldwide. At first we thought this number seemed pretty low until we realized they were talking about only PC's and not streaming devices. There has definitely been a lot of products that we have seen that are mini-PCs that are used primarily for media streaming: the Fiire is one that comes to mind. With advances in CPUs using less power and generating less heat we can easily see PCs moving more and more into the entertainment center. The biggest problem having a PC in your entertainment center is the noise from the fan used to cool the PC and the noise of the hard drive spinning. We have a couple of devices in our cabinet that have hard drives and you can really hear them. With the progress that is being made in solid state disks we should see the next couple of years produce a bunch of new devices that are ultra quiet.

One benefit of having full fledged PCs as your main media streamer will be the functionality. Most of the current generation of media streamers are very low powered devices usually running a low powered Sigma chip. If the noise and power levels of embedded PCs can come down to a reasonable level then we could see some amazing devices entering our living room soon. One of the limiting factors on most of the devices we test out is they don't have the raw horsepower to really knock your socks off. Take for instance the Mvix 760HD that we are so fond of. It is using an older Sigma chip and can't do H.264 for instance. So we can only imagine that there are some great things in store for all of us in the coming years. The media streaming market is just starting to take hold. 2008 is going to be the watershed year for these devices and by 2010 they should be as common place as DVD players( call us crazy, but we are always the eternal optimists ).

via ehomeupgrade