Tech's future: It's all about fun

There is no ambiguity about Kimberly Meyer's marching orders. Her daughter does not want just any MP3 player to listen to the music she downloads from the Web. No, her Christmas list is as precise as a Martha Stewart recipe for Bundt cake: She wants an Apple mini iPod - and she wants it in lime green.

Mrs. Meyer's daughter is not some tech-geek devotee of all things Apple. In fact, Meyer can't think of a single Apple item in the entire house. But this isn't about gigabytes and USB ports. It's about Madonna, Michelle Branch, and 10,000 songs in your pocket.

With its iPod, Apple has tapped into what many analysts say is the future of American technology: entertainment. And this holiday season, the computer industry as a whole is making its first significant foray into the world of digital cameras and plasma-screen TVs.

The momentum has been building for a while, as tech companies look to new markets now that sales of personal computers have slowed. But the recent rise of the Internet, combined with the explosion of digital media, has fueled the shift by turning every photo, song, film, and TV into nothing more than a package of digital information that can be moved around and played at will.

Now, as technology companies step in with an array of products that give consumers more control over their movies and music, they are recasting Silicon Valley's business sense and revolutionizing an entertainment industry still baffled by the realm of bits and bytes.

"Technology companies understand how to move a word document file around," says Rod Bare, a tech analyst at Morningstar in Minneapolis. "It doesn't take much more effort to move around a music file ... and if you're sitting in a tech company, you're looking at all the information that can be digitized."

In the broadly defined universe of entertainment, that's almost everything - from photo albums to episodes of "The Biggest Loser." Hewlett-Packard, a leader in printing, has already jumped into the digital camera and photo printing markets. Microsoft, which introduced its XBox game system several years ago, has reintroduced a brand of Web TV that allows users to surf the Internet by TV. And Dell now sells MP3s and flat-panel TVs on its website.

It's just the beginning. This year, both Dell and HP are offering Media Centers - computers that work like a normal machines but are specifically tailored to help users manage their digital music and photos. The next generation media center, which is just now entering the market, is a computer that hooks up to the TV and looks like a VCR. Through a remote control, users can record TV like a TiVo, play music like an MP3, and show movies that are saved on a computer in the den through a wireless Web connection.

"It's a growing trend," says Venancio Figueroa, a spokesman for Dell. "If you look at the usage model ... the PC is moving from a productivity tool to an entertainment platform."

On one hand, as computers become a more seamless part of everyday life, it moves America closer to the digital home. Yet it also underscores the increasing importance of entertainment and the individual in contemporary culture, as the ever more on-demand world spawned by the Web allows users to tailor every aspect of the media to their tastes.

Page: 1 | 2