It's a well known fact that the powers that be sometimes lurk on these forums so I'm going to put my idea out in the wild in the hope of someone doing it.

How about fitting TV's and DVD players with ethernet ports and allowing them to access home computers or servers so you can watch your content around the home?

I have a server and the XBox 360 in the living room is used to watch stuff on it, but what about the other tv's? I know you can get those little media centre boxes, but why not just build it into the TV?

What are your thoughts?

ethernet ports are getting more and more common on equipment.

I think the Humax freesat + box is going to have one and certainly for streaming HD content around the house, it will help; if its capable of doing that.

Don't the some new Samsung TV's have this feature DLNA.

It would have to be compressed video because ethernet isn't capable of carrying raw HD video.

Some of the new Sony's have Ethernet ports as well, although I've no idea what you can do with it.

What do you mean by "raw HD video"? Even 100Base-T will support higher bitrates than BluRay delivers, and Gigabit ethernet is ten times as fast...

The top end Philips TVs of the last four years (I think) have had Ethernet ports for streamed content. It's rare though that the feature is used by consumers which is a shame really

I think the major obstacle is cabling because wireless doesn't really cut the mustard. The PC is still considered as a separate entity from the entertainment system so it's usually located in some other part of the home. This means running a cable, and most women would rather eat their own livers than see the house turned upside down for a day to run a bit of wire

The thing is though that once a system is up and running the women love it!! I have a media server connection to my TV in the livingroom and you want to hear my missus and her mother yapping and laughing when they start going through pictures and camcorder footage on the big telly.

I'm looking to get a flat screen TV, so i'll have to make sure it's got one as at the moment we're using a CRT tv, which is a shame as i have an XBox 360 and lots of HD content, but i'm also building a media centre. I wont put too much effort into that as I would prefer to use the windows 7 version for a full build.

It's a shame that the networking capabilities are underused, is that a result of being seriously undersold? I like to think I keep abreast of such developments, but if I don't know about it, who does?

Oh and I second the wife approval business! My missus is forever going ape about cables!

when I was Philips we sold the feature pretty hard but you could tell it went over the heads of most buyers and shop floor staff

We even had a range connected devices (wired and wireless) called Streamium which was part of the "Connected Planet" strategy. It was all designed to make networking and media streaming a bit easier for consumers with little IT knowledge. It was a gift of an idea for the better Independent retailers; something they could have really got behind and pushed as a good way to differentiate themselves from the lower end of the market - kind of B&O connectivity for the masses - but sadly they couldn't see the opportunity.

Thats kind-of gutting really, and a real shame. With the advent of ever increasing broadband speeds, combined with larger storage cheaper (bunging an extra 500GB hard drive in your computer is nothing nowadays) also, the fact that routers are as common as muck and rounded off with the fact that the internet is awash with DRM free films, this could have been a standard feature in all TV's.

Shame it went over peoples heads. How many people do we get on here asking for a way to connect their computer to the telly? This goes one better than that!

Maybe the bottom end of the market will come up with something. Has anyone else noticed that the cheap products have more features than standard models sometimes? Like £20 DVD players that play (almost) any video format known to man....

yes and where are the £20 blu ray players ??

its going to die a death and be superceded if they dont get their finger out !!

the beauty of a £20 DVD player is its mostly multi-regional, its cheap and you can stick it in a kids bedroom. You can burn on your computer and it plays it.

Was it really worth Sony fighting Tosh ?

Just wait until the Chinese get to reverse engineering them like they did with DVD

In all fairness though entry-level Bluray prices have fallen pretty quickly since HD-DVD left the scene. What's muddying the waters is the different profiles and connectivity features. You can bet your ass that there'll be lots of people buying stripped down £99 machines without realising how many corners have been cut.


Well that's what manufacturers can do when they don't pay the licensing fees

DVD got very popular well before they were being sold for £20... obviously selling them for £20 meant everyone and their dog could get one or two or three per household.

I'm sure we'll be seeing blu ray players at the £129 mark within the next 3 months and not just the occasional Amazon deal (that is virtually impossible to actually purchase!)

The Amazon deal was in fact a giant cockup, a pricing error & due to this instantaneous computer linked world we live in Laskys followed the lead & droped there price of the Sony S350 to match amazon which caused Richersounds to price match + £10 for a few lucky people! from what I can gather Laskys honoured there deals up to the point when they changed the price back & amazon honoured some of the orders, keep your eyes open for the next error!

so in theory you could connect a wireless sender unit and recieve a signal which will display on the screen ??

It was simpler than that even.

All they really did was integrate wired and wireless networking and add the appropriate codecs so the TV or media player could play the most common formats. A little bit of software lived on the host PC which turned it in to a media server. Nothing really revolutionary of course; it's just that Philips was the first of the big consumer manufacturers to offer a complete solution.

seems the way forward to me