Households have always gathered around a source of entertainment in the evenings. For millennia it was a fire: a source of warmth and light where conversation, stories, and maybe some music were the evening's entertainment. From a social standpoint, not much has changed. The warmth is now supplied by central heating, and we've got as much light as we want, but in the evenings, most families just want to relax and be entertained. The campfire became the fireplace, then books and newspapers came on the scene to augment the oral tradition, then printed sheet music for the piano, then radio, then television, then the internet, but we just exchanged our village storyteller or musician for one across town or across the world.
Modern technology hasn't changed the desire for leisure or entertainment, but it has certainly expanded the breadth of what's available, and, in recent decades, seen a marked improvement in the quality of the media by which this entertainment is delivered. Today it's easier and cheaper to get whatever kind of written story, song, play, or movie you'd like, and the kind of quality that's available at home today is something new. Digital quality, big screens, and surround sound are the order of the day. But the biggest change that technology has brought to the living room is that the receiver is more in control than ever. We now have the technical ability to be able to almost instantaneously receive virtually any recorded work we might desire. But although this is technically possible, the reality is a bit more limited.
Leaving aside the vast quantities of written material, music, games, movies and other media that are self-published on the internet today, the majority of the mainstream commercial content is still under the control of traditional distribution channels, and the ease with with digitized versions of their books, songs, and movies can be re-distributed has made them very wary of making these works available on-demand. As always, the black market has been happy to take up the slack, and ebooks, songs, movies, and TV shows are readily available for anyone willing to deal with the sometimes spotty quality, playback difficulty, and, of course, legal issues involved. But technology has also been applied to making the best of a less-than-ideal situation, providing legal (or semi-legal) workarounds that are good enough for most people today. A lot of these workarounds involve hooking up computers to our TVs.
More and more living rooms today have computers hooked up to their TVs, even if their owners don't really realize it. Of course, game consoles and general-purpose computers seem to become more alike each year, and they even take on roles, like video playback, that we used to have standalone appliances for. TiVo and other Digital Video Recorders are just purpose-specific computers that search for and record the TV shows you want and store them on a hard drive. Using your TV to browse the web never really caught on, but as more of these devices are hooked to the network, we'll find that once the tools are in place, it will be handy to click a few buttons on the remote to find out where is was we saw that familiar-looking actor before, or whether it's going to rain tomorrow.
Where are we headed? The peculiarities of intellectual property mean that the owners of the books, movies, and music will probably make a consumer-friendly entertainment utopia quite difficult to achieve, but I can speculate on the kind of technology that we consumers would like to have: Every TV screen and monitor in the home would be connected to a server that would contain all of the family's digital library of songs, personal photographs, movies, and video games. This whole library would be kept organized with easy-to-use software, and backed up regularly, off site, via the network. Any work that they would like to have could be purchased with a few clicks, and would be available within a few minutes. Any of these works could be accessed from any of the terminals around the house, though some of the terminals would certainly be specialized for certain kinds of media (big screen and hi-fi surround sound for movies), specialized video hardware and hand-held controllers for games, a light hand-held unit for printed content, etc). New devices could be added to the network in a plug-and-play fashion, and new display, rendering, and audio technologies could be added to the mix by swapping out obsolete equipment, but the older media would continue to be used at their originally-intended quality forever.
Everything I just described is 100% feasible today. In fact, a dedicated hobbyist today could build a system that does most of what I'd described, if they were willing to flout common conceptions of copyright law. It would need to have the capability to record TV from Satellite or cable, and burn purchased DVDs and CDs, since most desired content wouldn't be downloadable, but the rest of it would just involve hacking together a bunch of readily-available hardware and software.
The living room of the future is here today. We just need to work out the legal issues, to make sure that the storytellers and musicians of today will be paid for their work, and show the outmoded gatekeepers the door. We don't even need to get rid of gatekeepers. We just need to find some new ones who will embrace today's technology to give us all what we want. If we could trade Sony and Viacom for TiVo, Netflix, and iTunes maybe we'd be in better shape.
If a geek from the fifties were to visit the home theater of today, he would certainly be impressed with the cinematic resolution and astounded at the availability of media, but disappointed that everything is in 2D.
