Satellite Dishes
What Now for Your Living Room?
By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post
September 26, 1997
It's been a long time since CDs won a place next to our speakers. Is it time for the next batch of consumer electronics to join them?
Let us take a moment to reflect on the virtues of home audio and video equipment. Not only can they impress friends, annoy neighbors and even simply play music or let you watch movies, they also just work. For years. Without needing to be upgraded.
What a difference from computers, which can't sit on your desk for six months without becoming obsolete. My father still uses the stereo components he bought in the '60s -- hulking, vacuum-tube-stuffed boxes with dials on the front that have actual needles. They sound great -- and a CD player plugs into them just fine. TVs aren't quite as long-lived, but a 20-year-old set can still pull in today's broadcasts with minor tweaking.
There's one problem with all this, though. If you make stereos or TVs, how do you make a living once you've sold somebody a system that will last for the next 12 years? The promise of a this-year's-model amplifier with more blinking lights just won't appeal to everyday people. That's why something like the compact disc was such a godsend to the Powers That Beep -- it was a great advance in music listening and it meant customers had to replace their LPs and buy new players, eventually adding portable CD players as well.
But just about everyone has gotten up to speed on CDs, so now what? In this issue, we look at three different technologies angling to take their place alongside your stereo and TV. Digital Video (er, Versatile) Disc, the object of this year's biggest marketing push, promises you movie-theater-quality video on a CD-size disc. Small-dish satellite TV, now 21/2 years old, may be the thing to liberate you from your local cable company while giving you more channels than any two-eyed human can possibly watch. And MiniDiscs, tiny re-recordable digital discs, have survived years of commercial irrelevancy to find phenomenal success in Japan and potential success here.
These things are all, we can objectively say, cool. Cool enough to spend serious money on? Cool enough to keep around for the next dozen years? Who knows -- the good people at Microsoft are even now planning the next wave of computer-TV-stereo integration, in which your PC will drive your TV, CDs, DVD and future abbreviations not yet invented.
I'm not sure where all that's going to lead -- but if they force my dad to buy a new stereo, he's going to be really annoyed.
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