One of the remaining challenges is Video.  In the good old days it was fine to modulate your "Top Gun" DVD onto the RF system and watch the picture in full 570 line glory on your 29" Telly.

Now with 1080 Line HD Video Content, the quality is so good that you could rip it off the internet, burn it to disk and turn out a pirated product better than what you would see in a movie theatre. 

This prospect gave the Recording industry a headache so bad that cured it with HDCP, High Definition Copy Protection, available now on a HDMI cable near you. 

HDMI cable is a one cable solution that carries HD Video and Audio over a single lead up to 15m in length.  In addition HDMI carries a HDCP signal so if the source of the signal was for example a blu-ray dvd player, and the destination was a nice big plasma screen, everything runs fine. 

If however, the source was a blu-ray player and the destination was a PC waiting to upload content to the web, the picture would be downgraded or blanked out all together.

This is great technology if you make your living selling songs, problematic however if you would like to connect your HD source to all the lovely new HD LCD screens in your house, some of which are in the bedroom which is 40m away.

The solution lies in Thin Clients.  Another technology from the IT world, the Thin Client is a small form factor, low powered PC.  Sit one of these behind the 30" LCD in the bedroom, and point it at the media server in the home theatre and your HDMI cable length is reduced right down to 300mm. In addition, the thin client can display different content to that being watched on the media centre pc - so now you have created a Hi Def Multiroom AV System. 

Not only that, but you have just removed the last reason to reticulate video anywhere, negating the need for coax, s video cable, component video wiring & HDMI cables, All you need now is a lowly cat5 cable or decent wifi signal.

The next step would be the ability to purchase an LCD screen with the thin client already built in - seem like a great idea for the future?  It's already available for sale...

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