Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004 | 11:03 a.m.
Home theater retailers have reason to rejoice -- Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp. are placing a greater emphasis on home entertainment technology, which may result in a bump in sales around Christmas 2004.
"We're glad to see Gates get involved in this," said Tony Issa, electronics manager for Big Screen and Furniture Showcase, which has three stores in Las Vegas including a warehouse showroom on Industrial Road.
Customers aren't yet demanding the connectivity between home theater and music components as described by Gates at a pre-show keynote address at the International Consumer Electronic Show, Issa said.
"But they probably will when they hear what he's offering," Issa said.
Gates unveiled the Windows Media Center Extender, a device that hooks up to a television and allows a Windows Media Center PC to display video, photos or music on a television screen.
An Xbox Media Center Extender also moves computer game-playing onto the television as well.
Gates, the chairman and chief software architect for Microsoft, kicked off the four-day CES convention, which begins today at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Riviera hotel-casino and the Alexis Park Hotel. More than 110,000 people are expected to attend CES, making it one of the largest conventions in Las Vegas this year.
The Microsoft executive unveiled a flurry of new products in his 90-minute Wednesday night presentation, which was accented with an appearance by comedian Jay Leno and monitored closely by security officers using bomb-sniffing dogs.
Although Las Vegas has been identified as a potential target for terrorists and the CES and National Association of Home Builders shows in January will be the largest conventions of the month, there were no incidents at the Gates speech.
Leno, who took the stage with Gates with the debut of Windows 95 in 1995, helped introduce the latest enhancements in Microsoft's MSN Internet service and website, called MSN Premium. The new service includes tools for managing e-mail, parental controls, calendars and digital photographs as well as new anti-virus and anti-spam products. Gates explained that the system includes the ability to send low-resolution photographs via e-mail for friends and family to see and then refer those viewers to a website where high-resolution images could be captured.
Gates also showed off his Smart Watch technology -- showcased at Comdex late last year -- that enables news, sports and financial market information to be forwarded wirelessly via FM radio waves to a device that doubles as a wristwatch.
But it was the home theater devices that seemed to rivet the overflow crowd at the Las Vegas Hilton Theater.
Gates said the Windows Media Center Extender would be made by Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Gateway Inc. He also showed a paperback-sized Portable Media Center device capable of storing and displaying video, music and photos, to be available in the second half of the year from Samsung and Sanyo.
It's the teaming of hardware manufacturers with the software giant Microsoft that make the products a desired commodity, said industry analyst Rob Enderle of the San Jose, Calif.-based Enderle Group.
"Microsoft is doing what it does best and the hardware guys are doing what they do best," Enderle said in a telephone interview. "It's the right time to make this fly."
Enderle said Microsoft and other companies have worked to solve high-speed wireless and bandwidth capacity issues and security problems on both the digital media and Xbox products.
"The technology is just about there," he said. "Now, it takes somebody to weave it all together. It's the weaving it together that makes the products compelling."
Issa concurred and pointed out that having more hardware providers involved in the process should drive the cost of the equipment down. Gates himself marveled at how the myriad plasma-based flat-screen televisions made by various manufacturers and on display all over the CES trade show floor are enriching the entertainment experience at home.
"I attribute a lot of this movement toward home entertainment systems to people wanting the theater experience in their homes, with the big images and sound," Issa said. "And a 65-inch high-definition television was selling for $5,000 four years ago. Now, you can get it for about $2,000 and it's a much better television."
Gates also spent a few minutes discussing automotive-based "telematic" computing for cars, noting the need for better voice-activated systems to make them more commonplace in vehicles.
Gates concluded his presentation with a glimpse of the future, with one of his research-and-development team members demonstrating a digital photograph indexing system that is in development. Gates explained that software under development would enable users to sort and categorize large volumes of photographs with key words and image-recognition technology.
Photos could then be shown in a slide-show format including attached voice commentaries on each picture.
"Isn't that amazing?" Enderle asked. "What a great way to be able to share with your kids, your grandkids and your great grandkids all your memories from images that can be so easily assembled and displayed."
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