Watching the Big TV with the Laptop on your Lap

Paul Boutin writes in slate about how convergence, this vaunted soon to be here concept, has stalled out on the runway. It’s all about 2 feet and 10 feet, the respective space allotted to the PC and the TV.

“I asked Harry McCracken, the gadget hound who edits PC World, what he thought of that notion (of PC TVs). He dryly handed me a 1992 magazine whose cover depicted Indiana Jones on a PC monitor. “Multimedia Magic with Full PC Power TODAY!” the mag exulted.

That could be a Viiv ad from seven months ago. We’ve had the hardware to make some sort of PC-driven TV console for at least 20 years. With the help of a simple adapter, you can see anything on your living-room screen that you can see on your PC. Today’s computers have the power for HD resolution, high-bandwidth downloads, and house-wide networking. So, why hasn’t the Great Convergence happened?

McCracken says most homes are consolidating around a two-hub model. A PC (or Mac) with some multimedia features anchors the home office, while a TV with some computerized gear—-think TiVo, not desktop computer-—owns the living room. Tech marketers talk about the “2-foot interface” of the PC versus the “10-foot interface” of the TV. When you use a computer, you want to lean forward and engage with the thing, typing and clicking and multitasking. When you watch Lost, you want to sit back and put your feet up on the couch.

My tech-savvy friends who can afford anything say they want set up a huge HDTV with TiVo, cable, and DVD players—then sit in front of it with a laptop on their knees. They use Google and AIM while watching TV, but they keep their 2-foot and 10-foot gadgets separate.