Toob: I Wish I had…

by Matthew York
October 2000

My living room is a complex place. It’s become so complex, that some of my family members can’t figure out how to operate the TV because we have too many remote controls. It wou

ld be nice to have just one remote control. In my efforts to simplify, I have purchased several universal remotes. But I keep adding new devices, like a personal video recorder (like ReplayTV and TiVo) which is not "controllable" via a universal remote control since it’s so new and has so many specific remote-operated functions.
In addition to all of the remote controls laying about my living room couch, I also have a mess of wires, power strips and jacks behind the home entertainment center. It is really complicated back there. It’s a major process whenever I want to make a change or add a new piece of gear.
In a perfect world, I’d only need one remote to control my entertainment center and one jack for each electrical component. This could be a possibility if I had something like a living room hub (LRH) that I could control with just one remote. Everything in my home entertainment center would plug into the LRH. I imagine it to have the shape of a VCR with a top lid that opens like a pizza box. Under the lid would be about 40 jacks, one for every cable and device to plug into. If the LRH were smart enough and connected to the Internet, it would always have the up-to-date control commands for every consumer electronics device. Then when I added some new gear, it could download the newest commands automatically.
If all of the devices were plugged into the LRH, then the LRH could route the signals traveling on the cables to any device. So if I wanted to watch a TV show, the LRH would set the tuner to the channel that I selected and route it to the TV monitor. If I wanted to make a VHS copy of a DVD, for example, it would route the signals from the DVD player to the VCR. If I wanted to record a movie onto my DVD-R, it would route the signal from the satellite tuner to the DVD recorder.
Since every device in my living room would plug into my LRH (yes, even the power cables) the LRH could monitor all of the signals traveling on all of the cables. As a result, the LRH would not only know which devices were in use, but the LRH would also know exactly what each device was doing (rewinding, playing, recording, etc…)
There’s still one problem that the LRH wouldn’t solve for me, though, and that is space. I don’t have enough room in my home entertainment center to fit all of the devices that I own. Ideally, the LRH would be integrated into another device. Imagine if there was a DVD player or a personal video recorder that had the living room hub built right into it.
As you may have speculated by now, the LRH would have to be a computer so it could connect to the Internet, sense the signals, route the signals, download information, etc…. Since it would have to be a computer, it could also serve the same function as my WebTV (e-mail and Web browsing).
The living room hub is a good idea because it solves most of the problems that the consumer electronics industry has created by developing too many devices that aren’t integrated with one another. If Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had been players in the consumer electronics industry, this whole mess never would have happened in the first place. I sure hope someone develops a practical LRH really soon, because I need one.