ViiV may be aliive or dead

OF ALL THE CONTRIVED SPELLINGS that some charlatan has been paid handsomely up with which to come, Intel's ViiV home entertainment marchitecture has to be right down there with our least favourites. But word on the street (phone actually) suggests that ViiV could be headed for the gulag.

When we received a call from A. Mole earlier today suggesting that ViiV was about to be put on ice, we contacted Intel to ask for a confirm or deny statement, but everyone was on voicemail - usually a sign that they're all in a meeting together discussing something important. We finally got hold of a spokeszilla on his mobile who told us that as far as he was aware, ViiV was still very much alive, but he'd check it out and get back to us.

When we chased him fiive hours later, he was still on voicemail. But the absence of a strong - or even pusillanimous - denial that ViiV was about to be airbrushed from history suggested that there might indeed be some truth in the rumour. Then, literally just as we went to press, as we used to say in the good old days, Intel finally phoned back and said that it was business as usual on the ViiV front and that updates would continue to be made.

Home entertainment has always sat a little uneasily in Intel's portfolio - the excellent At Play range of microscopes and other educational gadgets, together with the lovely and well-ahead-of-its-time Pocket Concert MP3 player were unceremoniously dumped a few years back for reasons as yet unexplained. Could ViiV be about to follow them into oblivion?

Watch thiis space. µ