The computer comes back to the living room

ANYONE OLD ENOUGH to remember the birth of the first commercially available and affordable home computers will have fond memories of gathering around the living room TV set for a spot of computery fun.

Dewey-eyed readers who once owned a Sinclair ZX Spectrum will be broadly split into two camps. Those who ruined their educations sitting up until the wee small hours having just one more go at Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy, and those who ruined their eyesight typing the reams and reams of machine code once printed in the pages of computer magazines using Clive Sinclair's squishy-keyed tiny black marvel - all just for the thrill of seeing a chunky, pixelated sprite moving around the screen. Some of us are guilty of both.

The ZX Spectrum with its 3.5 MHz CPU and massive 16KB of RAM was just the first of the mass-produced home computers which invaded the UK population's living spaces and consciousness. It was followed by the Commodore 64 and the Amiga among others, but just about all of these pioneering machines had one thing in common. They were all primarily designed to hook up to a standard television screen using an RF cable. No SVGA, no HDMI, no 7.1 surround sound. Just the same type of cable that sent the audio and visual signals from the aerial on your roof to your TV.

All over the world battles between little sisters who wanted to watch Top of the Pops and big bothers who wanted to play Elite broke out. Peace was only ever achieved when dad came home from the pub and announced that he paid the bills around here, and that he would be falling asleep in front of the football. And that was that.

In the early eighties, it was pretty much unheard-of for households to have more than one full-sized television set. Computer fans were sent packing to the bedroom where thousands of spotty herberts developed myopic vision staring for hours on end at tiny portable TVs hooked up to their increasingly-sophisticated home computers. Dedicated monitors for home computers were not seen until Alan Sugar acquired a couple of skiploads of unwanted components from a Korean bloke down the pub and hammered them together to make the Amstrad CPC.

Today, the idiot box is omnipresent with many homes having a TV in every single room in the house. You can even buy fridges and shower units with screens and modulators built in. And it's only a matter of time before these glowing windows on the world outside grow up and start to offer more than Strictly Come Dancing and documentaries about dung beetles.

Intel recently announced that it would be launching a new media processor, the Atom CE4100, aimed squarely at System On a Chip (SoC) applications for TV sets. Previously dubbed Sodaville, the new CPU delivers speed of up to 1.2GHz, and can cope with two full 1080p Hi-Def video streams as well as all the flavours of aural excitement you're ever likely to need or want. Add hardware decoding for MPEG4 video, Divx playback and a full compliment of video and display controllers and you have a pretty decently specced PC all on one card small enough to cram comfortably inside today's ultra slim flatscreen TVs.

Okay, it's not going to play the latest games at decent frame rates, and you wouldn't want to do any high-end rendering or hardcore Photoshop work on it. But browsing the Web, downloading and watching movies and answering your emails from the comfort of your favourite sofa will soon become second nature.

And you can forget the mouse and keyboard as well if some recent innovations catch on. Taking a very large cue from Nintendo's Wiimote controller, companies like LG and Philips are offering products like the Magic Motion. This nifty little gadget takes all the confusing multi buttoned madness that is your average TV remote and puts all of your functions and menus into an on-screen interface controlled by a motion sensing wand device with just a couple of buttons. You can change channels and adjust the volume using simple gestures or get into the full complexity of your TV's innards using the aforementioned menu system.

It's true that there are dozens of stand-alone solutions which will happily turn your TV into a PC-based media centre, and the convergence between PC and TV has been coming for many years. It's hard to buy a TV which doesn't have an SVGA or DVI monitor port, and PCs are increasingly equipped with HDMI outputs carrying high definition digital video and sound in one handy cable.

Every PC box builder under the sun makes a cut-down mini media PC capable of carrying out Internet and video duties housed in a fan-free silent box about the size of a couple of paperback books. Asus touts its $300 Eee Box as the smallest desktop PC in the world, a claim which has been much disputed. Even Apple's long-in-the-tooth Mac Mini has been pressed into service as a multimedia machine, nestling silently amongst the Nietzsche and Jamie Oliver on the bookshelves.

'Internet TVs' are also widely available but most manufacturers have been trying to keep their costs down in a cut-throat market by using their own silicon. Philips even went as far as persuading some of the most popular portals on the Web to create custom tailored versions of their pages just to make them look nicer on a TV screen.

Some TV makers have gone even further offering a sanitised and heavily censored Internet-lite version of the Web. But what's the point of the Internet if you can't get at any of the real stuff? That's the real issue with bringing the computer back into the bosom of the family. Into the heart of the home. Quite a few people don't really want anyone else knowing what exactly it is that they do for hours on end, locked in a darkened room bathed in the hypnotic, opiate glow of the LCD screen.

When 'just popping upstairs to answer my emails' really means 'just logging onto World of Warcraft for an eight-hour session of running around in an imaginary dungeon with a couple of dozen post-pubescent idiots from all over the world, brandishing a digital representation of a magical elven sword which took me more than 300 hours of my worthless existence to obtain', then it's probably best kept behind closed doors.

We'll skim over what some people tend to get up to when left alone with a computer that's connected to the Internet. This is a family publication, after all.

Intel's announcement could be the defining moment in the history of full PC functionality making its way back into our living rooms. As always, the success or otherwise of the venture will be driven by consumer demand. Even Intel's TV evangelist Eric Kim acknowledges that the transition may be difficult.

"Radio, telephone and television took years to realise a successful business model," he said in his recent IDF keynote. "We know that consumers have said, and continue to say, 'don't make my TV work like a PC'. We need to create rich experiences while retaining the safe, simple, social feeling associated with traditional television watching."

That's not to mention the billions of dollars of advertising cash which - even in the worst recession since the 1930s - is still sloshing around looking for a home. TV advertising is struggling so badly at the moment that programme makers are constantly looking for additional income streams and the Internet is where they think the money is. Every TV company on the planet is looking to the online community for a brighter future and with most people flashing through the adverts using PVR technology, the men in the red braces are looking to alternative forms of advertising to raise the profile of those products they would like to convince us we just can't live without.

Sponsored programming and viral advertising are just two new streams of revenue currently being followed by a host of brain-dead marketing men, and it remains to be seen which direction future campaigns will take, but the truth of the matter is that, without advertising, no new programmes will be made.

It's true that the way we watch TV has evolved rapidly in recent years. Multi-stream interactive services like SKY+ and Internet-based portals like the BBC's Iplayer have broken all of the rules as Kim points out: "Traditional broadcast networks are quickly shifting from a linear model to a multi-stream, Internet-optimised model to offer consumers digital entertainment that complements the TV."

If Intel has its way, the lines between computer and TV will be forever broken down and we will spend 24 hours a day staring slack-jawed into the maw of the money-making beast standing in the corner of the room.

There is currently no indication from either Intel or the rumour mill on how much these SoC widgets will add to the retail cost of your average TV, but if that additional cost can be kept below the $100 mark, we reckon the decision will be a virtual no-brainer. µ