• USA Today, Thursday, January 12, 2006 10:31 AM

A lot was said at this year's CES about media companies' great hope for seamless digital convergence: wireless Internet connectivity linking every device imaginable to a central network hub in the home. As USA Today's Kevin Maney notes, while this vision was repeated ad infinitum, little evidence of such connectivity exists today, and it doesn't even seem likely this "seamless nirvana" will be in evidence by next year's show either. Contrary to the prevailing dream, you cannot plug your TV into the Internet, make VoIP phone calls on your cell phone via a Wi-Fi network -- heck, you can't even get Google Video content on Windows Media Player, the application everyone who owns a PC has. Obviously, Maney says, this is because the major Internet media companies can't work together to come up with open standards like RSS or TCP/IP. As Google's Larry Page pointed out (and apparently he was the only big shot CEO willing to do so), nobody should have to install special software to make their devices work with one another -- nor should media companies encode their proprietary software with digital rights management. It's this kind of inter-media squabbling that will keep Internet-enabled devices from communicating with each other. As Page, said, these are kinds of things that need to be standardized, but as everyone knows, there's too much at stake for big media companies to get them to work together on standards. Hmmm.... Does anybody know what the FCC is up to these days?

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