One of the things Hewlett-Packard Co. is famous for is The Garage, where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded the company, considered by many to be the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
At the H-P Smart Home, the company has constructed a fully operational house, naturally complete with built-in H-P digital media technology, in order to show off the devices and connectivity that it believes will differentiate the home of tomorrow.
While technology in the home might be changing, the center of that home will remain the television, which companies like H-P already view as something more than just a box for watching TV programs.
No trend has been more visible in the advancement of new TV technologies than the development of the set-top box.
As cable and satellite TV have grown over the past 30 years in particular, the box sitting on top of the TV has evolved from a device that simply added 10 or 20 more channels to the standard lineup of the old Big Three broadcast networks to a veritable personal computer, complete with a hard drive for digital recording, on-demand programming and as many as 500 channels.
H-P followed on the heels of Apple and its AppleTV device, which starts at $229 and works exclusively with the company’s iTunes service for streaming content and buying and renting movies. Also getting in on the action are Netflix and its hardware partner Roku Inc., with a $99 player that streams movies directly from Netflix’s online site to a television, and Microsoft, which is doing almost everything from working to turn its Xbox 360 videogame console into a set-top box to providing much of the underlying software for AT&T Inc.’s U-Verse digital TV service.