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According to AMD, your television is about to become obsolete. Jonathan Seckler, AMD's senior manager for product marketing, reckons visual experiences on a PC will soon surpass those of the living-room television as people become increasingly mobile.
"TV is a fad," declared Seckler controversially, adding "the end of television can be seen." [Er, yes, tune in this time next week to watch the final episode, folks]
"Entertainment has become much more mobile," said Seckler, adding that the institution of television "as a passive medium where we all sit around like couch potatoes is coming towards the end."
Seckler said AMD's new Vision branding would pave the way to making mobile entertainment more tenable, especially on mainstream platforms like Tigris. AMD also has technologies such as AMD Theatre, which lets users tune into local stations from their laptops.
"We have platforms that are actually tailored to usage models," he declared, referring to how much time Americans spend watching television shows online on services like the currently free, but not for long, Hulu.
AMD's vision of the end of TV times may be a little premature, however. Back at Intel's developer forum in September, the bigger chipper declared it would actually be pushing its hugely popular Atom chips into set-top boxes and televisions, to bring a little more interactivity to what it described as "the hub of the home."
Likewise, in a recent chat with Intel's anthropologist Genevieve Bell, HEXUS was also told that Intel was adamant that any attempts to add Internet functionality to TVs needed to be simple and not interfere with the experiences and behaviour patterns viewers enjoy, because people still held a very strong bond to the big box in the living room.
