Well, TV remote control, it was a very impressive 60-year run. But it may soon be time to say goodbye. No more lost weekends between the couch cushions. No more swapping the order of your AA batteries to get a few more seconds of juice in order to click away from a blaring infomercial. At least, that seems to be the writing on the wall- sized HDTV.
The living room electronics convergence that was promised back in the late '90s has finally started to materialize. Our video game consoles download movies. Our set-top cable boxes can display our friends' Twitter feeds. DVD players and HDTVs themselves can stream Netflix movies and feed our home theaters' YouTube videos. But the humble remote control hasn't really kept up.
Universal remotes have barely evolved in the last 20 years. Clunky, two-handed, touch-screen remotes were in vogue for a while (at least among those who could afford pricey custom installations). And Logitech made a tidy business with its superior Harmony remotes, which downloaded devices' codes from the Internet and could control practically any machine in your living room.
But our HDTVs, media players and set-top boxes aren't very easy to control with a shoe box's worth of assorted remote controls or even the mightiest Harmony device. The PlayStation 3, for instance, uses Bluetooth, making a standard remote useless to control it without an expensive add-on to convert an infrared signal. In May, Google announced a TV partnership with Intel, Sony and Best Buy, among others, to bring more Internet content to TV and more TV content to the Internet.
It's just one more indication that as our home theater devices are increasingly Internet connected, we'll be more dependent on them for basic Web applications and to search for content streaming. You probably won't access all that with a keyboard and mouse or a laptop. You'll be controlling it all with devices you're probably already familiar with -- touch-screen Internet devices like the iPod Touch, Android phones, the iPad and any number of other phone or tablet we've yet to see.
We're getting used to typing on such devices. They allow for easy surfing and, most importantly, they lend themselves well to being living-room TV companions.
