The funniest thing I’ve seen in a few of the recent netbook announcements is a High-Definition Multimedia Interface. Funny in one respect because the high-end home theater market still can’t decide between HDMI and DisplayPort. Funny in another respect because many desktop architectures have dismissed any port faster than FireWire, anticipating that the need for speed is best reserved for networking, not video streaming. So why should smartbooks and netbooks go HDMI?
If you think about the announced rationale for cloud processing which Google emphasizes for its Chrome OS, a certain topology for the home begins to make sense – though it relies on several shaky assumptions which still might represent a tenuous thread on which to hang an HDMI port.
Start with the assumption that teens and college-age mobile netizens are all but abandoning the desktop PC. As an adjunt to this, many are spending less time with large DTVs in the home than might have been anticipated a few years back. As this mobility-only model gains steam, all video viewing and a good degree of video uploading takes place from the mobile handheld device.
Currently, there are a handful of dedicated mobile broadcast video networks, such as Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, though all are in a nascent state of acceptance. Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, and WiMAX can gain you access to IP “clipcast” video of the YouTube variety, but wireless access to multiple HD video streams would require multi-Gigahertz radio networks, and they don’t exist (at least as a consumer technology).
That leaves viewing and uploading through an ultra-high-bandwidth multimedia port. In a couple years, “SuperSpeed USB” 3.0 may serve the role that HDMI serves today, but smartbook and netbook developers may feel that HDMI is the only game in town, for now.
HDMI looks like the winner in the high-end video port contest, though some advocates of DisplayPort claim that chip vendor Silicon Image has the market sewn up in the same way that Apple and Texas Instruments Inc. controlled FireWire a few years ago. Will there still be a port battle between these video options?
On top of that, the notion that handhelds will access home theater networks for their multi-gigabit video connections still seems a bit klunky. I’m not sure what alternatives could take over – USB 3.0? 10G Ethernet on the motherboard? But what seems certain is that HDMI is a pretty ethereal interface to anticipate its growing as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Loring
