The process of turning all our culture into digital formats creates the tantalising prospect of complete integration of all the stuff we care about: books and films and TV programmes and music and pictures of our dogs that we can access anywhere at anytime.

The reality is there are hundreds of different technical standards and proprietary business standards making it a complete pain to do very simple things with your digital possessions: say, moving a song you’ve bought from one company to play on a portable device from another. For example, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to take the TV content I pay my cable company for and watch it on the train, and there are various daft ways you can do this now.

In response to this problem different vendors are proposing complex mash-ups of hardware and software that will bring all the disparate elements of our digital lives together. Needless to say, they want to own the whole piece. So, Microsoft has Media Center PCs, the Xbox, and Windows Mobile devices. Apple has the Mac, the iPod, Apple TV and the iPhone, and Sony has its PlayStation family, as well as phones, cameras and TVs. Because they’re all trying to cover so many bases, and because they all come from different places, it’s easy to miss the fact they’ve all got their eye on the same prize, but don’t be fooled. Sony, for one, has made its final destination absolutely clear: it’s planning a long-delayed online virtual world accessible from its PS3 game consoles, called simply Home.

Home is aptly named. It’s where in fact all these companies want to be, in the sense that they all want control over the digital media in our homes. They know that the company which controls the living room computing platform in the way that Microsoft used to control the office desktop computing platform will make ungodly profits. Each company has its strengths and its weaknesses. Microsoft has its formidable PC installed base and the hugely successful Xbox console, but Windows brings problems as well as benefits, not least the ludicrously restrictive digital rights management (DRM) software built into Vista. Apple has great hardware and lovely interfaces, and has cracked the music content relationships, but also insists on horrible DRM software and has yet to get the studios on board properly. Sony has great hardware devices and the brilliant PS3 game console, as well as loads of media assets, and has even won the next-generation DVD war, but a tradition of weird proprietary hardware formats like the Memory Stick as well as amazingly shonky software interfaces.

I’ve been playing with the Sony PS3 and the Sony PSP lately, and despite some typical Sony weirdness together they do offer some insight into what a dream converged home entertainment system might look like. The PS3 is a great piece of kit. It’s a bit easier to smuggle into your living room than the Xbox as it’s practically silent, and lacks a ludicrous external power supply, and of course it also plays HD Blu-ray movies.

A key element in convergence is linking together the internet, from which all digital goodness flows, to your PC, your TV, your games console, and a handheld device. Clearly wireless is the way to go: the PS3 makes this magic connection between console and PC very easily. I found it much easier to connect the PS3 wirelessly to my PC than the typically Windows rigmarole involved when linking the Xbox and a Media Center PC, and I never managed to get Media Center to stream via the Xbox, while the PS3 caught movies from the air as if by magic, bringing the movies on my PC hard drive on to my TV

So what do you end up with? Sony has a nice interface, (Microsoft’s Media Center interface is also very good.) You get great games and Blu-ray discs (although Sony’s gaming line-up and online play are still lagging behind the Xbox.) You can rip a DVD on the PC and then stream it wireless to watch on your TV. You can take that DVD and watch it on your PSP on the train (once you’ve invested in Sony’s horribly expensive proprietary portable memory standard.) You can download movies, games and game demos from the Sony store and watch them on your TV or PSP. It’s all starting to come together nicely, on some elegant hardware.

And yet… even though the hardware and network pieces are coming together, there are huge gaps. Why can’t I use my PS3 to buy music from iTunes (I can stream all my music from my PC to the TV if I want to)? Why can’t I buy movies and TV programmes from the Sony Store? All these things are technically possible and will probably emerge in time: in the US, online movie company Netflix allows people to download movies to watch via their game consoles. Sony charges you for an arm and a leg for media management software that makes it easy to copy your movies and music from your PC to your PSP – clearly this should be just part of the device’s basic software.

There is a forest of business, technical, and user interfaces the industry will have to navigate, and it’s frustrating to see the missed opportunities and delays preventing this mish-mash of standards, hardware and software coming together. It’s all so close. What I’d now like is an XboxPS360, which combined the Xbox Live experience and games with the PS3’s hardware; an iDS-PSP, which combined iTunes and the iPhone interface with the PSP’s screen and the Nintendo DS’ games, and a lovely Sony TV, camera, and video camera. Of course they will all connect wirelessly, play nicely together, and integrated via a high speed 3G or wireless connection. They’ll give me open web access to iTunes, Napster and all online music, TV and film providers, and it will all be properly indexed and searchable by Google. And oh, why not throw in a Kindle, Amazon’s promising eBook reader, for added fun? Stay with me people, I know this is going to happen!

---

Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• Spore: make yourself a little monster
• Human search engines: Chinese web vigilantes
• Living with Google's double-edged sword