My wife and I ordered a new corner TV cabinet a few weeks back to replace the particleboard Walmart number we'd purchased after moving in together five years ago. Eager to ditch the college-quality eyesore, I began disconnecting components as soon as the new cabinet arrived and we managed to maneuver its wider-than-remembered bulk through the front door and into the kitchen.Five minutes and one minor electrical shock later, I was greeted by this rather horrifying sight:For those of you keeping track at home, this is apparently the sort of electro-intestinal carnage that one can expect from a years-long Royal Rumble starring, in no particular order, one high-definition television, one Nintendo Wii, one Blu-ray player, one satellite receiver, one Apple TV, one sound bar, one cable modem, one wireless router, and one high-definition signal switcher — that last device being necessary to manage the feeds from the aforementioned Blu-ray player, satellite receiver, and Apple TV in light of the single, solitary HDMI input on our (relatively) old Westinghouse.My first instinct upon witnessing this modern-day Cobble's Knot was to hit up Maniac Magee on the celly and then curl up in the fetal position while he worked his way through it with only the promise of a large cheese pizza for payment. After learning from my school-teacher wife that the book was not, in fact, based on a real person however, I eventually hunkered down to untangle the Gordian gnarl myself, wondering all the while when technology would finally free us from a tethered entertainment existence once and for all.The most obvious candidate for wired obsolescence, of course, is the Blu-ray player (which would already require one less cord if I hadn't cheaped out and purchased the ethernet-only version instead of the wireless one to access online content). In my opinion, there's a better-than-even chance that Blu-ray discs will prove the last physical audio/video medium to gain widespread adoption, as more and more of us turn to Internet-enabled streaming media to meet our Hollywood hankerings.Unfortunately, aside from pre-recorded movies offered by your cable or satellite provider, conventional bandwidth wisdom dictates that broadcast television is probably still a few years away from being able to pipe true 1080p resolution (at 60 fps — not 24 fps) directly into your living room — to say nothing of Ultra HD programming, which DIRECTV has just recently announced it is working on and which Japan intends to transition to by 2020 (the year — not the TV show).Of course, once you ditch Blu-ray, cable/satellite doesn't need to be far behind. As streaming content libraries at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and future competitors continue to grow, the concept of paying for dozens of channels that you never actually watch will become almost quaint. And while we're consolidating, why not build TVs with wireless routers right in them? They're already a prominently and centrally displayed piece of equipment, so Internet signals to your other connected devices shouldn't suffer.And if you can figure out a way to build a portal into the TV for third-party video game manufacturers, perhaps a single peripheral is all you'll need to integrate their controllers as well, while the games themselves are delivered directly through your all-in-on uber-monitor. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the real Apple TV rumored to be debuting this fall incorporated multiple elements of my cord-free free-thinking.[Googles…] Well, speak of the devil! (who, I might remind you, did convince Adam to partake of a certain doctor-repelling fruit once upon a time). According to Macworld UK two days ago, "Apple is working on a television set with voice-control and a touch-screen remote, which will come with Apple’s very own game console." Well, applejacks! Now if they can only figure out how to power the whole thing via a giant Powermat, we'll really be in business.(crossposted on Brutish&Short)
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