I have a weird and slightly lazy dream to some day sit in my favorite recliner and productively work my tail off in comfort.  A couple months back, I even did a little experiment.  I positioned my portable projector from the office at the ceiling of my house and reclined a recliner back.  I set up my laptop keyboard on an inclined keyboard holder and typed away while laying back and looking straight ahead at the ceiling.

I’ll admit that it worked but not as well as I would have liked.  I was very comfortable, but the distance was a little to short to get the projected image large enough to be comfortable. 

Canon does have some new projectors that have an amazing capacity to make very large images from a short distance.  You can even look at a mindmap at like 20% zoom and see the individual topics extremely clearly but I digress.

Anyway, my idea or day dream was slightly reinforced about a week and a half back while I was attending CES in Las Vegas.  I came across the i-FI chair that I would describe as a recliner with the sound system built into it. 

Now, I have never been terribly impressed with the concepts of investing in home theater furniture such that you feel like you have a miniature movie theater in your house.  I’ll take a great couch or recliner any day.  I do not need something that feels like a goofy theater seat chair.

Plus, I have three kids under 10 and its not too hard for them to regularly recreate that spilled sticky ambience on any given surface in the house!

Amazing Voice Clarity in the Sound

Now, as I test drove this chair at CES, I rapidly learned what almost everyone there learned.  The sound quality is not only great, but for very loud movies engineered for surround sound, you can understand what people are saying as if there is not a lot of surround sound background noise. 

I’m sure you’ve probably watched a movie at home where you had to turn the sound up to 40 to hear the words and then when the action picks up, all the trim in your house is vibrated away to dust.  This chair seems to eliminate that catch 22.  Plus, it has a very cool built in ability to create a sound vibration in the chair without cranking up a sub woofer that can be felt in the ground from 10 miles away like listening to a freight train through a rail road track.

(video of the LA Times here, I’m standing in the background in some of the frames, but the LA times video is kind of rough, they are writers and not film types I guess)

 

All in all, I’m not crazy about the name that the i-Fi Company has come up with but in all fairness this is not only a chair for to work with your home entertainment system, but it is also an iPod accessory that enables you to dock your iPod.  So they seem to have the obligatory ‘i’ in the name.  That said, I can’t think of a better name to counter my critical view of their name, so I guess I should just leave it there.  Its priced at about the level you could expect for a high end comfortable leather recliner.

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BitTorrent long known as a P2P illegal file down load haven announced last year that it would go legit and is delivering on that promise today.  Starting on the day that the Academy Award Winners will be announced BitTorrent will start to provide movie and television downloads as it hopes to compete with the likes of Wal-mart, Amazon, Microsoft and smaller companies like MovieLink.

BitTorrent became very popular as the Movie version of Napster and is hoping to capitalize on its recent signature movie studio deals.  It also hopes to provide free ad support television downloads soon.  It is not going to be a simple transition as there are some big names with bigger wallets competing against BitTorrent, but like YouTube, BitTorrent has a massive following already and has the potential to expose its mass of ‘customers’ into paying ‘customers.’

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Hollywood announced a new alliance with Qflix in January.  The alliance would utilize an alternative to the CSS technology that is used to secure current DVD movies.  Hollywood is concerned that opening up home computers to allow the use of CSS locking technology might promote the piracy of DVD titles.  Computers have the key to unlock to play but not to unlock to burn.

So the new alternative provides a different type of key that would allow movies download from services like CinemaNow, Movielink and Amazon.com to encrypt and lock  the movie onto a DVD without opening a Pandora’s box that might allow users to copy other physical DVD’s.

It appears the technology would require device makers (computer and DVD player manufacturers) to incorporate this new technology, which points to an upgrade for consumers.

The benefit could however allow consumers to download and burn movies.  They could even go to retailers with access to vast libraries of out of print TV shows and movie titles where a show or movie could be burnt on demand within 10-15 minutes.

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