Every month or so, increasing in frequency as the holiday season approaches (courtesy of PR shops acting on behalf of Microsoft and its hardware partners), there are newspaper and television pieces about Microsoft's Media Center OS and the hardware that hosts it. Each time it's presented as a revolution in the living room, and there are bold predictions about how this year it'll take the world by storm.

While everyone seems to focus on the operating system as the critical link that will yield convergence, I think that's the least of the reason why computers were deported from the living rooms to home offices everywhere.

Instead there have been some historical problems that have thwarted convergence:

1. As computers grew from the Commodore 64s and Atari 800 era into highly capable devices, like the Amiga and Atari ST, that growth brought with it a need for more resolution than televisions could handle. This is what kicked the computer out of the living room, as computers now required their own, special monitor, and conversely there was no way that you were going to watch television on a 14" VGA monitor. Quite a few years back, just under a decade ago, Gateway tried making a 27" television/computer monitor to support their convergence device, but the result was a subpar computer monitor that doubled as a subpar television.
2. The wires of keyboards and mice are very unsavoury in the living room, not to mention that a modern PC needs to be networked to really be usable.
3. Computers take a long time to get going - they aren't very convenient - and they are noisy beasts.
4. Computers are ugly.

Thankfully there have been some great advances in all of these areas. First and foremost, home television and computer display technology have merged, and we now have relatively inexpensive, large (27"+) multimedia displays yielding a million pixels or more (720p and up). Many of these feature perfect-fidelity digital DVI or HDMI ports to transport the display of the PC accurately on your living room display. My living room television is a better computer monitor than the one in my home office.

Advances in wireless technology have brought us wireless networking (no running CAT5e to your living room), but also reliable wireless keyboards and mice: you can stick them under the couch, and you don't have a sloppy setup in the corner of the room.

On the topic of aesthetics, several manufacturers are now (finally!) making PCs in a standard home-theatre equipment form, making it fit in beautifully alongside your other equipment. No longer does convergence mean having a beige mini-tower in the corner of your room. With this they've equipped it with virtually silent fans and hard drives, ensuring that it's sonically unobtrusive.

So now we have good looking, high power, convenient computing devices that display gorgeously on our living room displays. Convergence is upon us, and whether it's used to play MAME games, poker online, or as an MP3 repositorie, the computer has re-entered the living room. I don't even care if it acts as a PVR - I have a stand-alone device to do that - but if it can interface with the television source provider and their HDTV and digital content, and it does a competent job at it, then it could do that task as well.

Sidenote: Microsoft recented inked an agreement with the cable and satellite cabal that will see them including CableCard functionality in their media centers by next Christmas. This is tremendously important, as without this there was no way that your Media Center could make use of all of the digital and digital HDTV channels on the provider's feed, instead being limited to the analog signals.

Speaking of that, a "fun project" I had been considering was a DVI loop-thru adapter in my media PC - one that took the uncompressed DVI 720p signal in an input, and passed it untouched into a DVI 720p DVI-D output. The purpose would be that I could then start overlaying graphics on the computer - the processing demands would be significant, but I mean things like a little translucent icon saying that mail has arrived or a skype call is incoming, or whatever. Of course this brings up digital rights management (DRM) issues: This would not work for HDCP protected content, nor will it work when Microsoft integrates CableCard functionality, as they'll have the swear on their first goldfish's grave that there is no way evil programmers can alter or intercept the signal.