Barry Willis

Home theater just keeps getting better. New products from <A HREF="http://www.toshiba.com">Toshiba,</A> <A HREF="http://www.meitca.com">Mitsubishi,</A> and other companies promise huge improvements in picture quality and greater system flexibility. For example, Toshiba's ColorStream PRO technology in its Platinum Standard SD7108 DVD-Video player preserves the MPEG-2 480-line progressive video scanning inherent in DVDs and outputs it directly to one of the company's new Cinema Series projection TV sets, such as the 71-inch TP71H95.

Plans by the NBC and CBS networks to transmit 1080i HDTV this fall are "suicidal," according to John Malone, chairman of <A HREF="http://www.tci.com/">Tele-Communications, Inc.</A> On May 5, at the <A HREF="http://www.ncta.com/">National Cable Television Association's</A> annual convention in Atlanta, Malone vowed that TCI won't carry HDTV in its ultimate form. A single channel of full-bore HDTV occupies the same transmission bandwidth as 12 low-resolution channels or several standard-resolution channels.

Surprise, <A HREF="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft's</A> <A HREF="http://www.webtv.com">WebTV</A> is now the only player in the TV/Internet game. On Wednesday, April 29, NetChannel Inc. threw in the towel, announcing that it was getting out of the business of bringing the Internet into homes via set-top converter boxes. The $20-per-month service never gained a large enough following to become profitable.

The living room in most American homes has traditionally served ceremonial purposes. It's the place where your parents entertained visiting dignitaries, like the local minister who came to offer consolation after your grandmother's funeral. It's the place where they took pictures of you and your senior-prom date. As a showcase for stiff, uncomfortable, and rarely used furniture, the traditional living room is an ornamental vestige of a bygone, formal era, like buttons on the sleeve of a dinner jacket.