If you think consumers are getting a little video obsessed now – just wait til the new technology that is allowing users to beam video from a laptop to TV screen wirelessly and instantly is fine tuned. It’s available right now – though the products we are aware of do have a few limitations.
The two most recent wireless PC-to-TV solutions both require a secondary device that remains connected to the TV to receive the wireless signal from the computer.
One of the products is a new system from Intel, several major laptop makers and the networking equipment company Netgear. It's called Intel Wireless Display, or Wi-Di.
A software product called PlayOn, from a company called MediaMall is the other. That one beams video to a TV through popular game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. However, both of these products only work on Windows computers.
From what we are told, the Intel solution only works a few laptops on the market and doesn’t allow you to do anything else with the PC while the video is playing.
The PlayOn system will work on an existing computer, and it keeps showing a video even if you choose to use the PC for some other task. But it can't beam just any old video to the TV, only those from services PlayOn has enabled.
This is a product category worth keeping an eye on as all the users shooting video with digital cameras and mobile devices would seem a perfect audience for products like these.
