Comenity: the real future of home entertainment systems
When I posted about ResponsePoint the other day, I didn't look closely at the customer video showing a happy ResponsePoint user. Turns out it's Mark McCracken, an old buddy from Silicon Valley, who is now founder of a Bellevue, WA company called Comenity. Their business idea? Setting up home entertainment systems.
Remember the old joke about how most VCRs are always flashing the wrong time because normal people can't figure out how to set them? Well, now everybody's out buying big fancy plasma TVs with HDTV inputs and the problem is a zillion times worse. What do you plug? Where? How do you get it to work with a remote control? Then how do you explain it all to your wife, who just wants to know how to get The Weather Channel?
Nowadays every new consumer electronics startup wants to brag about how easy they are to set up. Apple TV, Digeo (Moxi), Tivo, and of course Microsoft with MSTV, Media Center, Xbox, and more -- they all claim to be easy for mere mortals to set up and operate. But there are two problems:
- Maybe everything works fine if you buy an integrated system from a single vendor, what what do you do when you want to add something different?
- Setting it all up and keeping it humming will take you many hours and weekends. Maybe you think it's fun (I do) but still, what if you don't have the time?
I'm sure back in the early days of indoor plumbing or electricity, there were companies trying to sell customers on how easy their pipes were to install or reconfigure. And of course normal people back then did their own installations, just like they grew their own food and milked their own cows. But then somebody decided that specialization makes sense, and soon there were full-time plumbers and electricians doing these installations.
Modern, high-performance entertainment systems are just as complicated as indoor plumbing, and people should just admit that doing it right requires specialists. Sure, if you like to tinker you're more than welcome to go to Home Depot to learn about plumping, just like you're welcome to study all the manuals and configurations behind setting up your own home server network. But if you just want to watch TV, why not call an expert?
