Intel, Microsoft team to tout digital home

Intel and Microsoft teamed up to create and tackle the PC world. Next up: the digital-entertainment world.

The two companies on Thursday announced a joint marketing campaign for television, print, cinema and online advertising aimed at showing consumers what they can do with their digital entertainment technologies.

Photo gallery
Windows of opportunity

At Microsoft's LA bash, the stars
are the new Media Center PCs.

Those technologies might include Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Expenses for the campaign are estimated to be in the low tens of millions of dollars and will be split between the two companies. It will run from Sunday until late January.

The campaign is meant to address one of the key complaints about consumer electronics devices that use digitized content, which is simply that they are harder to figure out how to use. Digitized content, such as audio files and video clips, is more portable and transferable between devices and, in most cases, is of higher quality than analog content.

Consumer electronics makers such as Sony Electronics and Samsung have opened showroom stores where new products and digital technologies can be demonstrated to consumers to educate them about what they can do.

Microsoft and Intel will have similar demonstration areas in high-traffic malls in 38 U.S. cities, including Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

The companies are setting up a Web site named after the campaign, called Digital Joy. (As of Thursday morning, the site was not yet live.) The site is intended to provide information to visitors that will teach them about sharing digital photos and staying up-to-date on TV shows and radio programs, among other activities.

[coolfactor]

The Digital Hub

Apple pioneered this whole digital home concept, touting it as
the "Digital Hub". Maybe it was inevitable, but without the right
mix of ease-of-use and attention to the small details, these big
companies will just be making it harder for consumers, not
easier.

Sure

Sure, just like apple invented the Earth?s air? Get the apple out of your arse for a moment you drama queen.

-More Cupertino zealots