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Intel Media Hardware Entertainment

Intel Branding Media Center PCs as "Viiv" 202

Posted by CowboyNeal from the tune-in dept.
ChessKnught writes "Dan Ackerman posted a blog on Blog.CNET.com regarding Intel Developer Forum chatter about Intel's branding of it's Media Center PC. Don McDonald, one of Intel's Digital Home Group Sr. VP's, is talking about 'Viiv', apparently targetting entertainment PC users. It looks like it'll be combining CPU, Intel hardware (TV tuner, remote, and easy setup wireless home networking, etc.) and Windows Media Center Edition."
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Intel Branding Media Center PCs as "Viiv" More

Intel Branding Media Center PCs as "Viiv"

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  • "Viiv"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:51PM (#13402731) Homepage
    So some Intel executive's "niece" got to play in marketing for a week, it seems.

    • Trademarks? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 )
      I think that the marketing gurus are just running out of names that are not trademarked. It's the same with drugs and software. Soon, things will have to be named random strings so as not to conflick with some existing trademark.
      • Wow! My %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A ver 2.0 is SO much cooler than yours!

        -WS
        • uhhhhh..... FARM FRESH MILK!

          Have you been receiving empty packages?

          FARM FRESH! AAAAGH... MILK! FARMFRESHMILK!
        • Wow! My %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A ver 2.0 is SO much cooler than yours!

          That's %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® to you, not %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A. Thanks for your attention.

          Wile E. Coyote III
          Sr. VP of Plungers and Duct Tape
          Acme Widget Co., Inc.
          Makers of the %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® and other fine products for capturing high-velocity highway-running avians

    • No, it's Vivian from the Young Ones. The new Intel logo is going to be four silver stars stapled to a geek's forehead.

  • am i the only one (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AKAJack ( 31058 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:51PM (#13402736)
    who thinks "viiv" means "64"?
    • VII V = 75

      • Re:No it's 75 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:02PM (#13402808)
        And VI IV is 64.

        And V IIV is 57.

        Who cares what it stands for. It's a retarded name, and hopefully it's just a codename. If they actually do use this ridiculus name, they're gonna have to highlight the letters so people know what Intel's smoking.
        • Whoopse, I hit submit before I realized it. V IIV is technically 53, even though three is usually expressed as III in Roman Numerals.

          • Re:No it's 75 (Score:3, Interesting)

            by GregChant ( 305127 )
            Whoopse, I hit submit before I realized it. V IIV is technically 53, even though three is usually expressed as III in Roman Numerals.

            Actually, you were right the first time Roman numerals, traditionally, were not directionally dependent. That is why on clocks, you see IIII instead of IV: IV is 6 in Roman.

            Some jackass decided to ruin that simplicity recently (last couple hundred years, maybe?), and thus IV is 4.

        • Heh, I think it's the default pin used by the development engineers for the built-in DRM chip ...

          5 1 1 5 ...
        • Bestbuy employee: Good day sir!

          Customer: Hi, Do you know where I can find the VIIV.

          Bestbuy employee: Yes sir, just go down the hall, take a left. The bathroom is right around the corner.

          • You have obviously never been to Best Buy:

            Best Buy Employee: Would you like to get an extended service plan?
            Customer: Uh... what? Where can I get a gift card?
            Employee: Right over here. We have a special deal today. If you buy an extended service plan on the gift card, we'll automatically deduct the entire balance of the card from the card, just to make it useless but at the same time, sound like a good deal. If I use the word "good" enough and keep talking about extended service plans, your wallet wi
      • Roman numbers are added, not appended, and if one or more symbols with a lower value precede another with a higer value, they are subtracted, therefore:

        V + IIV = 5 + 3 = 8

        Yes, there are many ways to write the same number: VIIII is equivalent to IX, or XXXXX is equivalent to L

        Maybe they intend this to be the Octium [x886] (following Pentium [x586], Sexium [x686] and Heptium [x786]), and as this processor is meant for entertainment, games, fun etc., they made a joke of its name also.

        :-)

    • Or it's from the Chicago song. (Score:5, Funny)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:00PM (#13402803)
      take all overlapping pairs of consecutive digits:

      VI II IV

      that's 6 2 4 or in leet speak: "six to four"

      Now if you assume the two II in the middle were crossed for multiplication then that's 5x5 = 25

      Hence we arrive at the Chicago song:

      Twenty Five or Six to four

    • > who thinks "viiv" means "64"?

      Because "VIIV0K oportet suppeto" is easier to pronounce than "DCXLK".

      Because there are no "bars over characters" in ASCII, and because redundancy filter won't let me type in the other representation for the quantity you get when you multiply DCXL by MXXIV.

      And because even if the derivation would get past the filter, there is no. freaking. way. I'm going to try and multiply those two quantities in Roman numerals. Nuh-uh. If they want more than that much RAM, the Li

    • Crap here for the empty reply filter.
    • Yes! In all of the world you were the only one! Thank the stars you have pointed this out for us! Whew, that was close! We almost missed it. 25 years from now people will be thankful that you were here to catch that one. Wow!!

  • I realize that.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jvagner ( 104817 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:53PM (#13402748)
    ..technology branding is hard, but .. sheesh, isn't it time Intel fired their marketing division?

    VIIV? Viiv? It's like a new STD.
    • Could be HIV, if the middle bar in the H fell down /.

      Or, someone who likes the Vive shampoo. Pronouced the same, I think.

      Or, VI = 6, IV = backwards 6 = 9, == 69.

      Could be an acronym. "Vote Independant In Venezuela". It's a Pat Robertson conspiracy!

      But, my money is on a NIN fan in marketting. It's close to NIN, without the middle I.

  • Yet another product they'll can in 6 months (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dangermen ( 248354 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:54PM (#13402751) Homepage
    This is YET another product they'll can in 6 months. I use to work for an Intel dealer. It has always been funny watching Intel try to get into markets only to dump product six months later. Let's see: high end switches, SSL accelerators, ISDN routers, NAS appliances, multi-media centers, crap video conferencing, and a whole slew of others.

    Intel -NEEDS- to figure out that they really should only do Network Cards, CPUs, and motherboard chipsets. It could be argued that they are even slipping on the latter two.

    Either way, I recommend people stay away from them. You'll just be buying something from someone else.
    • Don't forget crappy digital cameras, crappy digital microscopes, crappy portable music players, and crappy wireless keyboards and mice.

      The thing is, many of these "initiatives" are actually where they went out and bought some other company. So they buy another company, thinking they're going to integrate them into their line-up and use that to increase their overall strength and presence in the market, and they put out a few products. But somehow they screw it all up so all the engineers from the acquired

  • Only 2 words count that I didn't see in TFA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rude Turnip ( 49495 ) <valuation&gmail,com> on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:56PM (#13402763)
    And they are: Cable Card. If anyone who wants a serious HTPC is willing to spend the bucks on the gear, then they'll likely be the type of person who wants premium channels and possibly on-demand programming. For a device like those Intel propose with the ViiV chipset, a video-in connection and IR blasters to control the cable box would be unacceptable...the Viiv unit must *be* the cable box and the Cable Card specification allows that. Tivo, for instance, is coming out with a CableCard unit next year that will allow me to get rid of my cable box. With the cable card from my cable company, my HTPC will be able to decode all the premium and HD programming *itself*.

  • From the article... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nos. ( 179609 ) <andrew@nOSPAm.thekerrs.ca> on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:56PM (#13402766) Homepage

    Aimed at entertainment PC users--particularly those who use rack-style home theater systems

    Is this a particularaly large market? I'm not a big audiophile, and don't have a huge plasma HD TV. I know some people who do. In all the stores I've been in, I've never seen rack-style home theatre equipment. Now, I'm not in the high end stores, but lets face it, if the big box stores aren't carrying it, there's not a big market for it.

    So, if most satellite and other TV providers already have PVRs and some have similar functionality (networkable, can play music, etc), where is the market for this? Is this going to be a high priced toy for those that can afford it?

    Of course, there is the possibility that they meant component style, which probably covers a pretty big majority of people who would be interested in something like this.

    • and don't have a huge plasma HD TV

      That's OK! Real videophiles tend to use HD Front Projections (anything from the 720P Sharp 12000s to true 1080i/p Sony Qualias). If a Videophile were to have a plasma it would be a "spare" that's on the wall visible when the screen is up, for bright ambient light viewing.

      Plasmas run hot, and have a severe burn-in problem. For that reason, people in-the-know avoid them.

      • Also, don't plasmas lose their brightness very quickly, so that they're pretty much worthless in a few years?
        • This is what they call burn-in.

          When plasma displays warm up, their materials expand. When they cool, they contract. This gradually weakens the seal between cells and lets the gases leak out.

          I wonder how well the first generation of large commercial OLED displays will fare compared to current plasmas.
      • You are uninformed and/or prejudiced against plasmas.

        Plasmas run hot, and have a severe burn-in problem.

        Really? Are you saying a projector runs cooler than a plasma with identical display area? Are there any fanless projectors? There are lots of fanless plasmas.

        Modern plasmas (i.e. ones made in the past few years) do not have burn-in problems. Temporary image retention (as long as a few hours in extreme cases) can still occur if an owner is careless and leaves a high-contrast, static image on for a few

  • Oh, great, another religious war (Score:5, Funny)

    by TechnoInfidel ( 569458 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:57PM (#13402771)
    Just waiting for someone to complain about it not being called Emacsscame.

  • Oh great (Score:5, Funny)

    by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:57PM (#13402774) Homepage
    "Hi! I'd like to buy a new computer! What can you recommend?"

    "Well, right over here we've got a state-of-the-art Sony Vaio."

    "Vae . . . via . . . veiaou?"

    "Vaio."

    "Viiu?"

    "Vaio."

    "Um. Well, one of my friends has a media center, and I was thinking of getting one of those too. What can you recommend?"

    "Here's a Viiv!"

    "Veev? Viv?"

    "Viiv."

    "You know what? I don't appreciate being made fun of."

    "Wait! Don't go! I'm serious!"

  • So long as its not a trend (Score:5, Funny)

    by pegasustonans ( 589396 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @06:58PM (#13402788)
    This is alright so long as Intel doesn't continue naming chips with random comic book sound effects.

    Pretty soon they'd be resorting to names like "Skwoosh" and "Zlurphpt."

  • This is of course... (Score:3, Funny)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:00PM (#13402801)
    ...part of their marketing agreement with Microsoft. The one in which both companies are suppose to use names that have no meaning whatsoever to the general consumer. (Run Vista on your Viiv?)

    (Well, it's either that, or they've got a side bet about who can come up with the worst name...)

  • Third choice. (Score:4, Funny)

    by bombshelter13 ( 786671 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:02PM (#13402810)
    So, when presented with the options of choosing a name for their new product that is either A) meaningless but pronouncable and fairly easy to remember phonetically (i.e. Centrinu, Celeron) or B) actually has some vague correlation to what the technology is about (HyperThreading, EM64T), they choose to do neither, settling on one that is neither catchy nor related to what the product actually does.
     
    Nice job, boys.

    • It is pronounced... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Poromenos1 ( 830658 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:31PM (#13402977) Homepage
      "vive", as in "five".
      • So why the fuck isn't it spelled 'vive'.

        Naming products things that consumers feel self-conscious trying to pronounce correctly tends to cause them to a) not talk about them, b) come up with some other name for your product that you have no control over.
    • Celeron is almost certainly related to the Latin stem having to do with speed: Celer. That makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective, look, its fast (but doesn't crunch as well... we'll gloss that over). Centrino I couldn't tell you, but almost certainly stems in something. Pentium, for those who didn't know, comes from Latin 5, since it followed the 486. Why the Pentium 3 wasn't the Septium is beyond me, I think that sounds catchier =P

  • Ah yes, "Viiv" (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:03PM (#13402819) Homepage
    The brilliant name devised by Intel's Committee To Come Up With A Name Dumber Than "Itanium".

  • More articles here.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hack Jandy ( 781503 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:04PM (#13402826) Homepage
    These were published yesterday:

    http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=250 9 [anandtech.com]
    http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=251 0 [anandtech.com]


    HJ
  • is this really suitable naming scheme?
    add one, and you get:
      Intel Inside VIIVI [google.com]

  • The next Centrino (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wiredlogic ( 135348 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:09PM (#13402862)
    This is another ploy by their marketing department to lock out their chipset competitors. Notably Via. This will be the same for the A/V market.

    By marketing the "Centrino" brand instead of "Pentium M" thay created demand among the clueless public and ensured vendor lock-in for their chipsets than would not otherwise be the case. The consumer doesn't know that a Pentium M is but they do know that their next notebook has got to be a "Centrino" because of blitz advertising. The notebook manufacturers have no choice but to design in more Intel parts if they want to meet "demand".

    This also helped in the demise of Transmeta even though the Efficeon had real promise. The Sharp Muramasa is the only Efficeon notebook to date and is only available through importers in the US.
    • Which brand of laptop do you think people buy? "Centrino"? Or "Dell"? Even "Centrino" is too much under-the-hood. Too most people, if centrino means anything at all, it just means "wireless network".

      At the moment, the only mediacenter brand with any clout in the market is the Windows XP MediaCenter Edition brand (in fact, before MCE, did you call it a mediacenter? Or a pc-with-tuner-and-encoder-decoder? Or a PVR/PVR-PC? Microsoft marketing now ensures slashdot headlines with "Media Center" rather than any o
  • add a couple features, perhaps a family movie or two, and call it the Aristrocrats?

    No, I won't expand on what I mean.

  • DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vorondil28 ( 864578 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @07:12PM (#13402879) Journal
    It looks like it'll be combining CPU, Intel hardware (TV tuner, remote, and easy setup wireless home networking, etc.) and Windows Media Center Edition."

    Not to mention DRM'd to hell?
  • Which sounds a little painful to my ears. For instance, to use it in a sentence: "Can we re-viiv our ailing business model?"
  • intel's trusted computing meets MCE 2005's DRM'd media files.
  • Could this indeed be true?

  • Or somebody else's brain subconsciously associates "VIIV" with virii?
    • I associate it more with HIV. So VIIV would be the vi Immunodeficiency Virus. I guess the vi users will have to use emacs too if Intel manages to make this a success.
    • No, I got the same out of it.

      I think they were going for the "vivere" root, life, involved in words like "vivacious [m-w.com]" and "vitality [m-w.com]", but given the computer connections "virus" does tend to come out too.

      Trying to peice together syllables to indirectly invoke things is a dangerous game. (Doesn't seem to stop a lot of big companies, though.)
  • Can either of these guys make anything without the others help ?
  • Why depend on Microsoft to power products like this? As good as the hardware may be, if Intel don't control the OS, they don't control the final product.

    Wouldn't make more sense to power it with MithTV, wich they can hack as they please and brand as a Intel only product?

    Why depend on Microsoft? Hell, what's wrong with you Intel, Microsoft used to depend on you!
  • Vyvyan from The Young Ones

  • Why it won't suck! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Thursday August 25, 2005 @08:50PM (#13403388) Journal
    Well actually, it will suck. But only for the first three years. Here's what I predict:

    1) Intel sleeps with MS to develop a HTPC standard. They take over the market.
    2) Everyone else tries to get in on the action. Lawsuits abound.
    3) Other, genuinely better alternatives will become available, some of them open-source. Not all of them will be compatable.
    4) MS, who has taken over the project from Intel in the interim, will drag their heels and still produce a sub-par product--but the functionality from the better products will eventually make their way down to the commercial items.

    Eventually, we'll have good HTPCs. Not as fast as we'd like and not as good as we want, but they'll be better than if Intel hadn't done this.
  • A quick glance and an attempt at pronunciation may result in it sounding much like "veevee". "Veevee" is a common slang term for "vagina" in many parts of the world.

  • All I can think of is Vivian from that classic 80s series "The Young Ones" and Rick yammering on saying, "Have we got a video"? when they had a video. How many 80s kids here remember that?
  • Typical marketing stupidity.
  • WWIV is still around?

  • ... now everytime INTeL announce something Mac Zealots get to say something less than interesting and completely speculative... so here goes :)

    Clearly this is the precurser to Apple bringing out a set-top box to access their new iMovie Video store. The Apple Viiv, in combination with the iViiv will allow subscribers to download 'HD Quality' movies on both their TV and the on the move. Priced at just under the national debt of Cambodia, this product is expected to appeal to New Yorkers, who will where the wh

  • Apparently..

    Charles Chou, San Francisco; Jessie Shen, DigiTimes.com [Thursday 25 August 2005]

    According to unspecified Taiwan-based PC makers, Intel is currently working with software developers to design middleware application software for the Linux operating system (OS) for its Viiv (rhymes with five) consumer PC platform to reduce the cost and selling price of the PCs.

    Viiv-based PCs will initially be based on the Microsoft Window Media Center OS, which should drive up the costs, as a special OS a

  • viiv ? (Score:2)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 )
    Maybe ViiV should be read like V2V (as in "v" "to" "v") for which I could make up any number of combinations with words starting with "v". Other than then, it look quite stupid.
     
  • ...would you display neen on VIIV?

  • that these days Intel develops fewer and fewer actual products but more and more brands?

  • I think Intel should get the engineers out of their marketing department. I mean, look at some of the winners they've had recently:

    HT Technology
    EM64T
    SSE/2/3
    MMX

    and now VIIV. WTF?

    Are consumers really supposed to get something out of these? At least Centrino was capable of being pronounced.

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