How the consoles had an affair with home theater systems

An interesting chapter of the console history is the part when their manufacturers experimented with the idea that consoles shouldn't be used only for gaming, but also they should be connected with home theater systems. Who know, perhaps they could even become one.

This idea saw the light of the world when CDs first came. As early as in 1991 we get the Commodore CDTV, that allow to play CD audio disks apart from playing CD version of Amiga games.

Even more consoles came up that year that allowed to games be played from CDs, but those got even MPEG and Video CD decoders. The most known is the CD-i standard, mainly represented by consoles from Philips. But the problem with those was that the consoles were expensive and the games not so good. And the Video CDs quality was not good either and interactive CD just made that not so good content a bit more interactive, but not better. So consoles eventually gave up interactive movies, but that was mainly because this low quality of video was already available to the world in VHS tapes and the much more superior DVD was quickly coming.

And with DVDs it look much more perspective. The PlayStation 2 ability to play DVD is considered one of the biggest reasons it gained that much popularity and even so called “pure-gaming-consoles” like the Nintendo GameCube flirted with playing DVD. In Japan – you could buy Panasonic Q – a GameCube compatible device that had a standard sized optical drive that allowed to play DVD disks.

But probably the biggest experiment was the Sony PSX in the year 2003, a PS2 compatible console with a TV tuner and the ability to record video on a hard drive. The console was expensive and the sales weren’t good and that led to the system not being sold out-side of Japan. It also meant a big blow to the concept of a console and a multimedia center that would sit at the center of every living room as Sony envisioned.

The next console, PS3 was still very close to this concept. It could play DVD, BlueRay but could even stream video. But over time, the relationship between consoles and home theatre system cooled off: All modern smart television have the connectivity and are able to easily stream video themselves and can easily use services like Hulu or NetFlix even without the console. While the newest consoles still have these features, they seem to be sort of “in the background” and the consoles are again more about pure gaming.