December 15, 2007
Viiv more dead than alive
Intel’s Viiv brand, which heralded its offensive into consumer electronics two years ago, seems to be heading for early retirement.
At a Friday preview of its announcements due at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Intel said the Viiv brand would be undergoing changes in the first quarter.
Intel will no longer be doing its “works with Viiv” verification testing, which had made the brand’s sticker appear prominently on different kinds of consumer electronics devices.
It was also dropping its media server software stack associated with Viiv. “We will allow Windows Vista to deliver similar functionality,” said Jeff McCrea, vice president of the Digital Home group.
Viiv had always seemed a less than essential supplement to Window’s Media Center and Vista’s version of Media Center appears to have made it superfluous.
Part of the function of the Viiv brand was to prime the pump for a market where consumers would demand more PCs and consumer electronics devices that delivered media onto TV screens using Intel chips.
It also was associated with content partnerships with media companies, an initiative that is also being halted.
Mr McCrea said: “We didn’t see the need to continue to drive that,” referring to how the YouTube generation has grown over the past two years.
Viiv was launched at CES in January 2006. It will be know as Core 2 with Viiv in 2008 and emphasise performance.
Future plans would surround “Connect, Manage and Protect” features – allowing consumers to wake up their computers remotely and access files, enabling IT professionals to fix and administer PCs remotely and providing consumers with extra security.
Intel has never been keen to quantify the success of Viiv, leaving the impression that it has lived in the shadow of Window’s Media Center software and failed to achieve anything like the traction of Intel’s Centrino brand.
