The flickering screen in the corner of the living room is a two-faced Janus. Even as boffins tell us that a millisecond of viewing can harm young minds and turn their parents into obese sloths, we are busily inventing ways of taking the idiot box wherever we roam.
So you will be unsurprised to learn that the latest move to cram yet more television and film viewing into our lives has entered the arena of the humble personal computer.
True enough, we've been able to watch television on the PC for several years now, by plugging the TV tuner into the back of the motherboard. I vividly recall walking into my boss's office more than 10 years ago and marvelling at his ability to switch effortlessly between writing his leader column and watching a football match. Admittedly he didn't do much swapping, but it was a marvel all the same.
But that's all in the past now. What we expect these days is to watch movies and television shows on the PC, whether we use a television tuner or not.
Streaming television and downloadable films are becoming big business. Telecoms companies are scrambling like crazy to get onto the IPTV (internet protocol television) bandwagon, since revenues from voice calls are plummeting as people switch to chatting over the internet using programs like Skype.
But, in the meantime, video on the PC has remained the domain of the DVD. Most new PCs can play DVDs, but all that is about to change.
You see, there are two new competing formats for the future of the optical disk and high definition video. The first is HD-DVD (high definition DVD), which is being pushed by Toshiba and backed by Microsoft.
In the other camp is Blu-ray, the technology favoured by Sony.
Blu-ray has the potential to carry more data in its disks, but HD-DVD is likely to come out faster in the shops.
And one of the first to make it there will be Toshiba. Last week it launched the Qosmio G30, a new laptop which left most gadget journalists with their eyes on stalks.
Qosmio is Toshiba's range of high-end laptop PCs. They come with in-built television tuners and a digital video recorder. In other words, Toshiba would be very happy if, instead of reaching for the remote, you opened your laptop and sat down to watch your favourite soap.
What makes Toshiba's move different is that this is the first laptop with an HD-DVD drive that will take a 30GB disk. This is enough memory to watch a full-length high definition movie.
And there's more. It's the first notebook to incorporate a one-bit digital amplifier and bass-reflex. This is the kind of audio technology normally only seen in the wet dreams of Hi-Fi buffs. The G30 will even do virtual surround sound and has in-built Dolby Home Theatre. Of course, the screen needs to be pretty good to display high definition video. So Toshiba has built in a TruBrite 17-inch screen and an nVidia GeForce graphics card - basically one normally used for very fast video gaming PCs - to produce the fastest images possible. The rest of the notebook is well equipped with a dual core 2GHz CPU, a 120GB hard disk, an HDMI outport (for high-end TVs), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, six-in-one card reader, Gigabit ethernet and S-video.
It also comes with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 pre-installed.
Likely to be priced at about €3,300, the Qosmio G30 should hit the shops in late April.
Meanwhile, if you would prefer to back the other horse, Sony's Blu-ray technology, you won't have to wait long, as products using this technology will appear during spring and summer.
Happy viewing.
