Philips ties up with Intel for Home Entertainment Systems

Intel and Philips are working together to build and market home entertainment systems which will run on Intel processors, Intel announced at IFA, the International Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin.

The PC-based Home Entertainment system will include a card that allows users to watch two TV channels at once, as well as a 250-gigabyte hard disk drive for storing music and photo collections and a recorder for DVDs and CDs, says Reuters.

Intel will supply a processor, chipset and software for a Philips media center that will allow customers to store and share photos, music and video in a single system, as they promote digital products for the home.

Intel introduced its Viiv platform last week in a move aimed at putting the company’s chips inside consumer home entertainment devices

The Viiv devices are expected to run Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition and employ Intel’s Centrino chips, which are already used inside laptops.

The initiative will expand Intel’s presence in the consumer electronics market as it continues to battle rivals like Advanced Micro Devices in court and in computer stores.

The IFA show in Berlin is typically the largest consumer electronics fair in the world, even bigger than the annual CES fair in Las Vegas. Dutch electronics maker Philips often makes a big splash at the event.

Philips plans to begin selling the device in October or November in Europe. The plans for the United States have not been set yet, but the Showline will need to be adapted for the electronic standards in the U.S. The device will be marketed primarily in electronics stores that are the equivalent of Best Buy in Europe.

“It will be positioned as an entertainment device,” said Philips spokesman Simon Poulter. “We’re not calling it a PC, even though the device has a lot of PC functionality. We want it to be seen as an entertainment center.”

“The Philips Showline Media Center extends our Connected Planet vision further, and our overall go-to-market collaboration with Intel will extend that vision further still,” said Frank Pauli, vice president of Philips Consumer Electronics.