Ken C. Pohlmann

At least some things in life are predictable. And one of them is the progression of value-added features in consumer electronics.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. This is not your father's stereo. In fact, it's not his home theater either. Kenwood has come up with a networked home entertainment system that promises to provide easy access to movies from a DVD megachanger and music from a variety of sources, including CDs, MP3 music files stored on a hard-disk drive - even Internet radio stations.

When your TV suddenly stops working at midnight on February 17, 2009, blame Vice President Dick Cheney. Back in 2005, the Senate's vote on a spending bill that included $1.5 billion to help people buy digital-TV converter boxes was deadlocked 50-50, so Cheney flew back from the Middle East to cast the tiebreaker.

After 4 years of testy hostility and 2 more years of bare-knuckled conflict, the war between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc came to an abrupt end. Hours before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Warner Bros. announced that it was abandoning HD DVD. Warner is the largest studio in the home-entertainment market, and its decision tipped the scales.