Imagine your web video streamed wirelessly from your computer to your TV.
That's the vision behind a new company called Quartics, officially launched yesterday by AST co-founder Safi Qureshey. The Irvine-based company claims it can stream DVD-quality audio from PCs to TVs, LCD monitors and projectors --wirelessly or through wired networks. At least, that's the impression you get from their website. We'd like to know whether the wireless part of this REALLY can do all that. Consider the hurdles: slow networks (802.11G networks aren't up to the task); digital rights (most big studios' content is locked up to prevent it from being ripped off in exactly this kind of situation); and the first simple question of exactly how you hook up a computer to a TV screen that doesn't have a VGA port -- and most consumer models still don't.
As we write, we aren't able to reach the company to get details about how these problems are presumably overcome, seeing as how chips with these capabilities are allegedly already available. Stay tuned.
-- Michael Stroud and Benjamin Nugent
