Surf the Cool Room with Miss Cool, who will help you to explore the freshly designed room and all of its modern applications. Miss Cool will guide you around the room allowing you to interact with all of the latest media players. These include an Mpeg movie clip player, flash games player and MP3 player. These will allow you to use the TV to view clips, listen to your favourite tracks on the stereo and play a multitude of new games on the arcade machine. In addition to these, there will be exclusive online news, competitions, screensavers and wallpapers.

Over time, users will develop a collection of film material all housed in a unique DVD rack that will show all the media available for specific movie titles available through the other players. New music, trailers, sneak peak clips, games, screensavers and gossip will be delivered to users on an on going basis by streaming the content to your computer but in an unobtrusive manner by appearing in the Cool Room.

The Cool Room’s interface is a colourful 3D space that allows you to completely redesign the interior, by rearranging furniture, adding to and re-colouring in completely your own style. Miss Cool will help you choose the latest designs and applications which can be instantly transformed. The Cool Room application relies on the fact that new media and supporting graphics files are downloaded into a directory on the users machine. Bandwidth friendly technology downloads these assets ensuring that your Internet connection is always fluid.

Universal Pictures have already secured deals with key third-party companies who will feature their latest products in the Cool Room, ranging from the latest technology to funky furniture. These targeted third parties can "buy" time to have an accurate 3D representation of their product, a poster on the wall or another portrayal in the Cool Room. These ever changing third parties simply add an additional dimension to everything else offered in the Cool Room.

No matter what women say, size is definitely a problem. Well OK, perhaps in this instance it is the size of the application. Although the Cool Room claims to be 'bandwidth friendly' it has most definitely been created with broadband in mind.

If you connect to the internet via the humble dialup method then you can pretty much forget using Cool Night In to its full potential. First off, the application itself is over 20MB in size and being one of the stubborn types who won't shell out for broadband, downloading the installation file over a 56k link would be a big no-no. 

Fortunately, those nice people at Universal Pictures have provided me with a preview disc with all the necessary files on so I can continue playing with Cool Night In. However, if you need to download the application from their website you'll be requested to provide a name and valid e-mail address. Once the download has completed you'll be e-mailed an activation code which then needs to be entered when you first run up the application.

After installing the product the main Cool Night In agent will be launched. This application runs in the background and performs all of the necessary downloads of news, movie clips and MP3 files. It's all controlled by a rather worryingly attractive looking Miss Cool who wanders onto the screen and then spends all of her time playing with her hair. She seems to serve no other purpose than to distract you and take up half of your screen. 

Mind you, she does give you something to click along with providing update information as it occurs. There is also an option to display the latest news which will open another window and then attempt to download content from the internet. Whilst it is an interesting novelty as first it soon becomes rather annoying. Fortunately you can tell her to go away and she'll stop fiddling with her hair before taking the hump and wandering off the screen. The same options are also available by 'right clicking' on the Cool Night In icon in the system tray.

With the various product updates being handled in the background the minimum PC specification of a Pentium II 366Mhz looks a little on the ambitious side. If you want to use your PC for doing other things at the same time then I would have to suggest that a Pentium IV 1Ghz (or equivalent) would probably have to be the minimum processor specification, especially when the Cool Night In application consumes around 90% of the available processing time (although the version on review here is a beta release and I would hope that things like that will have been ironed out for the release version). An "always on" broadband internet connection would also be a massive advantage - just remember that if you are going to leave your PC on that you have have the latest anti-virus software updates and have the protection of a firewall.

Once the application has run up and the Cool Room displayed things become a little confusing. Fortunately, it only takes a bit of exploring before navigation becomes a breeze. If you select the television you can watch trailers, if you select the hi-fi you can listen to MP3 files and if you select the computer you can select different wallpaper. I guess you get the idea. 

And if you don't like the layout of the furniture then you can move everything around, add new items of furniture or throw the whole lot out. Fortunately, if you make a complete mess of the apartment and loose the television or computer console then the programme bar has numerous shortcuts to the various features. The Cool Room will also have a number of exclusive competitions and you'll be able to make a number of shopping trips to Ikea to get new furniture for the apartment. And with that broadband connection to Cool Room enabled the room will develop over a period of time with additional content such as new film trailers, tunes and games. Major changes will occur once a month whilst minor changes, such as news updates and competitions, will occur on a weekly basis.

The only nagging question is, is this just a flash in the pan idea or have Universal Pictures latched onto a previously untapped portal of interest? You only have to compare this with the European launch of DVD and DVD-audio. Brilliant technology as it was, and still is, until the arrival of The Matrix on DVD the format was pretty much dead in the water. Compare this again with the current music titles available on DVD-A and you'll see the format is struggling to succeed. So a first lesson for Universal here. Content is king, make sure you provide sufficient information for its users to continue, and want to continue, using this innovative product. As someone once said, "If you build, they will come ..."

You can download the Cool Night In entertainment channel by logging on to www.universalpictures.co.uk. Once downloaded, in order to obtain your content updates you'll need to register your copy of Cool Night In.