More things to watch
By Tim.After being in the maelstrom at CES the past few years, I’m not missing it at all — happily watching the news come out via the blogs and enjoying the comparative peace and quiet of NYC, mysterious gas smells and all. And anyhow, sounds like Macworld was the real place to be.
People have probably already forgotten about it now that the iPhone’s been announced, but Engadget had a gallery yesterday of screens from the Xbox 360 IPTV client announced by Bill Gates at CES. Presumably, IPTV providers like AT&T and SBC could offer you an XBox in lieu of those outdated Motorola set-top boxes, assuming you could get one with a decent-sized hard drive. The question we have is, how integrated will it be with their downloads service? With things like the Venice Project and Democracy Player out there, there are going to be plenty of ways to grab HD-quality entertainment over the internet, in many cases without big honking DRM restrictions on where and how you can watch it. We want more things like TivoCast, allowing us to choose on our living room TVs between content from the big cable providers and web-only independents, so we can watch our Galacticast right after our Battlestar Galactica.
The SlingCatcher sounds exciting for that reason, as does Netgear’s BitTorrent-powered Digital Entertainer and the Apple TV. Slim, cheap little boxes sending the content on your computer over to your TV, no matter where it’s from, with an easy interface… a step in the right direction, albeit an intermediate one — if it works, we’ll see this as a standard feature in TV tuners and STBs, whatever form they take, in CES shows down the line.
Now how do I possibly wait until June for an iPhone?
January 10th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Just to tip the Apple cart:
As John Cleese’s character said in the film Clockwise: the worst thing is hope, once that’s gone it’s not so bad.
Is this why Apple dropped “Computer” from its name?
January 10th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
David, I think so… that and perhaps a successful resolution in the courts of some kind with the other Apple. It can’t be a coincidence that Jobs’ iPhone was playing a Beatles song in the demo…
January 16th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Hi Tim,
Wanted to point you to one of the interesting new devices I saw out at CES that is starting to go down this road, but saving the step of having to pull content to the PC first. Sony is introducing an IP-in module for its Bravia line of TVs which will allow users to watch web video directly via a broadband connection to their PCs. So far they’ve integrated AOL Video, Yahoo Video, and Grouper into the service (disclosure: I used to work for AOL Video). Each of them will be putting up custom feeds of streaming HD content for the service. Sony is using a walled-garden approach for now, but it’s not difficult to see how this could be opened up. So far they’re only looking at short-form, ad-supported content, as more of a complement to exisiting cable long-form and VOD offerings. The Sony rep said the TVs would hit the market in mid-2007, no comment on their plans to offer it for in lower price-point TVs…
A few links:
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/ces-newswire-day-one-bittorrent-on-tvs-cinemanow-on-pmps/
http://news.com.com/Sony+to+enable+TVs+to+play+Internet+video/2100-1041_3-6147919.html