Internet TV Standard Promises Easier Access to Online Video by Julia Hall

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Internet TV Standard Promises Easier Access to Online Video
by Julia Hall

Despite a history of consumer resistance to combining home computing and television, various electronics manufacturers and software design firms keep trying to come up with products that will make that combination a reality. Actually, it has been a reality for years. There were television capable PC's back in the nineties and adapters that allow television screens to be used by home computers have been around since the eighties. The combination between home computers and home entertainment systems simply hasn't been an attractive one for consumers.

One of the reasons for this is a matter of hardware. Many computer systems designed for home entertainment use, have pretty much been home office type computers with extra graphics capabilities that could be jacked into a television. That means that they'd basically be aimed at people who want to use their living room television as a computer screen. A set up that would allow them to surf the Internet, write emails, play games, and maybe even occasionally watch TV from the comfort of their couch or Lay-Z Boy. The trouble is that not many people want a set up like that. They don't want keyboards and mice (or other pointer devices that would work better on a couch) cluttering the living room. They want the computer to stay in the office.

Now, with more wide spread implementation of broad band Internet service, computer equipment that can handle graphics more effectively, and more online video content, it's actually possible to watch TV content downloaded from the Internet through a computer! The logical extension of this ability is to feed the video from the computer to the television screen. The trouble is that people still want the computer to stay in the office.

If the computer stays in the office, that creates a whole series of other problems. Like how to get the video from the computer in the office to the TV in the living room. How do you control the computer when it's sitting in the office and you're in the living room? Questions like those, combined with the fact that computers are more finicky than television equipment, makes most consumers not want to bother with connecting their computers to their televisions.

It seems that the electronics industry is finally recognizing this problem and is taking steps to deal with it. One of the latest steps is to develop a standard for Internet television. There are already standards for cable television and over the air television as well as Digital Television and Analog television, and televisions and receivers already know how to handle those. By contrast, video for computers has a whole bunch of schemes that make it much more complex to deal with from the point of view of a normal consumer. Combine that with the fact that the computer hardware necessary to deal with all of this costs a lot more than the television equipment, and it's amazing that consumers aren't even more apathetic about online video.

The new Internet TV standard will go a long way toward changing all of that. Instead of numerous proprietary standards governing things like bit rate and resolution, there will just be one standard for all Internet television. With the standard in place, devices and software could be designed to deal with that standard and only that standard, making online video much easier to deal with. If online video is much easier to deal with it will realize it's full potential. After all, all other things being equal, it makes a lot more sense to download just the programming you want to watch than it does to subscribe to an entire TV service which is constantly sending you content- ninety five percent of which you'll never see.

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Posted on: January 5,2007

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