Today I heard something on All Things Considered which implied that the cable companies are holding up the general availability of internet access by TV, motivated by the fact they haven’t yet figured out how to make money doing this. The part about money makes sense.
But why would I want to use a TV for internet access, aside from accessing actual TV or film content? Other than that, the way you use a computer is very different from how you watch TV. Accessing the internet is much more a reading experience, and for most people this means you need a much bigger angular diameter for a computer. In other words, you would need a huge TV to make text comfortably legible and provide a comparable amount of “real estate”, as I’ve heard the term for useful screen area.
What am I missing here, after allowing for the fact that some people do own huge HDTVs, and are therefore not impacted by the angular diameter problem?
My first internet device was a “webtv” back in 1998. Boy howdy that’s some nostalgia. As I recall it fell to computers becoming so much cheaper, but the technology isn’t new. Webtv used a server-terminal model for handling some kinds of media because the webtv boxes where very under powered. 2 megs of ram, and 2 megs of EPROM. Many internet media formats where converted and streamed to the webtv instead of handled on the webtv’s end.
The plus model had a built in tv turner, and show makers could embed links in shows. A little i would pop up and you could go to the site. The whole internet had one font because any other font didn’t show up as well on tvs.
Anyway I’m prolly way off in left field. What do you mean exactly? Using tv signal bandwidth to carry internet access? If so the primary market for that would be people who can’t get cable or dsl.
Having an Internet appliance built right into your TV would be useful for stuff like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon On Demand. It could also be used for games that are 100% online and don’t require a disc or hard drive (such as browser-based games). And it could be used to show photo slideshows stored online, just as we all watched them from slide projectors in years past.
I have one of my computers hooked up to my TV (which is a run-of-the-mill 27" tube TV) and while reading stuff is a bitch, I do use it regularly for the things listed above and for shows I’ve downloaded (from places like iTunes). It’s great for parties because I basically have a huge media library right there in my living room and my friends and I can listen to music (on Pandora), chat with our friends in California over Skype Webcam, look at someone’s vacation pictures on Flickr, goof on YouTube videos and watch any Netflix movie that’s available.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as one’s primary source of Internet-related computing, but there’s a ton of media out there that begs to be on a regular-sized screen and not relegated to the computer in my office.
The hot new trend in computing right now is to move all data and apps off of the hard drive and into “the cloud.” If you take away the need for vast amounts of storage, ANY appliance can become a viable portal to the Internet and thus tons of media stored therein. The TV and cable industries are realizing that the Internet isn’t so much about reading anymore, it’s about watching and listening (much to my chagrin - I hate that news sites do this now!!)
WebTV is a red herring, because it’s just a computer that uses your TV as a really, really crappy monitor. (Computer monitors are much higher-resolution than analog TVs. I don’t know about modern 1080p sets.) A WebTV box gets online the same way a computer in that house would, and its access is paid for in the same way.
Getting the Internet over TV would somehow involve putting a lot more data into a TV signal than even digital TV now involves, in addition to a way to get a signal back to the TV broadcaster so the subscribers could actually do things online. I’m not aware of anything similar to this being contemplated.
I’m pretty sure the OP got things flipped, and really heard something about getting TV shows via the Internet. Hulu seems to have demonstrated that this can work, although funding it in this economy would indeed prove challenging. Hell, funding Iceland in this economy has proven challenging.
Not all people have a computer, but almost everyone has a TV. And if you only need to use the Internet occasionally, or are on a tight budget, it might be worthwhile to get a cheap WebTV-type device, but not to get a full computer.
I built a HTPC (Home Theater PC) a few years ago which is hooked up to a 50 screen. It’s one of those things that before you have it you don’t know if you really want it, but once you have it you can’t imagine living without.
Want to listen to music? All my CDs are on it, including the cover art. No looking through the stack of CDs. Watch a movie? My DVDs are right there.
Miss a show on TV? Just go to hulu and watch it with very limited commercials. Discover (fairly high quality) radio stations from around the world? No problem. Parents visiting from the old country and want to watch the news in Swedish? Pop over to svt.se. I don’t see it as a computer replacement (I still have a second PC with a regular monitor for internet/email), but it’s a great addition.
BTW, if you’re interested in building one I highly recommend Ubuntu Linux + MythTV.
It would be interesing to know exactly how many people who buy a PC do not actually use 99% of what it can do, and just surf the web. All my teenager does(or seems to basically understand anyway) on computers is how to go to websites and chat with friends, no matter how i show him all the potential (almost limitless in my mind) of a good computer, he doesnt seem interested in it. I am sure he is not alone, so websurfing on the TV seems worthwhile for some at least.
One thing i wish the TV channels would do online…on their own site is repeats of shows.I use hulu and various other sites to catch missed shows, but it annoys me to no end if i miss a news talk show and can only get clips online, not the actual show, where context can be lost.
Is this what you heard? I can’t get the video to play, but the byline indicates that it is about streaming internet content on to your TV (play hulu, netflix, etc. on your TV).
Of course, the text article right below that talks about accessing the internet from your TV (ala WebTV), so I guess you need to clarify.
Would it someday be possible for the internet to provide extra personalized content while watching TV? For example, if I am watching a basketball game, it would be cool to quickly be able to check the current player’s stats of whatever player I wanted with a click or two on a graphic overlay on the bottom of the screen (this info is streamed on almost all major sports websites). If I am watching a movie with an incredible stunt, it would be cool to be able to pause the movie, do a couple of remote clicks and have information about that scene retrieved from the internet before I continue on with the movie. That is why I would want internet over my TV.
I listened to the same program and what I took from it was that they were talking about streaming video over the internet and projecting it onto your TV for viewing. Websites like Hulu and the various network websites that stream full episodes onto your computer would be fun to have displayed on your TV, allowing complete on-demand access to a number of shows. There already are methods of doing this, but they involve hooking a computer up to the TV and navigating with a keyboard and mouse. The ideal situation would be to have a standalone unit that could be plugged into the internet and then to the TV, allowing for videos from the various sites to be navigated by remote control. It was this last device that the cable companies are trying to fight, because if something like that becomes popular, many people may choose not to get TV services at all.
Internet over TV would be useful for at least two purposes:
access for folks who don’t have the money or interest to justify buying a full-blown computer. Even if lousy, it’s better than nothing.
combined TV-Internet applications. For example, imagine that you could access an advertiser’s web site by hitting a button on your remote during their commercial. Or that you could buy from the home shopping channels right from your TV. There’s money there for the company that can figure it out.