Cathode ray YouTube
Online content is about to enter your home in its most accessible format yet, as the big TV makers switch on to supplying an internet widget as standard
For a few years now, the television industry has been talking about "convergence" between the internet and television. It's slowly becoming a reality: more and more people are connecting their computers to their TVs to view photos, listen to music and other activities that cross over between the two; now television manufacturers are starting to add functions to their TV sets that will allow people to share photos through social networks, play online games, watch YouTube and other material found on the internet. YouTube is a barometer of this shift, as people move on from watching short clips or videos to looking at longer works and whole programmes, and the BBC's iPlayer, plus the versions from ITV and Channel 4, also make full-length programming available on computers.
Now, people are starting to want to create on-demand TV via the net on their own television set.
There's no consensus yet whether this should be done through the DVD player, a games console or by building it into the TV itself, but as a generation grows up not minding whether content is delivered via TV, computer or phone, the line between the internet and television is about to blur.
Manufacturers including Toshiba, Panasonic and Sony are releasing TVs and DVD players with internet-compatible "widgets" built in. Once these devices are connected to an Ethernet network (they aren't all Wi-Fi compatible) they offer a selection of services that are likely to include social networking, picture-sharing and other internet feeds.
Sony's AppliCast service is available now, with its V5500 sets, and will be included with its Bravia TVs later this month. Panasonic's service, Viera Cast, will be launched at the end of next month with one of its LCD TV ranges. The devices' remote controls will come with a "Viera Cast" button and as long as it is connected to a network, pressing this button will open up feeds from Google's Picasa picture service and internet content from Eurosport, YouTube and others.
Later in the year, Toshiba plans to release its Net Player, a souped-up DVD player that also offers net TV, which it has developed in conjunction with Intel. Fiona Patterson, the DVD product manager for Toshiba, confirms that the Net Player will not only be a fully functioning, upscaling DVD player, but will work as a Windows Media Centre extender, so people with music and video on their PCs will be able to play their content through the TV.
Home delivery
Companies have been promising internet protocol television for a number of years, and many prototypes have been demonstrated at UK trade shows. Ben Tudor, a senior analyst in consumer broadband services at Current Analysis, points out that several countries in mainland Europe are ahead of us. "Some of the operators, such as T-Home in Germany, are delivering internet to televisions right now," he says. This has been made to work the other way as well, with companies such as Deutsche Telekom able to deliver television to mobile phones.
It is also true that companies already selling in the UK, such as Apple and Archos, are getting TV programmes on to hardware other than a traditional television set. Tudor believes each faction has its own advantages, although Apple TV has yet to become the iPod of the video medium: "It's a little outside people's comfort zones in terms of getting it to work, so it's not had a fantastic uptake," he says. "Put all of this into a television set, however, and it's extra stuff in your telly that just works - and stuff that just works gets used.
"That said, plenty of people have bought PVRs - hard disk recorders - to sit under the set, and are happy to use them, because they provide utility."
The TV manufacturers will have an advantage when these services start to emerge in numbers, he suspects, because there's no plugging in of external boxes. However, he also notes that game consoles are already under a lot of television sets, so consumers wouldn't have to buy an additional box anyway, pointing to the BBC's iPlayer on the Wii as a successful example of this.
One major challenge facing all of the companies wanting a part of this market is making moving pictures from sources such as YouTube acceptable on a widescreen television. They look fine on a smaller screen or a PC, where expectations are lower, but in a larger format they start to look very blocky.
It is in this area that Toshiba in particular has been doing a lot of development. At its annual product launch a couple of weeks ago, the company demonstrated its "upscaling" technology that made a video from an iPod look like a standard definition picture. The company's UK managing director, Andy Bass, confirmed that he had seen prototype technology in Japan that would upgrade even the grainiest of YouTube pictures to an acceptable standard.
Family viewing
This is going to help improve the experience of anyone watching internet content through one of the new devices. Toshiba has yet to finalise which partners it will work with when it launches the Net Player, but it demonstrated it with Joost, Flickr and others, most of which aren't designed with a 42in television in mind. Patterson explained that each family member will be able to set up their own profile and download their own widgets. "There will also be parental control," she said. Unlike TVs from other manufacturers, this box will have Wi-Fi built in and will come in under £200.
However, Tudor doesn't think getting internet widgets on to television is going to be massive in the short term. "It's not going to be a deal maker or a deal breaker," he says. "Getting Picasa pictures on to your television is going to be a nice-to-have rather than a must-have." He believes it will end up like Teletext in its heyday: initially bewildering to the majority but eventually taken for granted.
Decoding the technology
Broadcasting has, until now, used its own technologies for getting pictures to your TV screen and synchronising them with the sound.
The arrival of computing technology in the market means TV manufacturers have to figure out how to get computerised pictures on to the screen, in a process that is more akin to making a DVD player present its pictures than decoding a stream of normal broadcast video.
Getting the internet stream off the phone wire and on to your TV is achieved by means of a "codec", a word that comes from "COde/DECode", and the key standard is MPEG-4, a collection of standard codecs introduced in 1998 that are still evolving.
A number of its codecs are common in the computer world already: MP4 video (officially, MPEG-4 part 14) appears on many multimedia devices, including computers themselves, and is particularly popular among PC-compatible computer manufacturers. Microsoft has its own Windows Media Video (.wmv) format, while Apple uses Quicktime as well as MP4 in the various flavours of iPod that play video.
The new "internet TV" devices will be able to play most of the standard codecs. Toshiba's iTV in particular will play content from any Windows Media Player on any computer it finds through Wi-Fi.
The quality of the picture will depend a great deal on the quality of the source material, and just how skilled manufacturers can become in upscaling, a technology usually used to take MPEG-2 video from a standard DVD and digitally enhance it so it looks more like a high definition (MPEG-4) output.
Guy Clapperton
The Guardian, Thursday 9 April 2009
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Online content is about to enter your home in its most accessible format yet, as the big TV makers switch on to supplying an internet widget as standard
For a few years now, the television industry has been talking about "convergence" between the internet and television. It's slowly becoming a reality: more and more people are connecting their computers to their TVs to view photos, listen to music and other activities that cross over between the two; now television manufacturers are starting to add functions to their TV sets that will allow people to share photos through social networks, play online games, watch YouTube and other material found on the internet. YouTube is a barometer of this shift, as people move on from watching short clips or videos to looking at longer works and whole programmes, and the BBC's iPlayer, plus the versions from ITV and Channel 4, also make full-length programming available on computers.
Now, people are starting to want to create on-demand TV via the net on their own television set.
There's no consensus yet whether this should be done through the DVD player, a games console or by building it into the TV itself, but as a generation grows up not minding whether content is delivered via TV, computer or phone, the line between the internet and television is about to blur.
Manufacturers including Toshiba, Panasonic and Sony are releasing TVs and DVD players with internet-compatible "widgets" built in. Once these devices are connected to an Ethernet network (they aren't all Wi-Fi compatible) they offer a selection of services that are likely to include social networking, picture-sharing and other internet feeds.
Sony's AppliCast service is available now, with its V5500 sets, and will be included with its Bravia TVs later this month. Panasonic's service, Viera Cast, will be launched at the end of next month with one of its LCD TV ranges. The devices' remote controls will come with a "Viera Cast" button and as long as it is connected to a network, pressing this button will open up feeds from Google's Picasa picture service and internet content from Eurosport, YouTube and others.
Later in the year, Toshiba plans to release its Net Player, a souped-up DVD player that also offers net TV, which it has developed in conjunction with Intel. Fiona Patterson, the DVD product manager for Toshiba, confirms that the Net Player will not only be a fully functioning, upscaling DVD player, but will work as a Windows Media Centre extender, so people with music and video on their PCs will be able to play their content through the TV.
Home delivery
Companies have been promising internet protocol television for a number of years, and many prototypes have been demonstrated at UK trade shows. Ben Tudor, a senior analyst in consumer broadband services at Current Analysis, points out that several countries in mainland Europe are ahead of us. "Some of the operators, such as T-Home in Germany, are delivering internet to televisions right now," he says. This has been made to work the other way as well, with companies such as Deutsche Telekom able to deliver television to mobile phones.
It is also true that companies already selling in the UK, such as Apple and Archos, are getting TV programmes on to hardware other than a traditional television set. Tudor believes each faction has its own advantages, although Apple TV has yet to become the iPod of the video medium: "It's a little outside people's comfort zones in terms of getting it to work, so it's not had a fantastic uptake," he says. "Put all of this into a television set, however, and it's extra stuff in your telly that just works - and stuff that just works gets used.
"That said, plenty of people have bought PVRs - hard disk recorders - to sit under the set, and are happy to use them, because they provide utility."
The TV manufacturers will have an advantage when these services start to emerge in numbers, he suspects, because there's no plugging in of external boxes. However, he also notes that game consoles are already under a lot of television sets, so consumers wouldn't have to buy an additional box anyway, pointing to the BBC's iPlayer on the Wii as a successful example of this.
One major challenge facing all of the companies wanting a part of this market is making moving pictures from sources such as YouTube acceptable on a widescreen television. They look fine on a smaller screen or a PC, where expectations are lower, but in a larger format they start to look very blocky.
It is in this area that Toshiba in particular has been doing a lot of development. At its annual product launch a couple of weeks ago, the company demonstrated its "upscaling" technology that made a video from an iPod look like a standard definition picture. The company's UK managing director, Andy Bass, confirmed that he had seen prototype technology in Japan that would upgrade even the grainiest of YouTube pictures to an acceptable standard.
Family viewing
This is going to help improve the experience of anyone watching internet content through one of the new devices. Toshiba has yet to finalise which partners it will work with when it launches the Net Player, but it demonstrated it with Joost, Flickr and others, most of which aren't designed with a 42in television in mind. Patterson explained that each family member will be able to set up their own profile and download their own widgets. "There will also be parental control," she said. Unlike TVs from other manufacturers, this box will have Wi-Fi built in and will come in under £200.
However, Tudor doesn't think getting internet widgets on to television is going to be massive in the short term. "It's not going to be a deal maker or a deal breaker," he says. "Getting Picasa pictures on to your television is going to be a nice-to-have rather than a must-have." He believes it will end up like Teletext in its heyday: initially bewildering to the majority but eventually taken for granted.
Decoding the technology
Broadcasting has, until now, used its own technologies for getting pictures to your TV screen and synchronising them with the sound.
The arrival of computing technology in the market means TV manufacturers have to figure out how to get computerised pictures on to the screen, in a process that is more akin to making a DVD player present its pictures than decoding a stream of normal broadcast video.
Getting the internet stream off the phone wire and on to your TV is achieved by means of a "codec", a word that comes from "COde/DECode", and the key standard is MPEG-4, a collection of standard codecs introduced in 1998 that are still evolving.
A number of its codecs are common in the computer world already: MP4 video (officially, MPEG-4 part 14) appears on many multimedia devices, including computers themselves, and is particularly popular among PC-compatible computer manufacturers. Microsoft has its own Windows Media Video (.wmv) format, while Apple uses Quicktime as well as MP4 in the various flavours of iPod that play video.
The new "internet TV" devices will be able to play most of the standard codecs. Toshiba's iTV in particular will play content from any Windows Media Player on any computer it finds through Wi-Fi.
The quality of the picture will depend a great deal on the quality of the source material, and just how skilled manufacturers can become in upscaling, a technology usually used to take MPEG-2 video from a standard DVD and digitally enhance it so it looks more like a high definition (MPEG-4) output.
Guy Clapperton
The Guardian, Thursday 9 April 2009
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
