Monday, January 12, 2009

The future of Interactive Television??

...or, rather, one POSSIBLE future for iTV.

This year it looks like it's all about forgetting tv to PC:s and laptops, or digital interactive set-top-boxes. No, what you want to do now is connect your 42" flat screen full HD television directly to the Internet. By then offering a host of widgets you're on your way to real real interactive television.

But, of course, this would be just too easy. So instead we have as many solutions as there are tv-manufacturers - "Sony announced support for widgets in its latest Bravia displays, referring to them as Bravia Internet Widgets. Samsung refers to its version as the Internet@TV Content Service. Vizio calls it Connected HDTV."

Good for them. Can't you all just gather around ONE solution and then us contentmakers could do great content for THAT solution, not a hundred different versions of the content for hundreds of different technical solutions.

Still, it sounds kinda neat. I don't have the time to delve into it atm, but it sounds like something that could have potential. We'll see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As confusing as it might sound with the names, I just feel like since each TV company will have different widgets (i.e Vizio has Netflix) they'll need different names.

Simon said...

You're quite right. I guess I have to content myself with "widgets" being the common term - at least something...