The Post Tivo World

(I freely admit I swiped this catchy title from a NPR segment on CES)

Don’t know what Internet enabled Television is?  Don’t worry, you will soon enough.  The geeks amongst us (hello friends) have been doing this for years, but CES this year is heralding a large amount of consumer friendly products and services that make watching video from the Internet on your living room TV.  Let’s face it – video has done an amazing job of leaping into the world of the web.  Even most grandmothers out there are now used to the idea of some funny video clips on the web being possible, even if they have no idea how it works(or why their grand kids insist on wasting so much time with them).  But web based content for most is still just that – bite size appetizers that tide you over between the big cable or satellite course every night (man I love metaphors).  Hulu has probably done the most to break that mold, by moving actual prime time content and movies onto the web in an easy to use, easy to operate format that has done a great deal to move office workers from hiding their private IM chats at work to hiding their TV viewing.

But the idea of moving that viewing back to the TV, while keeping the transmission of it Internet-based is like some sort of geek holy grail and broadcasters want in on it while your average TV watcher doesn’t even care (he just wants his shows).  Maybe this year might just be a perfect storm of technology, services, and general consumer knowledge of it all to make 2009 the year we learned how to cut the cable cord (man, I sound so optimistic there, don’t I?).  Mind you, that doesn’t mean we’re cutting the cord – just that we now know its actually possible.

Right now there is no official name for this, though “Internet enabled” as a catch phrase seems to get used often when describing it.  So what exactly am I talking about?  Well, this isn’t checking your email or your stock tips on your TV – I’m talking about using the Internet as the pipe to receive television content meant for playback directly on your living room set, not your computer.    This has been slowly creeping into our lives now for years, so it may not seem that radical;  the AppleTV, for example, for one has made it possible to watch content from the iTunes store for some time now.   But that is just one example and part of why it worked so well (for those who tried it, for it admittedly has a small segment fo the market) is that is was a closed network – with Apple controlling the content, the hardware, and the user interface.  In fact other than the broadband pipe, they were the whole ecosystem for delivering the video to your set top.  The the pipe may turn out to be one of the most crucial parts of this whole process, but more about that later – first let’s talk about the hardware, services, and know-how it takes to be one of the Internet TV pioneers.

This is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one – but its very important and a trend that will start seeping into the mainstream more and more thanks to the technology we saw announce last month at CES and services like Netflix extending into new platforms.

I’ll never get this out in one post (heck, I’ve been sitting on this draft for 2 weeks alone, much to Matt Smith’s chagrin) so let’s break this into a few chunks.  Consider this our tee up, and over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and all the various players already tromping around…

And as always, if you have something you actually want me to write about, please feel free to ask me questions.

Tags: apple, appletv, hulu, internet enabled, Internet TV, Netflix, netgear, roku, set top boxes, tivo, Web Video