Gmail on channel 14

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed (544x372, which was about 5 times less than HD).

And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed?

Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that refers to the set top box), on/off (both). Six functions and I have two remotes with 89 buttons together to do that... We have some serious problem here. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Guess what - the Wii from Nintendo, with its absolutely marvelous controller. Look how many buttons there are - just a few, the rest is done by the motion sensing technology. Think of it as a mouse that does not need a pad or any other surface. Just gestures in the air. So just imagine that by tuning in to the channel 14 will get you to your GMail account (or Yahoo Finance or Google Reader). Basically to any Web page you visit frequently. Sitting in the armchair, watching the Discovery channel on 13, switch to 14 and read your mail, without moving to the computer. Navigate with the motion sensing Wii-like wand, switch to 15 to watch your stocks portfolio or to 16 to read a bulletin board of your interest. Then go back to 13 for the next show on Discovery. Converged experience. One screen, one connection, one paradigm. Is there anything else missing?

Applications platform. What is the difference between a Discovery channel and a GMail? Discovery is [just] streamed to the screen from the IP network. All is needed on the IPTV set itself is a decoder, converting a media stream to a video image. In HDTV world most of them are being made by Sigma Designs, and I blogged on them in the Opera on Your TV. Sigma is potentially able to run the Opera browser, including AJAX, on their chip. So it may already be able to display your GMail page... But there is a difference between running and running. The difference is speed. While it may be absolutely true the Sigma SMP8630 can run Opera browser and AJAX applications, it may be a little slow at doing that. Recently, at Telecosm X, I had a chance to ask the question about applications performance to Ken Lowe, VP of Sigma Designs. And his words were "we are barely keeping up with the HD stream decoding task". That means, there is a very little room left for the Web applications. In the meantime the applications themselves are getting more and more power hungry. Like the new Google Reader - it is nice, but eats a lot of CPU cycles. And this may bring us to the conclusion Intel's Viiv strategy may actually work. You may want a Pentium inside your next TV set...