The other day my whole family clustered around the square screen in our lounge watching Bafana Bafana getting beaten again.
This sorry saga was brightened when my 10- year-old son took a snapshot of Lucas Radebe, then split the screen to show live action on one side and the close-up of the captain on the other half.
He proceeded to carry out on-screen fashion experiments with hairstyles for the hapless Radebe, starting with golden locks and ending with a Day-Glo green far more electrifying than the soccer. Then he e- mailed his creation to his mate in Australia, who received it before the game ended.
By now you might have guessed that the square screen in our lounge was no ordinary television. Indeed not – it was powered by a television card in my PC, which I had dragged into the lounge for the occasion and plugged into our TV screen to improve the viewing area. The fun and games with hairstyles was made easy by the marriage of digital technology (my PC) with the old- fashioned analogue TV set.
Why bother with TV when everybody knows the Internet is offering the latest from Billy’s willy to digital movies?
The Internet is transforming the world, but the World Wide Wait is also interminably slow and full of dross peppered with stunningly good content. Sure, television is also full of dross, peppered with good content – but it’s quick, easy and cheap compared to computers on the Internet. It’s time to look at the convergence of these two technologies: what can a bit of digital intelligence do for a TV?
My family’s experience of computer-enhanced television is something you can have today in South Africa, and the television receiver card you pop into your PC costs little more than R1 000. Says Incredible Connection MD Paul Moses: ”Most of the buyers are middle and senior managers who want to watch the cricket from their desks at work”. The cards work well provided you connect up to a good aerial, and if you want to use your PC for more businesslike tasks while watching TV, you can shrink the TV window to fill just one corner of your computer screen – or hide it altogether if a big fish strolls into your office.
Slightly further down the tracks is interactive TV. You can think of this as adding some computer-like bells and whistles to your television set. The vision is that we will be able to talk back to our TVs; the starting point is to exert more control over the beasts than merely channel-hopping or switching off. The first step lets you mix television and the Internet on your TV screen. Using a PC-like device called WebTV perched on top of the TV and also linked to the Internet via an ordinary phone line, you can surf web-based TV guides and double- click to view the actual broadcasts, or follow up a TV ad by surfing to the advertiser’s website while keeping the TV programme going in a little window.
WebTV enables broadcasts, currently only in the United States, to use a clever trick to include basic Web links in the broadcast stream that comes to your TV. But the actual Internet surfing is a lot like standard PC stuff, based on a modem. You need a wireless keyboard if you want to type anything in, bringing the US cost of the system to a little under R1 500 plus a small premium on your Internet access account. Still a lot cheaper than a PC, and if the Internet goes too slowly – well, you can always watch the latest soapie on TV.
Unveiled last week was a simpler but potentially faster-spreading trick: a way to put broadcast TV on pause – whether for a bathroom break or to follow an Internet link thrown up during the show – and then go back to the show later, starting exactly where you left off, even though the broadcast continued with its inexorable schedule while you took your break.
All it takes is some place to store the incoming transmission, plus some clever technology from a company called Intelasync. Obvious storage candidates are digital set- top boxes (like WebTV which has a gigabyte hard disk inside) but Intelasync reckons that it can even make a plain old VCR do the job without the current hassle of recording the whole show. Not as fancy as a PC but a darn side easier to operate.
The nearest thing in South Africa today is a Philips TV PC. It is literally a Windows 95 PC, except it plugs directly into your TV for display. It is styled to look like a VCR. It also has a wireless remote keyboard and mouse, so you can park on the couch while surfing the Internet or watching a digital movie, with the option of switching over to traditional TV broadcasts whenever you want to. What is not on the agenda yet in South Africa is any kind of link between the broadcast and the Internet content, so you’re left with a rather clunky juxtaposition of an ordinary TV and a rather misplaced PC, either peering to read the semi-legible Web text from your couch, or pulling a chair up far too close for conventional television.
Computers and the Internet want to supplant television in the war for eyeballs. But I believe TV won’t give in without a fight, and like Microsoft, it won’t be shy to borrow a few ideas from the opposition.
– Mish Middelmann is the director of Praxis Computing. You can talk to him on The Computer Show on Radio 702 and Cape Talk on Thursday at 7pm