The Internet is infiltrating every electronic appliance in our homes — and the television set is the next target.
The humble TV is undergoing its own revolutionary change to meet the Internet halfway. From being a window to sport and sitcoms, the TV set is evolving into a kind of digital hub.
Now it’s not just video machines, DVD players and satellite decoders that are connected to the box, but game platforms, video cameras and computers. The new breed of DVD players plays the MP3 music format. One from Samsung even allows you to record directly to its built-in hard drive. This means you can record a movie at the same digital resolution at which it is broadcast, provided you have a DStv satellite decoder.
The decoders have become more than just receivers of a TV signal and are evolving into a means to send and receive e-mail, do on-screen catalogue shopping and, soon, order pizza from Mr Delivery while watching a sports match.
This convergence is happening to gadgets everywhere, says Nolo Letele, MultiChoice’s Africa CEO.
“There is a much larger trend going on in the world that Interactive TV fits into. Your cellphone is morphing into a personal digital assistant [PDA] and handheld computers are almost as powerful as desktops. Using new technologies like infrared and Bluetooth, your phone can talk to your PDA and you can use your phone to read your e-mail and play games.
“You can run your whole life through these gadgets.”
The TV is the device that is king in the home, but it has problems. Most TV sets are the old cathode ray tube (CRT) type, which suffer from low resolution and brightness that hardly compares to that of the newer liquid crystal displays (LCDs) — the basis of everything from cellphones to lap-top screens. Also, the superb picture quality of DVDs is much darker on a CRT TV.
However, LCDs are expensive and cannot be upgraded. Viewsonic, a leading maker of computer displays, aims to solve this with a “media station”. This will be a terminal that will communicate with the TV display using a standard wireless networking protocol, but will allow you to plug a multitude of devices into it, from the video recorder and DVD player to games boxes and your computer. What’s more, the media station will be the conduit for the TV signal itself and it will be able to use the new forms of TV broadcasting when they emerge.
Alan Chang, managing director of Viewsonic in the Asia Pacific region, says LCDs will also make TVs portable. “That means you won’t need many TV monitors in your home. You can bring the TV into any room.”
Different configurations of the media station are available, says Viewsonic marketing director Vincent Wang, so they can provide a range of access to various devices. The entry-level box will cost around R1500.
One useful feature most advanced TV sets have is the picture-within-picture option, which lets viewers watch another channel in a small pane in a corner of the screen. Couple that with input from other sources, such as the Internet or e-mail, and the options increase for working while playing or watching a cricket game at work.
DStv’s interactive TV already does something similar: it can frame sports action in a window while letting the viewer navigate its interactive menu for information about the game, results, fixtures and log standings. Ultimately the broadcaster aims to let users chat using SMS over a cellular module built into the decoder.
Microsoft has staked its vision of the next big thing on this idea. It has brought out two new technologies aimed at creating a more natural interface with computing, including through the TV. The first is like a detachable laptop monitor and the second is a super remote control device. The company’s plans for the keyboard Tablet PC are as bullish as Bill Gates’s original intention to have a computer on every desktop.
Microsoft’s Xbox games platform has enough processing power under the hood to be a computer in its own right. Developers of the free Linux operating system are using the hardware to build their own computers. It also plays DVDs and has a broadband connection, which appeals to the Linux folk as a means to get their machines online.
The consulting firm Accenture thinks that greater access to television sets could rival the Internet revolution and its unprecedented access to information and communication.
“Across the world, more people own televisions than personal computers. Ultimately the spread of digital television with its sharper, wider images and audio and data programming capabilities will provide a platform for two-way personalised communication in the centre of most homes,” the company’s analysts wrote in a report earlier this year.
Television, as Letele points out, is a familiar and trusted medium. Unlike the more technical and complex computers, they are easy to use and most people are familiar with the “baton of power”, the remote control.
Interactive TV will use this familiar medium to deliver innovative services, says Accenture.
“For consumers, digital television provides more channels, better picture and sound quality, and the opportunity to access new interactive services.
“For businesses, t-commerce offers the chance to exploit a trusted and widely available medium. It puts e-commerce at the centre of every home, providing a new means of reaching untapped segments of the market and grabbing a greater share of consumer attention.”