Big-Screen Broadband

The convergence of the Web and television has long been touted as the real promise of IP, but most service providers have stopped at over-the-top video. However, vendors are beginning to encourage their operator customers to go beyond feature films and bring media to the living room.

One vendor, 2Wire, recently launched the MediaPoint broadband entertainment platform, an Internet-enabled media device. The broadband provider's goal was to reduce the hardware footprint of the device and leverage the software's capabilities, including access to feature videos, user-generated content, and Web services such as music, photos and Internet radio. The device uses 2Wire's media software and a service management system to let users browse and download movies and services via Ethernet or Wi-Fi through any broadband connection.

For example, if a consumer wants to call up a photo from a recent vacation in Bali, he simply does a cross-domain unified search by typing in a keyword. The photo is then retrieved from the network and displayed on the screen or any networked device in the home. Likewise, the platform can seek out a music playlist stored on a PC in the home office and play it back on the living-room TV set. And the possibilities don't end there.

“If you have been accessing your Bali vacation pictures and listening to a lot of Dave Matthews, and you've been watching a lot of kung fu movies and checking out a lot of clips of '80s break-dancing on YouTube, that is an opportunity at the home page to bring all those together in a patchwork experience, so if you went home, you can be entertained there as well,” said Jonathan Symonds, vice president of product management for 2Wire. “If you search, you search across all those elements. We really want to get at that level between granularity and personalization.”

2Wire also powers AT&T's Homezone product, which integrates a satellite video service with Internet video access on the TV set. Symonds said MediaPoint is especially relevant to this type of hybrid service, in which cable or satellite consumers are likely more interested in an à la carte pricing scheme than a premium service package. The business model is up to the service provider, but he anticipates the device's price to fall below $100. Telcos can choose to sell the rebranded service for a one-time fee or as a gift with the purchase of higher broadband speeds.

“For a telco, it really provides an interesting option they didn't have a few years ago to really provide a very cool, very consumable, very desirable entertainment play for an incremental cost that is so far below what an IPTV [capital expenditure] would be,” Symonds said.

Consumers may still be wrapped up in the TV basics of on-demand viewing and high definition, but innovations such as 2Wire's are beginning to show them the possibilities of when the Web meets TV.