Everyone is saying (including me) that Internet TV is the next big thing and it's going to hit the living room. Everyone is also saying that HDTV is growing very quickly with HD TVs and services becoming very popular.Unfortunately at the moment both can't be true, the reason being is that the vast majority of web content is not HDTV and is in fact very low quality. As Mark Cuban has pointed out who would want to watch crappy quality video on a widescreen HDTV display, no-one that's who!
So the answer of course would lie in higher quality internet video that looks great on a big TV. HDTV video on the web is sparse and there is a reason for this; it's expensive to deliver and it requires a beasty connection to receive.
But even if a HDTV internet video provider could afford the cost to deliver, and people had generous internet connections to cope with internet HDTV there is another hurdle to jump over.
PCs are becoming part of the living room structure with content taken from the internet onto the PC, then onto a central media server (be it a PVR, Apple iTV, or other device) and then to the TV, although sometimes the central media server can be bypassed altogether.
Sounds simple, just hook your PC up to your TV and watch the HD internet TV. Unfortunately it' not so simple:
- Most PCs do not have a DVI or HDMI port-out for HD meaning it will only output SD.
- Most wireless servers only stream video around the house at a lower bitrate.
1. Are DVI ports really that uncommon or are they talking about HDCP capable DVI ports? If so, doesn't HDCP only take effect if the Image Constraint Token is enabled (which nobody is doing yet)?
Posted at 12:44PM on Nov 30th 2006 by Phatman