{"id":218,"date":"2009-05-11T15:52:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T19:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=218"},"modified":"2009-05-11T15:52:21","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T19:52:21","slug":"browser-powered-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/browser-powered-television\/","title":{"rendered":"Browser-Powered Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

[A longer than usual blog post, summarizing some strategy ideas I’ve been working on.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

In the early 90s at DEC, I had a colleague that worked with the cable industry.\u00a0 I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince him that TCP\/IP would be the winning network infrastructure for the fancy interactive TV services everyone was talking about.\u00a0 In the end, “adequate general purpose”<\/em> solutions always win.\u00a0 Proprietary solutions can’t compete with economies of scale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Moving up-stack, I’ve been thinking about how TV content delivery is going to play out.\u00a0 We started with over-the-air broadcast, then shifted to cable (first analog, then digital), and now we’ve suffered through a decade or two of crappy set-top-box user interfaces fed from proprietary cable networks.\u00a0 Along the way, our TVs have evolved from tiny, fuzzy CRTs to large, crisp 1920 x 1080 color monitors.<\/p>\n

As household bandwidths have increased, we’ve got options that end-run cable companies to get content on the screen:\u00a0 Apple TV, Roku\/Hulu, Tivo, network-enabled DVD players, game consoles, etc..\u00a0 But these are still closed & proprietary:\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t deploy my own apps (or even content, in some cases) without a lot of permission from other people.<\/p>\n

On the bleeding edge, users are plugging their large-screen TVs into computers (the Mac Mini is a popular option), sometimes installing software like Boxee<\/a> to provide a “couch-friendly” UI.\u00a0 I like Boxee, but it’s only an intermediate step and feels like a response to the past.\u00a0 Users don’t want “set top boxes<\/a>” (STB) or “media centers<\/a>” or “electronic program guides”; they want unrestricted access to apps and content.<\/p>\n

And a general-purpose delivery mechanism already exists:\u00a0 Web browsers.\u00a0 As Apple demonstrated with the iPhone, HTML+JavaScript is an excellent way to get content on-screen, because it leverages a deep existing technology infrastructure.\u00a0 (And adding Flash makes it even more compelling).<\/p>\n

I’m betting the same will happen with TV:\u00a0 HTML (and related technologies) will become the new “broadcast standard”.\u00a0 I’m not<\/strong> talking about seeing Firefox’s File\/Edit\/View menu bar on your TV; I’m saying that content will be rendered by a full-screen browser engine using HTML+JavaScript+Java+Canvas+Flash+Quicktime+etc technologies.\u00a0\u00a0 Users will access any app or content they want by navigating to the appropriate URL.\u00a0 (Innovators will adapt browser navigation to the TV screen & remote control, just like Apple adapted Safari for the iPhone.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the test:\u00a0 how hard is it to write Boxee’s UI or any STB UI as a full-screen JavaScript or Flash app?\u00a0 Apart from accessing LAN content, it’s relatively easy.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty certain this is how things are going to play out.\u00a0 Now the entrepreneurial question is:\u00a0 what to do about it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[A longer than usual blog post, summarizing some strategy ideas I’ve been working on.] In the early 90s at DEC, I had a colleague that worked with the cable industry.\u00a0 I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince him that TCP\/IP would be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}