Consumer electronics giants including Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and Toshiba are all unveiling their Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services this year and striking deals with a variety of publishing companies and web sites such as Ebay, Google’s Picasa and Eurosport, amongst others.¹

IT giants Intel and Adobe are also collaborating to bring the popular Flash platform to digital television sets and set top boxes. This initiative is aimed at enabling Flash based video and audio content to be viewed on digital television sets via an on demand or live video stream, as well as on the internet and mobile phones.²

Similarly, the BBC is looking for a joint venture which aims to deliver content from both the BBC iPlayer and its archive via a set top box which would essentially be Freesat, Freeview and the iPlayer all in one device.³ Having had their recent joint proposal to share the iPlayer technology with ITV, C4 and Channel 5 blocked by the Competition Commission⁴, the BBC are still keen to jump on the IPTV bandwagon and get a firm foothold on this new wave of Web TV.

Just how much internet access this next generation of television sets and set top boxes will allow us will vary depending on the provider. It’s safe to say that IPTV products from the likes of Sony, Panasonic, et al will give us what they call a ‘walled garden’ of websites. In this case, our internet access will be limited to a closed set of web services.

However, there are a couple of new kids on the block which may well provide something closer to unlimited internet access on our television sets.  These ‘new kids’ are the BLOBbox (launched 3-3-09 at CeBIT, Hanover), and the Nth Code Player (not launched yet but a sneak peek appeared on YouTube 2-3-09).

BLOBbox is a joint development between TVBLOB and Telsey and is essentially a glorified set top box which aside from the usual Freeview channels, also allows the user to browse YouTube, Picasa, watch online TV, download BitTorrents and watch and listen to streamed media files from their PC.   Social networking is also a unique feature of the BLOBbox as it includes Facebook amongst other social networking features.⁵

Nth Code Player has been recently developed by Beijing based software developer, Nth Code.  When integrated with a Wi-Fi equipped television or DVD player, the Nth Code Player will automatically find any available laptop or PC within range and enable the streaming of shared audio & video files. It also has a built in internet browser which will allow user to surf the internet and access online media using RSS and BitTorrent.⁶

Just how much internet access these latest software developments will give us when these products hits the high street is still unclear. For those with children I’m sure the ‘walled garden’ of web services will be more than adequate. However for those of us who are used to unlimited internet access, I’m sure these limitations may well be annoying in the long term.

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