october-2009

092
BUSINESS
Watching TV—actual shows—
via the internet has finally, truly
arrived. But a study from Cisco
Systems suggests this is only the
beginning, estimating that by 2012, videostreaming
traffic will increase to 400 times the
traffic carried by the entire internet in the year 2000.
But why now, when broadband connections have
been around for quite a while? A few reasons: Content
providers are loosening their grip on prime material,
software makers are crafting simple gateways to it,
and manufacturers are building user-friendly (and
cheap) internet-TV devices. All this has led to a
perfect media storm, the ideal conditions for internet
video to thrive.
“It’s going to be pretty crazy in the next few years,”
says Bill Leszinske, Intel’s general manager of consumer
electronics in the company’s Digital Home Group.
“The internet is going to fundamentally change the
TV experience.”
But as impressive as the growth of internet video
has been, a recent study by Nielsen Media Research
estimates it constitutes just 1% of total video consumption
in the US, which means the medium has a long
way to go before it replaces TV altogether. Sure, there’s
plenty to watch online, but clearly there’s a preference
for watching from traditional platforms like cable and
satellite boxes, possibly because viewers typically get to
sit in more comfortable chairs.
“ It’s going to be pretty
crazy in the next few years.
The internet is going to
fundamentally change the
TV experience.”
Internet TV is taking the comfy-seat challenge
head on. Enter new programs like Boxee, a software
download that turns a viewer’s Mac or PC into a faux
television. Once they install it, they can put the laptop
down, pick up a remote control and flip around internet-video
sites just like they’d surf channels on a cable
box (in industry parlance, the “10-foot” user interface).
“A few years ago we noticed that mainstream providers
were putting up more video,” says Andrew Kippen,
Boxee’s VP of marketing. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be
great to take all of your local media, combine it with all
GO MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2009
that mainstream video, and put it all
one place?’”
Boxee has been a word-of-mouth
phenomenon since its debut in 2008
and now boasts 600,000 registered users.
Since Boxee is based on the open-source
application XBMC Media Center, it can typically run
on anything with a processor, including a Blu-ray
player, set-top box, game console or the TV itself.
Debuting an Apple version of the software before a PC
one turned out to be a brilliant move, as Boxee’s clean
and functional interface won praise from the Macpreferring
technology press.
As popular as it is, Boxee is hardly the only way to
browse internet video more comfortably—it’s just one
of the few that’s been attracting investors. Hulu just
released its own desktop application that works with a
remote control, and there are plenty of other programs,
including MediaPortal, MythTV and Freevo. In fact,
Microsoft and Apple both provide native 10-foot
interfaces for their machines, called Windows Media
Center and Front Row, respectively—though the
built-in access to internet video is relatively limited.
atching internet video on
a computer is easy since
it’s always online, but what
about on a TV? That’s where
the hardware comes in, and
there are a host of machines
that can deliver internet video seamlessly to the set.
The most well known is Apple TV ($229), a sleek white
box that wirelessly moves media from network to living
room. Everything owners have in their iTunes and
iPhoto libraries—video, music and photos—is made
available on their TVs. Plus, there’s a direct connection
to the iTunes Store, letting customers download new
content they would like to see on demand.
A similar device is the Digital Entertainer Live from
Netgear, which packages a Boxee-like interface in a box
that sits by the TV. It also connects to the home network
(via an Ethernet cable or an optional Wi-Fi adapter) to
bring customers both web videos and their own media.
Content-wise, it aims to be like Apple TV on steroids at
a significantly lower price ($150).
“We want to make it easy to find all the different
types of content out there,” says Netgear’s Phillip Pyo.
“Our product gives you a portal to more than 150 websites,
including YouTube, movies on demand through
CinemaNow and a video search engine.”
But while the amount of video available is impressive,