By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

The vision of the digital living room has been around a long time. This is where the living room and Internet collide centered around a screen (namely the TV) and information, video, audio, games, and communications all converge. Over the years, attempts have been made to bring this vision to reality mostly with lukewarm results. Anyone remember WebTV?

At a recent gathering just outside of San Francisco, this vision was discussed. The talks centered around three main topics: 1) What will the interfaces to this digital living room look like? 2) When will this vision become a reality? And 3) How will the various parties, from cable operators and content providers to ad agencies, hardware manufacturers and even consumers make money in this new world?

Attendees included representatives from across the digital living room landscape — the usual suspects such as Comcast, Verizon, HP and Microsoft to the upstarts and start-ups like Hillcrest Labs, HDD Disk Flix and SendToMyTV — mixed for a day-and-a-half discussing how each of them will make the future come to life.

It was soon clear that this vision was further away than anyone would admit. Some commented that the topics and problems at this conference have remained the same for years, moving forward each year only incrementally, if at all.

However, others saw progress, which lead them to believe the manna was going to start falling soon. The evidence towards this convergent possibility is the massive increase in people watching video, short and long form, over the Internet on their PCs and laptops, and the increase in broadband speeds to the home. Over 10 billion streams of video were initiated over the web in January of 2008.

The question was raised about how the consumer would be paying for all this content. Currently almost all of this video viewing is ad-supported … thus cash-free to the consumer. This ad revenue needs to get split between the distributor and the content provider. Unfortunately, ad agencies aren’t clear exactly how to measure this new medium, so they have little to show their clients as support for moving their budgets into the new world.

Cable companies want to maintain a walled garden approach to offering content, so they are concerned with how and when to allow their customers to access content from the Internet.

On the set top box side, TiVo, a pioneer in intelligent set top boxes, continues to be one of the more progressive companies in the space. With the luxury of having a proprietary set top box in millions of homes, they have expanded the digital video recorder to allow their customers to access parts of the Internet, like Amazon UnBox, in their living room.

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have a large installed base of boxes that have the potential to shift the landscape dramatically. The 360 comes equipped with a network connection that allow consumers to access the Internet, play games in real time with others, download movies, TV shows and play HD movies. The PlayStation is rumored to be adding a video download store soon.

With the expectation of massive amounts of content being available through Internet TV, companies are facing off around the consumer search experience.

Hillcrest Labs offers a pretty interesting interface available through their set top box. The consumer accesses the well-designed content interfaces and search screens with a slickly designed three-dimensional mouse device that allows the user to easily point and click on content or application choices.

Hitachi is focused on making the search experience as fast as possible with massive amounts of data. They’ve developed a very fast database and retrieval system, and are planning to bring it to the home set top box in partnership with cable companies and set top box manufacturers.

Currently the database is being used in in-dash, personal navigation and GPS devices with some really interesting application ideas. One application in particular allows the user to recall songs from the database that were playing at another time based upon GPS location information.

The main takeaway from the event was that there are many companies looking to make the digital living room a reality. So look out for a number of new services being offered by the cable operators, new set top boxes from companies you’ve never heard of, new content offerings and a multitude of business models in the coming months and years.

The bottom line, though, is it will take a lot of collaboration to make this vision a reality for all involved anytime soon.

Some day soon, the television and the personal computer will be nearly indistinguishable.

It’s happening before our eyes. We’re able to time-shift when we watch “Heroes” on our digital video recorders, and we’re sneaking peeks at snippets from last night’s “Colbert Report” on YouTube. To say nothing of downloads for our iPods.

Not one to overlook an audience (or a revenue source), the networks are taking their first steps in streaming video of old episodes of our favorite shows. We took a quick tour of the networks’ sites, and here’s what we found.

But first, a couple of notes: Some of this content is changing daily, so what’s here today may be gone later today. Plus you’ll need a broadband or high-speed connection. And sometimes even that’s not enough to watch the videos uninterrupted.

Continue for a list of current web based TV offerings 

SAN FRANCISCO – Jeff Stewart directs an educational technology program at Macon State College in Georgia. But even he was quickly overwhelmed while TV shopping last month.

The sets at his local Sam’s Club all looked nice, but each touted a different alphabet soup of new features, from HDTV to LCD. Stewart didn’t want to make a mistake. He left without buying anything.

That’s not what TV makers want to hear, especially as buyers flock to stores ahead of this Sunday’s Super Bowl. Sony, Samsung and others hope a host of new TV technologies will keep the once-stagnant market growing fast. The latest: “smart” sets that connect to computer networks or the Internet.

But as TV makers rush ever-changing new technologies to the market, they run the risk of confusing and alienating customers.

Read the rest of the article.

Yankee Group analyst Joshua Martin says the standalone DVR product category will cease to exist by 2010, “and its dissolution will result in the end of TiVo as we know it.”

More at Reuters

The Hollywood Reporter – NEW YORK — As consumers become more connected to broadband and digital television, they are more likely to become engaged in primetime television programming, according to a report released Thursday by CBS Corp.

According to the report, which was conducted by CBS chief research officer David Poltrack, 30% of the population was “fully connected” by last fall, meaning they have both a broadband and digital television connection at home, up from 22% in fall 2005. The network’s research found that this group, which they describe as “upscale” and “better educated,” is 20% more likely to watch the top 10 primetime programs than the national average. read the rest of the article at HOLLYWOODREPORTER.COM