The BBC is currently running a neat little promotion for the iPlayer, the premise of which is to tell civillians that they can watch their favourite BBC show on the iPlayer, on the television, writes Julian Clover.
Sky is doing something similar using Jonathan Ross, who these days presents an ITV chat show, explaining how being able to get catch-up on his television is changing his family life. Virgin too is busy promoting its TiVo box and all three provide a TV experience.
So the arrival of the new Xbox One and the promise of incorporating TV content pulled from your cable or satellite provider is intriguing.
Only last month Microsoft sold its Mediaroom IPTV business to Ericsson. Mediaroom has been through something of a renaissance in recent years, helped along by its presence on the Deutsche Telekom T-Entertain platform.
When my sister decided that BT Vision was the service for her I got quite excited, thinking that I would be able to enjoy all the features I’d seen in all those glossy presentations Microsoft had given me over the years, needless to say I was disappointed. BT Vision had been dispatching its customers a nice DTT PVR. Nothing more.
Those presentations – a good ten years ago surely – promised the ability to link your set-top box to your games console.
This seemed like a good thing, though it was never entirely clear how many conversations there had been between the separate parts of Microsoft. Around the same time the artist formerly known as NDS was talking about adding elements of the games console into the set-top.
For a while games consoles were doing well in adding numbers to catch-up TV, maybe that’s still the case in the kids’ bedrooms, but now it is the tablet or the sort of thing Mr Ross is talking about.
Assuming European operators are happy in connecting their boxes to what could be interpreted as a rival service, and it might be dependent on how sophisticated an offering the operator has, is the TV element for real or another play for the second HDMI socket?
