We all know the Internet has changed everything. Next, its going to change your TV habits, big-time. But how?

I love reading stories that claim to know what is ahead. I always wonder how they make their predictions. Like this one from ABI research, reported on Engadget: Internet Media viewing on TVs set to surge by 2013. I, for one, don't know yet how Internet-on-TV will unfold. But I agree it will be a big phenomenon, and fairly soon.

Last week on NPR, there was a great 7+ minute story on the topic, during prime drive-time. This phenomenon is certainly starting to move from tech circles to consumer circles. I can't make a ton of predictions, but what I do know is the following:

• There has been an explosion of TV-related Internet content over the last 18 months. Suddenly, Internet stuff actually belongs on your TV. Building on YouTube's start 3+ years ago, the entrants over the last year or so have been mainly commercial sites, and they are good. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Joost, Veoh, ABC.com, Comedycentral.com are just a few that I watch. Even YouTube now has full-length commercial content, and a lot of it. Of the bunch, Hulu has gotten a lot of play in the press, and according to Neilsen, they broke into the top-10 website providers of streaming videos mid-last-year. I am a loyal user.

• Netflix and Amazon.com have booth been very aggressive at winning deals to get their services built into boxes-near-your-TV, and built right into new TV's. XBox, TiVo, and Roku are among the boxes to announce services to bring Netflix or Amazon content to your TV.

• TV's are still selling, even in the recession. According to DisplaySearch, total global sales were up in 2008, to an astonishing 205 Million units. And they are predicted to be about flat in 2009. Which means, the transformation to digital, flat-panel TV's continues to be the biggest phenomenon in consumer electronics, by far. Those millions of mostly high-def TV's can render high-res Internet experiences very well. And consumers, having just invested in them, will be anxious to put them to good use. According to Nielsen, TV is still where Americans spend their time. TV use actually grew to 127 hours per month last year. Make no mistake, the TV is still King.

• At this year's CES, Internet-on-your-TV was one of the big topics. I saw Internet-enabled TV's from LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Sharp. LG, in particular, seems fairly committed to the concept (meaning, they were actually demoing it in the booth rather than just showing it). Some of these solutions were plain aweful. My partners and I laughed out loud in the Sharp booth, in a not-good you-gotta-see-this way. There's a brief round-up of Internet TV solutions at this year's CES here.

As for me, I'll go on record. I don't like stuff built into my TV. A lot of TV's don't even have tuners anymore. I don't even use the speakers built into my main TV. We feed our TV's their content from a finite collection of boxes, such as a cable-box, DVD or BluRay player, and sometimes a game console, and I think it will be a while before that changes. That's because our TV's outlast these other gadgets and we don't want to be stuck with outdated stuff built into the TV. I think Internet content is much more likely to be popularized by one of the existing external boxes, or by an additional box, than as a proprietary feature on your TV. A built-in TV feature, by the way, will work differently on one brand of TV vs. another, and thus never achieve any kind of scale in a fragmented TV market.

Intel and Yahoo have decided to collaborate on a strategy to bring simplified Internet Widgets to your TV, with some consistency across brands. Called Widget Channel, I saw several demonstrations of this at CES. There's a nice story here on CNET that discusses the strategy. I like Widgets, and it is an appealing notion that they could emerge as a standard that developers can count on, to bring Internet experiences to TV in a simple form. We'll just have to watch and see if they take off.

I can't tell if Intel and Yahoo are really behind this thing or not. They had people on the floor demoing it who really didn't understand the technology, and they weren't pushing the platform very persuasively for developers. Maybe it is "early days". Or, maybe Intel and Yahoo are only "somewhat" committed.

While I like the idea of the Widget channel, much is left undone. The best Internet experiences are pretty powerful, and I don't see most TV's having the computer processing power to render 3D web experiences in real time. Little gadgets on the TV will probably ultimately let people down. In my experience, every time people are given the choice between the "real" Internet and "little pieces" of the Internet, people choose the real thing. Widgets are pieces.

If Internet-on-the-TV is going to take-off, there needs to be a new controller strategy. People are accustomed to the full control they get from a mouse and keyboard. There needs to be a way to give them this level of control over Internet experiences on a TV, without introducing a mouse or a keyboard into the living room. Today's solutions use things like on-screen keyboards which are so frustrating to use that I want to throw something at my TV.

In our house, we have a very quiet, very power-efficient PC hooked up to our TV. I handle all of the system maintenance, so the rest of the family gets a very easy-to-use always-on PC experience. If the whole thing was simpler, and never required bootups, backups, patches, updates, wizards, anti-virus programs, and what-not, I'd be much happier. We have a variety of ways to control our TV's PC, and none of them are ideal. My favorite full-sized TV-room keyboard is this one, which sells under a variety of brand-names. I have tried a bunch of them, including the Logitech DiNovo Mini, which is nice-looking but very difficult to use due to a flawed mouse-pad. I'm also using the very clever AirMouse app for iPhone, and I keep waiting for their promised update with such necessary things as an esc key (as in, the key that gets you out of full-screen on Netflix and Hulu), so its not a solution I can recommend yet. I'm told the update is coming any day.


Having the Internet on TV has really changed things for our family. I find myself not recording stuff anymore. Our DVR is rarely used. All the stuff we want to see is just a few clicks away without having to bother with a DVR. We have good family times watching clips together on YouTube and Hulu. Previously, the kids were squirreled away with their laptops in another room. So in a way, having the Internet on our TV has brought our family closer together. If that doesn't spur a phenomenon, I don't know what will.

Staying connected just got easier

I have a number of different wireless devices. When I travel, I usually carry either a laptop or Netbook, and a wireless phone. I take my laptop into other companies' conference rooms and need an Internet connection. The problem is, I don't want to pay for multiple 3G dataplans for my multiple devices.

That's why I am so impressed with MiFi, an ultraportable WiFi hotspot recently announced by Novatel. As you can see in this photo, MiFi is very small. It's the smallest portable WiFi unit I have seen. (Photo credit to Engadget, where you can find a great consumer products column by Ross Rubin). Read the Engadget story about MiFi here.

With MiFi, you'll pay a wireless carrier for a single 3G dataplan, then use it to connect whatever laptop or netbook you happen to be using. This will save me a ton of complexity. I have laptops that support PC card, and others that support Express, which means I can't easily use a single 3G datacard. And, I don't like having to launch the connection application. Simply switching on a WiFi hotspot will be much easier, and give me the added benefit of being able to share the connection.

By the way, having one of these in your backpack will provide a bonus benefit to iPhone fans. As you know, many iPhone functions are restricted to WiFi only connections. MiFi will give your phone a WiFi connection wherever you may be, using 3G as its backhaul. So you can download iTunes songs, for example, or watch videos on the Television app.

My email service, email client, and smartphone come from three different companies. But I still expect it all to work together perfectly.

As a marketing guy, I have been thinking lately about the merits of “systems” vs. the finer attributes of “best of breed.” What am I referring to? Well, in “systems”, you choose who you want to do business with in advance, and then get everything from them, on the promise that it will all work great together. With “best of breed” you choose different offerings from a variety of providers, getting exactly what you want in each category, but then potentially face the hassle of cobbling it all together.

With cars, I’m a “system” guy. When I make a decision to buy a car, I’m also in effect deciding that their dealership will also be the ones to do all of the service on the car. I only use factory audio in a car, because, well, I just like that it is more integrated. Factory floor mats? Absolutely. I have even gone so far as to have the dealer replace my tires. One throat to choke, as they say. To be clear, I’m not defending that this is a good idea. It may be a very bad idea. But it is what I do, nonetheless, simply because I prefer it. Are there product categories where you prefer to buy into a “system” and then stick with it? I’ll bet there are.

But I’m also willing to bet that for most of us, we prefer to buy the best-of-breed in most categories. When I do this, I feel that I still have a right to get mad when it doesn’t all work seamlessly together. So do you. Companies who rely on you buying everything only from them, just to get an adequate experience, aren’t thinking about you, the consumer, the way they should.

I’m feeling this way about Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) right now. Windows Live Mail doesn’t support IMAP, and they only support email forwarding if you pay them for premium mail, which is darn hard to figure out how to do. I wanted my Windows Live mail to be readable from within my gmail account, for a number of reasons, including gmail’s superior integration with the iPhone. Well, you can’t do that. You can’t use an alternative offline client very easily, either. Basically, your choices to access your mail (and keep it in sync, which rules out POP access) are… 1) the Windows Live Mail client (which, thankfully, I love), and related Microsoft mail clients, 2) the Windows Live web service (which I don’t like as much as gmail), and 3) Windows smart phones. That’s pretty much it. I think their idea must be that if they make it really hard to use any email client other than their own, you be a more loyal customer, and not switch away. That is a crazy amount of absurd and it just makes me mad. I love my Windows Live mail and I also love my iPhone. I expect them to work together more easily than they do.

Sometimes companies who are selling a “system” make it obvious with their advertisements, which try to convince us we're better-off buying everything from them. Sony and Apple are two companies that each spend a significant amount of effort trying to convince consumers to buy their own products across-the-board, under the promise that it all works best together. And generally, it does. But at what cost? Premium prices are an acceptable cost, but to me, being trapped in a closed system by underlying proprietary technology isn’t worth it. I view Mac’s this way. I love some Apple stuff, but I feel that Apple tries to trap Mac users into using only their stuff (shouldn’t they have put in HDMI, and not mini-DisplayPort, into their latest Mac’s? My point.). This is the value of working within the most broadly adopted standards. With enough openness, the really popular products should eventually all work together very well, if their makers have the consumer’s best interests in mind.

In our household, we’re more PC than Mac. I much prefer Windows to OSX, probably because I am so familiar with it. I’m the IT guy in our family, and I look after about 8 PC’s and one Mac. But all of our networking is Apple. I prefer Apple’s configurability and I’m a huge fan of Airport Express for whole-house music distribution. We use mainly iTunes for music and video. I have been impressed with how easily Apple products (iTunes, iPod, Airport, TimeCapsule) integrate into a mostly PC environment. Quite simply, they are writing some of the best PC software out there, which ironically, is one of the reasons I have little interest in switching to Mac’s. In this sense, they are less of a closed “system” purveyor than some would say.

Ripping DVD's just isn't worth it. And with their intransigence on the issue, the studios are handing even more power to Apple

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to rip all of my DVD's. The thought was, I'd have my library to enjoy wherever I go. Or more specifically, my kids would. The killer app here is the ability to view the movies you own on a portable device like an iPod.

Well, it didn't work out. Put aside the obvious issue that, despite a tradition of "fair use" in our copyright laws, most agree that ripping DVD's isn't legal in the U.S. Since I wasn't planning to share my DVD's with anyone digitally, or rip rented DVD's, I wasn't deeply worried about that. The larger issue turned to be that since the studios aren't cooperating (yet), there is simply no consumer-acceptable solution today. I tried Handbrake, 1Click DVD copy, and Movavi as the video converters, and DVD43 and DVDDecrypter as the DRM removal tools. My verdict? Not worth it, not even close. It takes two apps (a decrypter and a copier) to rip a DVD, and they have to work in concert. Some disks fail to copy entirely, others take up to two hours even on a fast machine. And, there doesn't appear to be a setting that will both look good on the big screen TV, and play back on an iPod, which means that each disk must be ripped twice. So I uninstalled the apps and gave up. Have you had a better experience?

Instead of new DVD's, I have started to buy more movies from iTunes. They automagically play on our family's various iPods, don't cost all that much, and look (barely) acceptable on the big screen. So if my case is typical, then the studios have, through their total insistence that nobody be able to copy DVD's, handed even more power to Apple. Haven't they been watching what is happening to their friends (and affiliates) in the music business?

I have been watching Real Networks' dispute with the Studios with interest. Their proposed product, RealDVD, would be the first mass consumer legal DVD ripping software. The idea is that a single application would backup your DVD's to your computer hard drive, and then make them available for playback on up to five computers (and perhaps other devices), while still respecting the DRM. The product reviews were good and I am anxious to personally try the product when, and if, the dispute is resolved. In certainly agree with the insights (simplicity, portability) that have apparently driven Real's product.

From the McGyver files...iPhone docking in the car, and how it totally changed my usage pattern

Why am I writing about something as mundane as an iPod dock in my car? Because it totally transformed my usage of the device. More on that below. But first, I'll share my docking method.

I'm not a big fan of the Frankenstein look, when it comes to technology in the car. So I didn't want the phone-dock-in-cupholder-with-lots-of-wires thing. I looked and looked for an elegant and low-cost solution to dock my iPhone in my car. My simple requirements:

• Not ugly
• Powers the phone
• Lets me see and control the phone
• Undocks easily, 'cause I get in and out of the car a lot
• Pipes the phone's audio to the car stereo with a decent connection, for listening to music, podcasts, Internet radio, etc. from the phone.

This last requirement was made harder by my car, because despite being a late-model Lexus hybrid, it doesn't have an AUX jack (which is pretty hard to understand).

I shopped all around, and found no product that fits the bill perfectly. What happened to capitalism? Am I the only one with this list of requirements? Is this not now the best-selling phone in the U.S.? And people go around in cars, right?

For now, I solved it (almost literally) with duct tape and wires.

Here's the photo:

So, crazy as it sounds, the best solution for me turned out to be a plain old Apple dock, along with a Griffin iPhone car charger (black, hidden under the dock), and a cassette tape adapter (black, see wires, arrgh). And here's the McGyver part, I mounted it to the console with a commercial velcro-type of fastener called 3M dual lock (expensive but awesome stuff for all kinds of applications).

The cassette tape adapter plugs into the back of the dock discreetly, as does the car charger. I wish the dock was black, but well, that's Apple for ya.

Since doing this, a number of the commercial car docks have started supporting the 3G, so I'd consider them. The one that caught my eye was this one from Kensington. Still, it is a little higher profile and I don't have an Aux jack so I'd still need the cassette tape thing. Seems like a tad more work to get it in and out of the dock, too.

The my phone's display is showing Pandora Radio, and outstanding website and web app. Pandora fits the "great consumer technology products" bill, so I'll write about it separately at some point.

Here's the main point. It turns out that the iPhone is an amazing Internet radio device. Who could have predicted that this would be one of it's major scenarios? And how many other people use it this way? The magic of the Internet, and therefore of Internet devices, is that everyone gets a different benefit. There are as many use-cases as there are people. So why are there so many fixed-function, walled-garden devices coming out, when people really just want the Internet? If the developers of iPhone hadn't realized this, I wouldn't be able to listen to Pandora or NPR News or CNN (via Stitcher, another recommended app), or various other Internet radio things just by dropping my phone into a dock, and driving off.

I have live TV on my iPhone. Do you?

During the election season, I was glued to CNN. I needed to catch all the commentary that went along with every stop on the trail and every move in the polls. That meant watching TV in strange places. No device is better for strange-place TV watching than your phone. The problem was, I had recently switched to my shiny new iPhone, and was pretty mad that that I couldn't access my Slingbox from it, while Apple and Sling duked it out over whether the Sling app would be released (still no updates, which can't be good). Well, I got it too late for the election season, but now I'm using Orb and it really works. Success!

Here's the deal. You need to have a computer in your house, with a TV tuner installed on it. Many desktops have been shipping with tuners for years, so your computer might have one even if you aren't using it. If not, it's easy enough to get a simple USB external TV tuner. Ideally, this is the one computer that you leave running. Once your TV tuner is installed in your computer (again, it probably already is installed), connect your standard cable-TV coax cable to your TV tuner.

That's pretty much it. Now install Orb on that computer and install OrbLive on your iPhone.

Orb takes your live TV signal and streams it out over the Internet to your Orb clients, such as a laptop running Orb software, or your phone. You can access a program guide from your phone, choose a channel, wait a frustrating 15 to 20 seconds or so, and then poof, you are watching TV on your phone from anywhere.

Unlike the YouTube app, Orblive will display TV in either the portrait or landscape mode. I like this because I use Orb in the car while I am waiting on the kids, while my phone is docked. The puts the audio on my car speakers and the TV is viewable from my seat (no, I don't drive and watch TV, and neither should you).

OrbLive can also be used to access the photos, music, and other files on your home computer (or home network) from your iPhone. It found and categorized all of my music, and allows me to play it on my iPhone (except DRM protected tracks), just as if that music was in the iPod on my phone. In my case, this isn't much use because I have the same music locally on my phone. But, I do use this feature for photos. Faced with tough choices due to the non- expandable 16GB iPhone (would a micro-SD chip have been that hard??), I took all of my home photos off of my phone to make room for music and videos. With Orb, I have fast access to my entire home photo library from anywhere, already organized into folders just like on my home machine. I can flick through the photos just like on the native photo app. This is terrific.

I can also access files on my home computers, and open documents, using the file access feature in OrbLive. This has actually come in handy.

Since your home computer can act as a DVR using Windows Media Center, you can also access recorded shows seamlessly via OrbLive. When I installed it, there were some conflict issues when Media Center wanted access to the tuner at the same time Orb wanted access to the tuner. I understand they have fixed this issue, but I've never gone back to check. I simply turned off the Media Center TV functions and never looked back. Now, I use that computer's TV tuner only for Orb.

Want to know why? The truth is, I don't use DVR functionality that much anymore. I gave my Tivo to my Mom (It's a version 1, from about 1999, and she loves it -- that says good things about the quality of Tivo's initial design, doesn't it?). I don't use MCE either. Once in a while, if I really want to record something, I use the one built into my cable box, which gives me the added benefit of High Def recording (minus hassle).

Here's why. Internet media has changed everything. Who could have guessed, just a year ago, how much commercial TV content would be freely and legally available on the web today? Now, shows are posted to the web just a couple of hours after their initial airing. And the Web is the ultimate DVR, because you don't have to be hassled with recording anything. If I want last night's The Daily Show, I simply go to Hulu, type "The Dail" and before I'm done typing, there it is. Why record stuff anymore? I have a lot more to say about Internet media, because I have dedicated the last year of my professional life to the topic with my start-up. That's another post.

This is a blog about "great consumer technology experiences," which begs the question, does Orb qualify? No, not really. It is still way too geeky. You have to like to tinker to keep a PC running as your TV server. Eventually, the Internet media future should make a solution like Orb totally unnecessary. We'll all have to wait a little longer.

Meantime, tell me about your experiences with live TV on your iPhone. But please, leave out the details of the "strange places" where you watch...