Active-TV Technology for iPhone and iPod touch

Active-TV Technology for iPhone and iPod touch
Navigate YouTube

Navigate YouTube available at iTunes App Sore

An easy to use iPhone and iPod touch App that enables both new and advanced YouTube users to get the best from YouTube.

Browse video Standard Feeds, Categories, Channels and Playlists. Then organize new videos into your own favorites and playlists. Make playlists private or public. Subscribe to other user's playlists and video collections for future viewing. Subscribe to videos matching search-words.

Look at publicly viewable favorite videos, playlists and subscriptions based on your YouTube friends, family and contacts. Send and receive video links with YouTube contacts via YouTube video messages.

Search for new videos tagged for your language or geographical region, using local keyboard. Explore for new videos via easy switching of user ID to the owner of interesting videos - then explore their world.

All actions are kept in sync with PC, Mac or Apple-TV access to YouTube. Available at Apple App Store.

active-TV technology for PC

active-TV technology for PC
Windows PC based home network

Monday, March 20, 2006

HP hybrid-TV (TV + DMA

Active-TV ecosystem developers,

HP has added DMA (Digital Media Adapter) technology to a TCP/IP networked TV.
Here is the opening sentence from the HP SLC3760N brochure: “The HP Advanced Digital Media LCD HDTV takes television and makes it personal by bringing your photos, music, and videos from your PC to your TV”. There is now a clear trend to integrate convergence features into a high-end TV.

The approach taken by this yet un-priced hybrid-TV, follows some of the active-TV principles – adding convergence features to a consumer-understood appliance which inherently supports digital TV broadcast reception. There is no indication of advanced active-TV features, such as the merging of broadcast TV images with media application images.

It appears the DMA support does not extend to thin-client UI projection. Images of the TV UI appear DMA-like and not the more advanced MCE spotlights (see attached image). The features list below is extracted from the data sheet http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2006/ces/ds_e_37lcd_adm.pdf

  • Stream audio and video files via your wired or wireless network from your PC to your TV
  • Connect directly from your TV or via your PC to Web-based media services
  • Windows Media Connect compatible, Intel VIIV™, PlaysForSure™ and DLNA certified™
  • Supported digital media include: JPEG, BMP, GIF, and PNG photos, Windows Media Audio (WMA), WMA-Pro, WAV, and MP3 music files, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 MP@ML, MPEG-2 MP@HL, MPEG-4 (including DivX), AVI, Windows Media Video (WMV), and WMV-HD files
  • Compatible with Windows Media Player 10 and its digital rights management (DRM)
  • Built-in 10/100 based-T wired and IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless networking [end]

Direct web-based access (no PC required), suggest there is support for a micro-browser. Likely, the full array of formats supported is accomplished with some PC transcode processing. I guess the integrated SOC Si is from Sigma.

I also found … [Extract] Furthermore, the SLC3760N is also capable of streaming audio and video directly from the Internet courtesy of compatibility with RealNetworks' Rhapsody online music subscription service and CinemaNow. …..the SLC3760N can also access Web-based media services such as online photo service Snapfish or … [end]

There appears to be no requirement for Media Center Edition (MCE), only the Windows Media Connect (WMC) available with XP Home. So, there is no use of Microsoft Extender Technology.

Compatibility with ViiV is claimed, but this may be nothing more than WMC support; as there is no appearance of the promised ‘higher-level’ ViiV features, such as projected UI support.

Comments, corrections and feedback welcome.

No comments: