Four Screens Media

What do people really want?  Not TV on the Web, but TV on demand.  The Web is just the only place to get it.  Sure, Hulu’s grown in popularity.  But ask the average person why they watch it so much versus television and you’ll likely get the answer “because I can only find that content on demand on Hulu.” 

One day it’s quite likely you’ll hook a set top box to your TV (or just plug the cable card in) and be able to watch a Hulu-like ranges of shows on demand (with similar advertising).  That day can now be tested with PlayOn.

Thanks to work arounds like PlayOn from The Media Mall (at http://www.themediamall.com), you can try the future of video moving from Web to the TV today.  They are claiming this is perfectly legal as they carry all advertising to the Web thus keeping with the terms of service.

The basic idea of software like PlayOn is that it takes the video feeds from services like Hulu, CBS.com, ESPN, CNN, YouTube and others, retrieves it through your PC and then, acting as a media server, sends it to a media extender connected to your television.  In PlayOn’s case, it connects to an XBox 360, Playstation 3 or HP Mediasmart. 

I tried it out on the Playstation 3 and loved the concept of how it works.  You connect to the server in the video menu then simply go through categories which are translated into folders.  So a flow may go content type (Hulu, CBS, ESPN etc) – shows-alphabet-show name-episode), click and the video runs on the full screen. 

I found their interfact and navigation to be the best of all Web video on TV (e.g., Netflix downloads, Playstation Video store) or cable navigation services I’ve tried.  Sure, the Playstation 3 video store is nicer looking, but this way actually ran faster and was more intuitive.    

This is beta software so their are glitches.  But it truly shows how a all-in-one box like the Playstation 3 can use TV video over IP (let’s just call it IPTV) to either replace the cable box or the service overall.  Now, all we need to do is get more bandwidth, finalize the revenue model, get buy in from the content providers, educate the consumers (oops, maybe not…it’s as easy as starting a video game) and roll it out.