YouTube on the Tube

During CES, several TV manufacturers and content providers announced plans to distribute interactive content directly to TV sets, headlined by Google's move to bring YouTube and Picasa to Panasonic HDTVs. Now let’s see: interactive content on TV – say, isn’t that what we’re trying to achieve with OCAP?

But in the case of YouTube and others, the manufacturers are using an Internet connection to bring a limited menu of broadband video and Web content to the TV screen.

It’s debatable whether these “mini-WebTV” efforts will win over consumers, but they could have a bearing on the OCAP movement. It seems to me that the broadband streams could be married to OCAP interfaces for better presentation on TV. Or the TV manufacturers could take their own Internet-to-TV approaches without OCAP.

So for OCAP, will Internet-to-TV prove to be competitive, complementary, or a flash in the pan?

Read all about it:
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/home/markets/2008/01/08/matsushita-google-youtube-...

San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/09/BUIHUB2NK.DT...