Panel: Matt Smith – Yahoo!, Brian Bruber – Fora TV, Herve Utheza – Orb Networks, Neal Page – Inlet Technologies, Ted Malone – Sling Media.

Bringing web video back to television.

The landscape is changing and things are looking pretty optimistic right now – AppleTV, xBox, Sling, etc.

By 2011, 163 million broadband enabled televisions.

Right now the models are very much closed systems and the future depends (and gets interesting) when you start to consider accessing open internet video on TV sets.

The TV broadband experience seems to rely on (and be the perfect venue for) long form content.

The formats for the future have emerged and we are already creating content that can be made TV ready.

A single standard to get video to TV would be nice but it’s not going to happen. If anything we’ll see another form of format war arising. The variety of devices and requirements will make this extra challenging. There may never be a unified format and as a result, it will be important to remain flexible and adjust to new developments.

TV manufacturers are already talking about providing broadband connections right in the TV hardware.

The big gap right now is going between broadband on to the TV which requires alot of specialized devices. It is still expensive and challenging to get content onto a TV.

AppleTV has done a great job of getting web based content looking good on a huge flat panel TV.

The growth in browsers attached to TV opens up alot of options for content consumption. Something as simple as an xBox or Wii can act as an initial bridge.

Many websites which generate content (pro or user gen) now have the option to get into TV broadcasting. These newcomers to TV are able to utilize their existing web infrastructure and bypass the traditional TV networks and exisiting Brands. CurrentTV is the poster child still.

Personalization of content is a big part of bringing web video to TV.

The virtual TV guide of the future may very well be personalized channels that you and your friends build and share. Community is not going away, and because of the vast amount of content this will be critical in helping people find content they actually like.

At any given time, you will need the ability to take an asset and deliver it on any number of hardware devices. The user experience is going to need to be consistent across whatever device they want to consumer content on.

Transcoding and heavy lifting is going to need to happen deep in the network and deliver to any device. This is a huge challenge and one of the keys to success may be distributed computing power amoung the community of viewers.

Right now we are in the middle of a battle of the media player and it is a furious evolution. Because of this you need to consider how this will impact the mixing of broadcast and web based video content on future TV hardware. RIght now it looks like game consoles have a significant edge right now and may continue to have in the future.