The new crop of internet television solutions (Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box, et al) are more capable than ever.  However, despite the technological readiness of all this new hardware (or perhaps because of  it), cable/broadcast networks are more reluctant than ever to allow their content onto these devices.

There’s every indication, in fact, that the process of developing viable and sustainable business models built around getting premium internet video content directly to to the television is going to take the various stakeholders (including cable/satellite operators and advertisers) much longer than the more optimistic of us had hoped.

It’s a little frustrating.

What’s an out-of-patience viewer to do?

Fortunately, while networks continue to shy away from the television, they seem more comfortable than ever allowing access to their content from the safe confines of your computer’s web browser:

• For many, hulu has become virtually a browser-based ‘DVR in the cloud’ for catching up on recently missed programming from 3 out of the 4 major US broadcast networks (only Disney/ABC, with its close ties to Apple/iTunes, continues to shun hulu).
• Program-specific websites such as those of The Daily Show and Fox News Sunday (my two favorite news-related entertainment programs) often now routinely make extended interviews and other additional content available online.

There’s a reason why content owners are increasingly friendly to the web browser yet continue to view the internet-connected television with such fear and loathing: the computer offers a sufficiently lousy user experience (single-viewer, non-aggregated content, desktop-based) so as to not threaten incumbent television revenue streams.

Waiting indefinitely for ‘the internet television device of the future’ or buying an interim device such as Apple TV that lacks content already available a few feet away on my web browser are both unattractive options.  But what if I could get my desktop computer’s audio and video output over to the HDMI input on my television wirelessly?  Technically, it’s a non-trivial technical challenge: the typical home TCP/IP wifi network can barely handle a buffered and highly compressed video stream’s packets.  HDMI, on the other hand, is a much more bandwidth-intensive protocol – designed to run on a wire with zero compromise on quality, HDMI couldn’t care less about accommodating or recovering from the vagaries and dynamic fluctuations of wireless network performance.

But hey, I only needed to cover the 30 feet from one side of my living room to the other - what I needed was a short, fat pipe.

So I started looking into it – and here’s what I found…

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Ikea – hey, what’s not to like? You pick and choose from its vast furniture selection exactly what you like, pass through a (relatively) quick check-out and off you go, enjoying your new purchases.

So, how does a popular self-serve furniture store figure into this yours truly digital technology and media blog?

Attending the recently-held Paley Media Center’s IC 2010 event in New York, a-la-carte programingwas among the hot hot button issues. The notion that one day we could freely pick and choose Ikea-style (and thus pay only for) our personal cable, satellite, or IPTV channel favorites scares the living daylight out of some while others believe it’s a must or at the least - unavoidable.

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A few years ago, Radiohead released a  video shot entirely with a 3D array of lasers rather than with lights and cameras.  Now the Montreal-based band Arcade Fire has partnered with Google to promote a song using another new technology: HTML5.  For bands like Arcade Fire and Radiohead, it’s about supporting their songs in new ways and reaching new audiences (we’re writing about it, aren’t we?).  For Google, it’s about advancing the cause of both HTML5 and their HTML5-enabled Chrome browser.

It’s not quite accurate to call the Arcade Fire/Google collaboration “The Wilderness Downtown” a ‘video’.  Directed by Chris Milk,  the website is essentially a showcase of several HTML5 features.  Leveraging Google Street View, the site first asks the visitor to enter their childhood address.  If Street View images exist for that address (they didn’t for my childhood address in the New York City suburbs), those images are incorporated into the video – complete with panning, effects, and overlayed animation.  In other words, the presentation  is “geo-personalized” for each viewer (if you grew up in an area that’s been covered by Google Street View, that is).  That’s  cool factor #1.

Multiple browser windows opening on cue, all playing video in sync (allowing, for example, a flock of animated birds to fly from one window to the other)?  Cool factor #2.

Then a window opens allowing  user input and manipulation of sophisticated graphic objects via both mouse and keyboard.  Since all this is implemented locally via HTML5 at the browser (rather than by some JavaScript calling back to a server), latency is about zero – it feels as if it’s running locally on an installed application (which, in fact, it is – the browser).  Cool factor #3.

However, if a user tries to access the site with a browser other than Google’s Chrome, they’re presented with a warning prompt that the ‘film’ will not render properly in their browser.  In my experience, while the presentation took longer to load on Firefox, I got relatively similar results, though.  It leads me to question the warning, especially since according to the WC3 (the HTML5 standards organization), the browser with the most complete implementation of the HTML5 standard right now is built by – wait for it – previously standards-unfriendly Microsoft, with their just-released beta of IE9 (that this is not widely known is yet another in a series of missed PR opportunities for Microsoft).

So, OK, maybe the “Chrome only” warning is a little reminiscent of those “For best results use only <foobar>-branded accessories with your new <foobar> product” warnings – still, the loading time and overall performance with Chrome was pretty impressive.  Whether it’s a fair fight – whether the site is built on browser-agnostic strict HTML5 or Google’s cheating a bit by optimizing for Chrome is another question (and not an unreasonable one – we’ve written before about Google’s big plans for Chrome to evolve beyond the role of a browser into the cloud-based Chrome operation system).

All of which speaks to a fundamental obstacle facing the adoption of HTML5 video – standardization.  While the new <video> tag threatens to someday make third party video middleware such as Flash and Silverlight irrelevant, the significant hurdle of insuring compatibility across all the various browser HTML5 implementations out there remains.  Further complicating things, each browser company often has its own competing business agenda.  For the WC3, getting HTML5 off the ground can sometimes look like an exercise in cat-herding (in fact, there still hasn’t yet been agreement on the underlying video codec).

This is one of the primary reasons widespread adoption of HTML5′s native video tag is still a few years away.

Who’s dreading the advent of HTML5 almost as much as Adobe?  Probably the web developer, who will have to test on five different browser HTML5 implementations rather than on a single Flash container.

For more on HTML5 video click here.

When you live in a foreign country, sometimes it’s the little things:

Upon moving to Berlin last year I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was thedailyshow.com not geo-blocked over here, but entire episodes would stream with no commercial interruption whatsoever!  I know, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, does it – still, I’d get a little kick out of that commercial-free skip from one segment to the next each and every time – it felt like I was getting away with something.

Like I said, it’s the little things.

Until recently, that is – watching an episode at home a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find a low-budget German commercial for a shooter video game inserted into my previously commercial-free Daily Show stream at each segment break!  Interestingly, the commercial’s audio was missing and the video resolution was awful.  More interestingly still, after the spot, I was returned not back to the start of the next segment, but was instead deposited at some arbitrary point three quarters of the way through the episode.

It’s been that way for a week now: the same soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial during each commercial break, followed by a return to some random spot later in the episode.

It all felt like such a hack that I got curious – so as a quick experiment, from my office one day I fast-forwarded to a few of the segment breaks I had seen carrying the soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial when streamed from home  …and lo and behold, no soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial!

This meant the source of the commercial is relatively local.  Still, it could be there’s nothing shady going on at all: my home ISP could be streaming from a content delivery network with Comedy Central-sanctioned advertising support, and my office could be streaming from a CDN without.  However, given how thoroughly hacked the insertion of the commercial (and the commercial itself) feels, I wonder if something more ‘informal’ is  happening – could it be that my residential ISP is recognizing this particular traffic as a particularly popular video, and so is buffering the stream themselves while they (somewhat unsuccessfully) attempt to insert a commercial they (rather than Comedy Central) sold?

It’s not such a far-fetched premise: I’m continually amazed at the expensive original recording music drops being used on German TV- there’s simply no way some of these low-profile German TV programs are paying Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith and Nirvana for the use of 3 of their most recognizable hits, all within the space of a minute or two – maybe things are just looser over here

On the other hand, detecting the presence of the stream would require some level of packet inspection – something I’d be surprised could happen in privacy-minded (and Google Street View-unfriendly) Germany.

The soundless, grainy German shooter video game commercial – it remains a mystery.

Back from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, strangely, of all things, it was micro-blogging that got rejected.

Yup! No Twitter, no Facebook status updates, no quick text shout-outs. Nope! Nada! Nothing!

To be sure, any and all mobile communication on all carrier networks was out. Voice and data. You name it.

While I initially suspected complete event-caused subscriber overload (my Blackberry screen message said as much), I soon discovered this “no mobile” diet is a perfectly normal scenario on D.C.’s National Mall.

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