The New York Times has just published a piece on a technology we’ve written about a few times before (here, here, and here).  They’re covering research into its possible uses in the data center, whereas we came across it in a consumer electronics context:

Problem: Stakeholders in the preservation of the broadcast/cable television paradigm (networks, cable companies) are much less inclined to deliver content via the internet to your television than they are to your computer’s web browser.  That’s a shame, because your computer is essentially a single user, lean-forward device – not great for television.  In fact, that’s what makes it nonthreatening enough to be accommodated.  It’s a business-driven issue rather than a technological one, and it’s what has crippled Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee, and any number of other set-top box contenders to date.  It could be a while before a stable and sustainable internet television business model gets hammered out.   In the meantime, how to get that web content over to the television where it belongs, without running an HDMI cable under  the carpet?

Solution:  Use an  Ultra Wide Band wireless solution, of course!  Getting an uncompressed audio and video stream over to the television would require a lot more bandwidth than what even the most up-to-date flavor of  802.11 wireless technology can handle, but luckily, ‘short fat pipe’  UWB technology capable of moving a very large amount of data a very short distance does exist, and in fact it’s been around for a few years now.  It was surprisingly difficult to find, but over a year ago we found a simple and inexpensive  WiMedia-based solution that we’ve happily been using ever since: it consists of only a small (dongle-sized) USB2 transmitter at the computer and another small dongle-sized HDMI receiver at the television.  Install the driver on your computer, put that website or iTunes video into full screen mode, and you’re good to go (until you have to get up off the couch to pause the video – but hey).

The product (bought for under 100 USD) has ended up being a highly effective workaround for the ‘browser-only’ internet television problem described above.   Funnily, though, it’s remained something of a well-kept secret in the consumer electronics space – and since I imagine our particular use case will disappear once true internet television does indeed arrive (whenever that is), this recent New York Time piece on whether the same ‘short fat pipe’ technology has an unexpected future moving large amounts of zeros and ones between servers in the data center caught our eye.

Back where I come from, they like to say that “soccer is the sport of the future, and it always will be”.

You could say the same about internet television.  OK, sure – even as I type this, millions of video streams are being watched by millions of solitary computer users at this very moment – but while some folks (including us) have spent the last few years promising that internet television is right around the corner, the consumer electronics landscape has become littered with failed attempts to deliver the lean-back/multi-viewer/couch-centric user experience we know and love (and how we do love it – in 2010, Americans spent 2.7 hours per day in front of their televisions).

It’s going to happen, though.  Simply put, the benefits to the user (time shifting, long tail content, à la carte pricing) and the benefits to the advertiser (targeted advertising – need I say more?) are just too compelling for it not to.

So here we find ourselves on the eve of CES: time, once again, to predict the advent of internet television.  Let’s see: there’s Google, back with new and with improved Google TV – as well as a roster of hardware partners that now includes the world’s top two TV makers Samsung and LG (they join founding Google TV partner Sony).  And then there’s Apple – we’ve been speculating about this forever, but recent rumors about an impending Apple TV this year have achieved critical mass, based on word from both Apple suppliers and from the at-large tech media .

Make no mistake: internet television is, to use a technical term, The Big Enchilada.  Precisely because the stakes are so high, though, the incumbents (internet service providers, cable companies, cable networks) have been struggling to stay out in front of the  impending disruption (and avoid having what happened to the music industry happen to them).   Up until now, the best way to do that has been to deny these internet television services access to the same top-tier content they’re happy to be making available via your computer’s web browser (more on one viewer’s workaround: here and here).

The next step in the evolution of internet television is not going to have to do with processor speed or Siri voice-based remote controls – rather, it’s going to involve that vital third part of the internet TV equation: content.

The real thing to watch for in the Google TV announcements coming out of  Las Vegas this week will be what content agreements are in place.

It was Google’s inability to ink such agreements (and some less than well-received hardware) that made 2011 a disappointing year for Google TV.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt has high hopes for 2012, though: he was recently quoted predicting that “by the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded.“  That’s a pretty bold statement.  After the disappointing 2011 Google TV has had, it’s hard to imagine Schmidt going out on a limb like that without having some new top-tier content agreements up his sleeve.  And as for Apple?  Building an internet television has been their obvious next move for at least the past few years.  Why is it only now that it (finally) appears imminent?

The answer to both questions could be that that new business models for internet television content licensing and distribution have recently been ironed out – and we’ll be hearing about them later this week.  

Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

• Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.

  Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.

  Locator. Tara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

  Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?