Allen Weiner

According to a story in The New York Times, General Electric is getting back into the TV manufacturing business, partnering with Tatung, a Taiwanese electronic company, creating a series of new sets that have Internet capability. The plan is to start with Internet access via a separate box migrating to in-set Internet access next year. This is hardly first-mover advantage as a number of manufacturers, including Sony, already produce or have announced production of TVs with similar capabilities. The twist here is that GE, who owns NBC-U, plans on pre-loading content from the Peacock Network (and its subsidiaries) on the sets so you can watch “The Office” or recaps of Notre Dame football by clicking your remote on an on-screen widget. Yes, it’s like turning on your PC to find myriad cheery icons offering free trials of AOL (sorry, couldn’t resist), Microsoft Office or Quicken. Increasingly, hardware OEMs are looking with greater circumspection at third-party pre-loads believing that the valuable real estate on a PC screen could be something they mine with their own branded software and services.

So now we face a future where the next valuable virtual real estate could be on your plasma screen. And while the GEs of the world will naturally want to differentiate their widgets from others, IP-delivered content icons that pop up on your TV, this scheme will only work in open delivery platforms such as the one Yahoo! has planned for its TV widget plan announced at the recent Intel Developer Forum. If TV widgets beget more widgets then this could be just the fuel the electronic program guide businesses need to move forward with greater speed and add order to on-screen chaos.

Of even greater consideration is what impact IP-delivered TV content directly to the consumer could have on cable and satellite providers as well as telco’s hope for IPTV. For all consumers except those served by fiber optic networks such as Fios or U-Verse, bandwidth to the home will fall short of delivering a continuous reliable TV experience that comes close to today’s HD programming. With bandwidth caps and tiered pricing under consideration by leading ISPs, a likely outcome could be a premium service bundle that gives consumers the IP juice they need to fully deploy their TV widgets. This could provide an alternative revenue stream for cable company ISPs who may be threatened by cable service exodus. Such a move does puts IPTV in the form of telco TV in peril, replicating the business issue facing telco service providers on a number of fronts: what’s our future beyond the plumbing business? As of yet, no good answer has emerged.