Hey, I’m all for Internet-connected entertainment, and I’m obviously not alone. Web-based video viewership has been catching on as dramatically, partly driven by the fact that nearly every new set-top box and even some TVs have become Internet-enabled. ABI Research (www.abiresearch.com) just released a report that describes this trend in great detail, and the company expects that the number of web browsers embedded in consumer electronics devices such as digital TVs, game consoles, and set top boxes will grow from 60M in 2008 to 214M by 2013. That’s rather impressive growth.

John DiLoreto
Analyst and Editor for
Insight Media

"Most forward-thinking consumer electronics vendors today are integrating IP ports in their mainline consumer electronics devices," says research director Michael Wolf. He went on to say that many forms of content are coming to the living room via the Internet, not just web surfing but mainstream TV content, sometimes called "over-the-top" because it bypasses traditional broadcast methods, sometimes on top of the same physical network.

"The push to bring web surfing, over-the-top video content, social networking and other web 2.0 applications to consumer electronics is creating a need to integrate browsing engines and dynamic user interfaces as well as other platforms for content rendering," said Wolf.

The integration of web browsers into digital TVs is already common in Japan and is becoming increasingly more common in North America, with vendors such as Sony integrating browsers as a way to help deliver web services. In my Display Daily of August 22, 2008, I described Intel and Yahoo’s recent announcement about porting its widget platform to the living room. Unfortunately, not all of it looked ready for primetime, with a river of widget icons, a sidebar and other Mac-like visual elements.

According to Wolf, "…in the living room we see the browser core — either explicitly or as part of a rich Internet application runtime such as Adobe’s AIR — as one of the important elements in this vision of the future."

What this means is that not all web browsers are created equal. That’s the good news. Otherwise, can you imagine turning on your TV and seeing a screen like the accompanying one from ovguide.com for choosing what to watch? There are well over a hundred links on just the first page!

ABI Research’s recent study examines the different standards involved in making a browser-based user interface for the living room, and explores vendors’ efforts to integrate web-based standards, like the CE-2014 HTML user interface used by Yahoo. Many of the initial implementations of this standard will use a variation of Webkit, the same browser core used by Apple and Google, two very forward-thinking companies.

So, there is hope that CE manufacturers and content providers will take a look at these standards and this report, because there is still, obviously, much work to do.