It is not well known, but Digital TV in SD o HD is actually being transmitted in IP packets by cable providers.  Your digital television set has an IP subnet address, for UDP packets being sent to your home/office.  For  public cable TV,  this IP address is a sub net of the cable WAN network.  If you have a High Bandwidth connection,  you are sending and receiving IP/TCP packets for your Internet connection on port 80 with a DHCP address from the same cable WAN subnet.  

We can converge the two mediums by simply adding the following style sheet code to any and all HTML web pages that will be ported to the ITV television experience.  The background image is no longer static, it is dynamic.  It can be streamed from an IP source, such as a U-Tube video, or it may be an HD port carrying UPD packets. 

If the target media is not an ITV set, then the HTML page would display as it does today, without further change.  Of course, there must be some way to detect that we are rendering to an ITV capable browser, so that we can render the content in two formats using the same web page, if this is a requirement. 

When a viewer changes channels on his/her ITV set, the DNS name for the HD/SD channel will also change, allowing the viewer to access his/her own web page at the updated IDNS (an ITV webchannel). A public/personal experience is possible if the viewer has set up his/her own profile for that particular website, or if he/she has an active session with that website.  Here is where we see the usefulness of client side cookies, since some ITV sites will have millions of logged on viewers.

Voila!  The web page has an active video background that is rendered by the ITV set, along with the HTML content, on the same HD / SD screen.  To the HTML developer, the background image is transparent and can be overlaid with personalized content. 

As an example, and one that my sons would enjoy, we could some day  see a sports game on ITV, with the HD video as we see it today, but with an overlay that the ITV webchannel makes available to the viewer.  If they are playing the very popular "football league" game, they could see their own player roster appear on the HD ITV screen, along with real time scoring updates, for their viewing pleasure. 

Madison Avenue of course could see their products on video ads, but with an HTML overlay personalized to the viewer.  Coupons or sales perhaps, or how about  a Buy Me Now button, without any additional coding on the server side, nor on the HD video stream.   The two medias merge only on ITV, but can be used separately as well, for those people who do not have the ITV capability installed, yet. 

Simple, Clean and Easy.  As it should be.  Why is this of political interest to us? Because some day we will be able to vote electronically while viewing political debates, accessing an electoral ITV website, and our own voting profile. Private? Secure? Secret? Of course, how do you think "players" access their secret Swiss bank accounts on the Internet? Yes we can!

Vantari

Atlanta, GA

January 18, 2008

Atlanta, GA
Jan 18, 2008