Cablevision Shows CTI stands for Computer-TV Integration

How big an industry will computer-television integration industry become and will it dwarf the multibillion dollar computer-telephony integration market which was responsive for originating the CTI acronym?

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How will carriers and cable companies navigate the new world of computer-television integration and can it be profitable for them?

Video revenue which carriers and cablecos rely on will continue to decline over time and YouTube and Hulu are just a few services which are responsible for this migration from television to the computer video watching. Still, as carriers cope with this transformation, for consumers, there is still no easy way to transfer content from YouTube to that shiny new flat screen TV in the living room. There are devices like ZeeVee which connect to your computer and broadcast the output to a cable channel – accessible to all the TVs in your house but none of computer/TV integration products has become mainstream – not even Apple TV.

The ZeeVee idea has been emulated by Cablevision, the cable company serving parts of the northeast and will be turned into a service soon…. Tom Keating explains it is called called PC to TV Media Relay and it uses software on your computer to upload a video signal to Cablevision which is converted to a cable signal which you can watch throughout your home.

There are some potential privacy concerns as Tom points out but once we realize the ISP already has access to everything we do online, there is no need for additional alarm.

Cablevision is extremely forward looking – they have provided free WiFi to their customers for years, they have an online programmable DVR service and a mobile/desktop portal at optimum.net which affords customers access to many of the company’s services.

Personally I hope the name “PC to TV Media Relay” gets changed because even engineers will likely find it cumbersome.

One imagines this new service should help reduce churn and if the interface is easy to use it may even spur defections from service provider TV from AT&T and Verizon.

Still, there is always room for further enhancements and some of the future improvements I would like to see from the company are Slingbox-type features allowing TV viewing on a mobile device/laptop. In addition I am very interested in the connectivity between DVR and computer and am wondering why no standard exists like a URL which allows us to click to record a future program.

For example let’s say you want to record Jay Leno but since he seems to be on TV at a different time each month lately you lose track of how to find his program. Meanwhile, NBC is sweating bullets because analysts are saying Late Night on NBC will never be the same as the Leno brand is tarnished due to the frequent program moves and squabbles with Conan O’Brien. Wouldn’t it be really amazing if NBC could push a URL which allows users to click and instantaneously set their DVRs to record the program forever?

TMC’s Erik Linask Discusses this Cablevision story and other news

Moreover, now that we have computer to TV and DVR service from at least one cable company, why can I not DVR live programs from Hulu and other services?

A multibillion dollar industry called CTI was launched when computers and telephony systems started to communicate, what are the possibilities afforded by computer-TV integration?

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