A look at the (near) future of TV
There has been a robust reader debate following a post on Russell Brown's Public Address blog previewing this week's Future of Television Media7 special.
But, typically, the game has changed even since that post was written.
The pundits were lining up to predict that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would next week announce a revamped version of the company's Apple TV set-top box - this one running the same operating system as the iPhone and iPad.
But Jobs appeared to quash the idea - for now at least - in an intriguing onstage session at the D8 tech seminar. Jobs said there was no scope for "a better TV" because "there's no way to get it to market".
He didn't, he said, want to simply make 'another TiVo". Notes on his appearance are here. But if Jobs isn't inclined to jump in, others certainly are.
Hulu, a joint venture between US networks NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment and ABC that provides a similar service to TVNZ ondemand, this week made a bid to boost its flatlining viewer numbers by announcing that it will soon be available via the Xbox 360's Xbox Live service.
Son, maker of rival game console Playstation 3 has already ploughed into similar territory with the BBC's iPlayer service and TVNZ Ondemand - and a an art-house and specialist movie service called MUBI, which will launch in a group of territories, New Zealand included, later this year.
But Hulu will not be coming to Apple's white-hot iPad tablet - because its network owners have declined to spend money converting a programme library in Flash video format to the H.264 format Apple requires.
Jobs has famously banned Flash ("yesterday's technology") from the iPad. New Zealand Freeview subscribers still hoping for Sony to finally tweak its PlayTV PVR add-on for the PS3 to work with our Freeview HD standard might get some cheer - but not much - from the news that a second generation of PlayTV is in the works.
The product has been updated to handle Freeview UK's new HD service, which uses the same MPEG4 technology our Freeview HD has been based on since launch. And here's the Google TV introductory video that opened the Meda7 special. Jobs says Google TV will fail within months. But what would he know?
