Future of TV is future for Intel

September 27, 2009

By: Richard Hart

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The future of TV is the future of Intel. That was the message at the annual Intel Developer Forum held at Moscone Center this week when the giant computer company began to look like a television company.

"Broadcast is not going away," Eric Kim assures us. "You know, people love broadcast TV and they love the Internet. The debate used to be, 'Will Internet beat out broadcast?' We think that's the wrong debate."

Kim is Senior VP of Intel's Digital Home Group. Before joining the company, he was Director of Strategy for a television manufacturer. At Intel's 2009 Developer Forum he kicked off a day devoted to TV. The company is so stoked about it because there are 500 billion hours of television in the world. Video will account for 90 percent of all Web traffic by 2013 and broadcast revenue is still 50 times that of Web video.

"A number of years ago, we thought that simply having PCs sitting in the living room and connected to the TV was the best answer," Kim says.

But, it turned out that consumers don't want a keyboard and a mouse in the media room. So, Intel believes that the future is a better TV, meaning chips sets designed specifically for the set tops, rich visual interfaces based on technologies such as Adobe Flash, and built-in gaming hardware that could retire the XBox and Play Station. The television camera of the future will actually be two cameras, one for the left eye and one for the right eye, because it's 3D. Intel is convinced that the future of television includes 3D.

On stage were demos by Los Gatos HDI and by Hollywood's 3Ality, Director James Cameron's company. Chief Technology Officer Howard Postley says, "3D has changed from being used as a gimmick to being used as an ambient effect. So, it's now creating a window into the environment a lot like the way they talked about HD."

But, just as with HD, a lot of infrastructure change needs to take place and the advertising model needs to be fixed. Despite that, it is clear that people who once developed software and hardware for the PC are taking the TV seriously again.

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