The Internet-TV Interface

Last summer, I disconnected my land line phone and cable. The triple play is an outdated concept - all you really need is a data line.

Since then, my wife and I have been watching most of our video entertainment through Hulu and Netflix (with a few DVD plays here and there). It's been great - we're seeing everything we saw before and want to see, on demand in HD.

The one element that's been lacking has been the interface. The Netflix interface was solved back in November, when Xbox released it's NXE update. But to watch Hulu videos, I've still had to connect my laptop to the television (just a docking station, really), and then navigate the site with a wireless mouse. Which works fine, but it's not ideal - the wireless range is only so far, it needs a flat surface to run on (and doesn't work on our wicker table), and the text can be a little hard to read at distance.

Enter Boxee. It's an interface for web TV, designed to look good and facilitate navigation on a television. If I had an iphone, it would even let me use that as a remote. Which is pretty good, but what I like even better is using my Wii Remote.

This is all pretty bleeding edge right now, but I love where it's going. We're still struggling through a lot of design-the-UI-for-the-platform issues, but ubiquitous data access is getting closer.