I've been reading articles about Google TV, Microsoft, Sony, BT, Sky and (now) Apple with interest regarding their push to your living room to put content on your TV.  There's a hell of a lot of content on the web and the age old issue of watching this content conveniently on your TV instead of having to fire up browsers on your PC is a problem none of the big companies appear to have really solved.

Sure you can watch some of Sky's content on your Xbox 360 now. But you won't get all of Sky's content because of content restrictions enforced by content distributors. You also won't get 4OD, BBC iPlayer or the ITV Player on this service. In addition to that you won't get YouTube, Hulu or Joost. Basically there is not one set top box that will give you all of these services through your TV without having to switch or unplug some box out of the VGA, SCART or HDMI slot on your TV. My guess is that Google are trying to address this with their new set-top box idea. Weather it will work remains to be seen, because at the end of the day it doesn't matter how fancy your platform is, content is still king.

Content distributors also hold a lot of sway, they dictate how their content can be distributed. If a channel is distributed via the Internet and over encrypted satellite in the eyes of the content provider they are separate mediums which require separate content rights. Hence Sky's problem of only being able to broadcast some of their Sky 1 shows via SkyPlayer and blocking the channels for the duration of that show for SkyPlayer customers while satellite customers get to view it.

Likewise content providers may give the writes to distribute a show over a streaming Internet Service with the caveat that it cannot be streamed to a service that connects to a TV as this right could have been solved to a terrestrial provider. This arrangement makes things incredibly difficult while all the user wants to do is watch their TV shows in the most convenient way possible.

I wish Google TV every bit of success although I am struggling to see how they will be able to offer the content we want all through one set top box. In addition to this problem when watching a series on TV sometimes people would like to start from the beginning of a series people are all raving on about. Content providers don't make it easy to get to this content and their appears to be a high amount of people using illegal downloads via services such as Bit Torrent to get to this content. The video/TV entertainment industry appears to be out of touch with how people would like to consume their content. The same thing happened in the music industry which saw a huge shift in how music was distributed which lead to services such as Spotify.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that held just about every movie, TV series, documentary that had ever been made, made available on demand? You could pay for the content per item or for a monthly fee have access to all of it?

Its quite interesting how Western countries have accused China of hacking into their systems. What I really can't understand is if these systems are so critical to the country and there are so many secrets on them, why put those machines on the Internet to begin with?

Its not rocket science just pull the cable that connects the server to the Internet. Have your own private network not connected in any way to the Internet.

Every now and again I hear friends talking about how popular web sites such as Facebook, My Space, Google Mail, You Tube and Bebo are blocked by their work. CatPass.info is a site that acts as a proxy to sites that have been blocked. In return  (nothing is free in this world!) you get some adverts thrown in at the top of your browser. Not a big price to pay to enable you to see these once blocked sites?

Okay after rebooting my machine twice I finally got the BBC iPlayer to work. Wehoo!

What can I say it actually works! The picture however is very "letterbox" style and not really 100% optimised for computer screens. Oh well will download some more now and see what I get. 

The BT Home Hub I have installed in place of my Conexant Hasbani router has recently started being a real pain in the ar*e. For no reason at all it will drop the Internet Connection and commence downloading updates from BT to update the firmware. It does this without disconnecting the BT Home Hub phone (one of the reasons I went for the hub) but it drops every other Internet connection.

I use the Internet a hell of a lot for work and dropping a VPN connection or a remote Citrix connection is not fun when you are in the middle of some important work. Yes I understand that BT wants to update the firmware but not when I'm using the hub and definitely not when I'm working on the damn thing! If this continues I am going to rip the damn thing out and go back to the Conexant. The Conexant is a simple bit of equipment but it works and is reliable. BT obviously weren't thinking straight when they decided to run updates on the Home Hub, and I suggest if they want this piece of equipment to be key to their new strategic idea of bringing TV, Phones and other services into the home that they had better think good and hard about standard of service. If you are going to update a piece of software you ask first you don't just disconnect people and let them lose their work.