Over the last four years, TVBLOB, an Italian-based company with a funny name, has sought to bring about the most comprehensive software of web-based features on a TV set.
At this week’s CeBit conference in Germany, TVBLOB finally unveiled the first IPTV media box packing that software, the BLOBBox. Judging by the initial specs, it might be too ambitious for its own good and might end up swallowing some engineers by the whole.
The BLOBBox is like an Apple TV on steroids. It’s a media player/video recorder that connects to TVs and has a 160 GB hard drive, a DTT receiver, is optimized for web connectivity and Bit Torrent downloading (through HTTP/FTP), and also has its own custom Linux OS and browser. Streaming from a PC or network is supposed to be simple (hello Wired colleagues’ MP3 collections!), and comes with several sleek on-screen web apps for browsing Google properties like YouTube and Picasa. And with all of that Torrenting going on, it also plays MP4, DivX and XviD files.
Most importantly, TVBLOB claims that its kit transfers web content to TV seamlessly (with HTML and Ajax), almost mirroring the same type of service as the net-based widget TVs we heard about during CES. The only difference is these web widgets are more likely to be used as conduits for the main content, as opposed to separate bite-sized snack apps.
TVBLOB thinks opening up its SDK (called BLOBKit) will easily encourage developers to come out with widget-style applications for their favorite custom channels.
At almost $500 a box and first available only through an Italian reseller, we think it’s going to take a lot more distribution to force people to want to build apps for this. But as a project with a lot of possibilities, I can see a few developers going deep and trying to set up as many ‘web-widgets’ as they can, with some even losing themselves to the tempting power of the Blob’s openness.
According to TVBLOB, the company is looking to license its software to other OEMs, so we might see actually see a BLOB come to the U.S. sometimes soon.
Photos: TVBLOB/flickr
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