Online Content Delivery to Home Appliances

Internet streaming services like YouTube (free) and Netflix (paid) provide additional content sources to traditional IPTV services. Commonly accessed on computers, how these services can be enjoyed through home appliances such as TV sets is still unclear although there are early attempts. We propose to physically separate application functions such as content browsing and selection from content delivery functions so that (a) Web interfaces provided by the streaming sites can be reused (b) User input like typing can be less painful. We present the design of our proof-of-concept prototypes based on off-the-shelf components and discuss a possible path to Next-Generation Network (NGN) integration.