If you’re a tech-savvy early adopter then there are ways to do this, of course. You can connect up your laptop via the TV’s PC input or you can build a media centre PC. You could even buy Apple’s iTV. But with most of the options there’s a small but, ultimately, show-stopping limitation. The PC-connected-to-the-TV option ends up being very frustrating and has what’s become known on tech forums as a low GAF or WAF (girlfriend or wife acceptance factor).

There’s no easy remote control option and you probably don’t want to have a Bluetooth keyboard on the sofa with you, if the computer isn’t a dedicated media device then it will inevitably be used for something at a key moment and no one really want to wait while their TV starts up or reboots. Most of all, we don’t want to ever have to get off the sofa to get the system working.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the steady progress of the big TV operators who are getting close to the ‘watch anything any time’ promise of on-demand. But coming from left-field there are the games consoles, which have some useful plus points. For a start they are connected to the TV, and now many of us have connected ours to the net to play online games. The Wii even has a wireless remote control as standard and tends to be in the living room given its family focus.

Sony and Microsoft have had video services in the market for a while now. Sony’s first foray was to turn the PS3 into a software PVR. In the UK, Microsoft and BT have partnered to allow Xbox users to access BT Vision’s on-demand content. But it’s the massive success of Nintendo’s Wii platform, which hit 2 million sales last month, that looks set to establish the games console in this market. BBC’s iPlayer service is available via the Wii’s built-in browser in the UK but it’s the recently announced family-focussed TV service due go live in Japan early this year, and which will feature original content, that signals Nintendo’s intentions.

With millions of devices connected to TVs and the internet, it’s starting to look like Nintendo could succeed in creating a mass market on-demand platform where those new entrants not connected to the TV, like Joost, are struggling.

While Vizimo has invested substantial effort into enabling content discovery through automated analysis of content, we’ve always been firm believers in the power of social recommendation. The best recommendations invariably come from friends who know what we like and whose tastes we respect. TIOTI has made fantastic progress towards enabling socially driven discovery of what to watch and we were excited by the prospects of boosting this with our analytical capability. Our objective is now to evolve the current site towards providing an unparalleled view of up-coming TV as well as historical TV content.

We’ve already launched an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, called TIOTI TV+ (available on the App Store). The app provides a view of what’s on TV, enables users to remotely set a PVR (Sky+ only at the moment), provides links to related iPlayer content and other viewing recommendations.

Watch this space.

We are big believers in the viability of this type of proposition, although there are clearly many hurdles to overcome from a regulatory and technical perspective. There are many players seeking to benefit from offering on-demand services, but an initiative involving key content owners and broadcasters that would position the on-demand element as an extension of the primary TV would offer a level of coherence that some of the smaller initiatives clearly lack. Presumably the Canvas platform will also be open to other content providers (for a fee).

Although the concept of being able to watch anything, any time is appealing, there is a big gap between the perceived benefits and the reality. The BBC’s iPlayer project has been very successful and is very well done but benefits tremendously from the fact that discovery of the content on offer is linked to content that is currently being broadcast (e.g. catch up on a missed episode). When it comes to true archive content, the situation is different. Do you wait for people to browse through and find something? Do you try to programme new ‘channels’ that use broadband as a delivery mechanism? Or do you provide a search facility and hope that people will know what they are looking for?

With on-demand content, discovery is the key issue: how do you enable viewers to discover stuff that they’d be interested in watching from the vast archive of content available? Or, better yet, how do you allow content to find interested viewers?

This is a key element of what Vizimo offers to partners. Vizimo powers personalised TV with its breakthrough approach to understanding the “aboutness” of content, matching related content and profiling viewers’ content interests. This core capability enables service providers to blend broadcast and on-demand content by recommending relevant on-demand programming based on a viewer’s profile and/or a current show. Discovery of on-demand content is then driven by users’ engagement with broadcast TV. In effect, content finds the user and, critically, by being woven into the same service and guide as broadcast content, on-demand consumption becomes a sit-back, passive experience.

Anyone interested in seeing a limited version of this in operation is welcome to download our application on the iTunes App Store (see TIOTI TV+). Initial reviews are fantastic.

The revolution in our terms is really about going all the way and moving from what is effectively real-time consumption of content to the world of watching whatever you want, whenever you want and wherever on whichever device. Within this new domain we will see a move towards:

(a) Substantial consumption of on-demand content, catalysed by catch-up TV services

(b) Mobile devices becoming a coherent component of users’ broader media experience

(c) Content consumption spanning multiple platforms

As it stands today, the revolution is in that phase where it is not clear who is fighting whom. Everyone is just fighting for consumer media mindshare. As consumers we can watch a growing number of channels on digital terrestrial TV, we could pay an unreasonable amount of money to a satellite or cable company to have a couple of hundred additional channels of guff (and some sport as well). We can get some TV on our mobile phones if we buy an additional subscription for that. There is a growing amount of decent, legitimate TV content available online and if we bothered to hunt around we could find most things online for free.

When we go out to buy a new TV we’ll be offered an internet connected TV that allows us to connect to on-demand services that have done a revenue share deal with the TV manufacturer. An ISP sent us a free internet-connected PVR for renewing a broadband subscription and that device connects to the ISP’s video on demand service. Our DVD rental subscription now includes a video download service. The new WiFi hub that we bought acts as a media extender and also connects to some kind of on-demand video service if we have a compatible PVR and the new home PC that we purchased is a media centre.

Basically, it is likely to be messy over the next couple of years as players jockey for position in the hopes of capturing some of the value. Our goal within this blog is to track some of the key trends and, while we will try not to do the hard sell on why Vizimo is so great, we hope you will not mind the occasional mention.