Time Warner Cable Wants to Put Web on TV

Speaking at the a conference in New York, Time Warner Cable chief Glenn Britt said the company plans to offer subscribers a way to get Internet video on their living room TVs—and plans to offer wireless in-home networking via the company’s cable models. The idea is to enable users to put video from the Internet on their televisions, as well as more-easily enable an entire household of devices—from PCs to game consoles to handheld devices—to utilize a Time Warner Cable broadband connection for all their at-home Internet connectivity.

"We’re actually going to have equipment we make available to subscribers," Britt told Reuters. "It’s actually going to be a new wireless cable modem that will allow you to network everything in your house."

Britt’s comments come a month after Time Warner announced plans to spin off Time Warner Cable into its own business by the end of 2008. Although the cable operation was one of the few bright spots on Time Warner’s larger balance sheets, the split enables Time Warner to focus on being a content company and sidestep anti-competition issues involved in running a media distribution network.

Britt estimated it would take one to two years to popularize technology that puts Internet video on living room TVs, although such services already exist for users willing to be early adopters. For a mainstream consumer application, though, bringing online video to the living room poses two major challenges: making Web video look halfway decent on a large display, and making it easy for users to navigate the morass of video available via the Internet.