By Carolyn Schuk

 

Last week the folks who are trying to figure out the contours of the "digital home" of the not-so-distant-future converged on the Santa Clara Convention Center at the CONNECTIONS Digital Living conference. And no picture of the connected future is complete without considering the swarm of digital video entertainment headed for your house and mine via the Internet.

While many people are working on how to get all this to your house, Littleton, MA-based ZeeVee has a solution for bringing it to the place inside your house where you want to watch it: your big screen, high definition TV set. The company calls it "local-casting" and it works essentially like familiar cable TV service.

Using a device about the size of your cable box – the ZvBox – ZeeVee brings the Internet to your living room using the coaxial TV cable already in your house. Simply connect the ZvBox to your PC at one end and a cable TV jack on the other, designate an unused TV channel as your ZeeVee channel, and tune in.

 

It works just like any other broadcast channel, except that the programming is coming from your computer – for example, movies and music stored on your computer, video from websites like YouTube, or movies downloaded directly from Netflix. To help you navigate. ZeeVee comes with a special remote featuring a mouse-like touchpad.

 

"It's a whole-house DVR and DVD player," says ZeeVee Marketing VP Brian Mahoney. "It plays all your content. There's no clutter in the living room. And there's no change in user behavior."

 

It's all good news except for the price: $499. However, ZeeVee hopes that the fact that there's no ongoing subscription fee will make the high price more palatable to customers. The ZvBox will start shipping the end of this month and you can pre-order it at Amazon.com.

 

Carolyn Schuk can be reached at cschuk@earthlink.net.