Wired News has a solid story on the DEMO conference: Six Minutes to Stand Out.
Reporter Daniel Terdiman singled out one company that also impressed me with its six-minute presentation:
…cable TV companies may find themselves threatened by Mediabolic, whose network media player is designed to give TV viewers a previously unavailable level of personal control.
The media player allows users to run custom-designed web-based applications on their TV. For example, users can get instant eBay auction alerts, view their Netflix queues, play their Live365 music collections or any of hundreds of other applications — all on their TV.
Amazingly, all of their applications looked exactly like Windows XP Media Center Edition. In fact, several portions of their demo used add-ins that are running on my Media Center PC. It’s not a program you can buy and use to build your own Media Center. Instead, they’re selling a development platform that hardware companies can adopt. We’ll see how much interest they can muster.