A well know Swedish internet guru has proven that broadband speeds of 40 Gigabits per second can realistically be delivered to homes for a low price. Showing a huge act of unselfishness, Peter Lothberg decided his 75 year old mother should be the first to experience the lightning speeds - thousands of times faster than the average home broadband connection.

In practical terms, a speed of 40 Gigabits/sec would allow 1500 streams of HDTV to be accessed simultaneously. If nothing on the HDTV channels takes your fancy (you must be fussy!) then you could easily download a DVD in about 2 seconds.

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The Democracy Player, essentially an RSS video feed aggregator with a slick interface, is busy adding available channels, including a lot of high definition content. The player facilitates subscribing to channels, or feeds, and automatically downloads videos to your computer.

A new feature added to this release is the ability to sort by high definition channels only. The player also indicates which channels, or feeds, are available in high definition.

Most LCD monitors are equivalent to high definition TVs in terms of resolution. I watch online videos on my Dell 24″ widescreen monitor. Watching low resolution video fullscreen is painful.

Having a feed aggregator like the Democracy Player indicate which channels are high definition is a nice feature that should appeal to lots of people. As web video matures, it will be interesting to see if software like Joost transition totally to high definition.

The Democracy Player is one of the few online video players that is open source (hence the name “Democracy”).

In the past year or so, computer graphic cards have begun to sprout HMDI ports allowing you to connect your PC to a High Definition (HD) TV via HDMI cables.

I think it was the Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro that was announced in March 2006 that was the first HDMI graphics card on the market.

While this probably does not mean much to anyone now as there is a lack of HD content available on the internet, we are slowly seeing this begin to change with more internet TV episodes beginning to stream in HD.

TVTonic, for example, has a library of vodcasts that can be watched on a media center PC, with many of them being available in HD and perfect for watching on a plasma television.

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Summary: We will soon be replacing our TVs more often than our PCs as the television advances towards becoming a simple and functional living room PC. The dominant maker of this new hi-tech TV could be one of many companies that could overthrow the Microsoft monopoly.

And at the center of this transformation is the internet.

Mark Cuban recently said that we’ll soon be replacing our TV’s more often than we replace our PCs. I’d have to agree with Mark on this. The evolution of the living room is putting more pressure on the TV set to be able to do more.

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It’s Stage6 Day here on Web TV Wire and Web TV Hub (23/04/07). Learn more…

I was lucky enough to catch up with the insightful Darrius Thompson, the co-founder of DivX, to put him in the hot-seat for 15 questions on the beta launch of Stage6, the video platform and community from DivX.

5 Take home points from the interview:

• Stage6 is more about enabling independent content producers with a professional platform for distributing video online than sharing home video clips.
• Stage6 actually allows you to download content and play it on DivX-compatible consumer electronics.
• HD video is all the rage over at Stage6
• Innovative community features including “Karma” have been introduced in Stage6 beta.
• The DivX software has been downloaded over 200 million times from the Stage6 site.

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Its been said before that HDTV will slow down the evolution of Internet TV because the general low quality of web TV just doesn’t cut it against the sharp crystal clear high definition plasma TVs.

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AT&T Homezone is a mish-mash IPTV/satellite TV service which features live TV from the DISH network, movie downloads from MovieLink and TV shows from Akimbo. The Homezone box does support DVR functionality but is not High Definition (HD) ready.

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