Intel Joins Forces with Yahoo! for Pushing Internet TV

Internet TV represents, without a doubt, the future of television as we know it, since the WWW is turning into world's greatest content delivery solution. However, in order to be able to enjoy the various types of content that can be delivered via the Internet, users require dedicated, specialized machines, and this is where giant chip manufacturer Intel comes into play.

Thus, at the Intel Developer Forum, the company has just announced the Intel Media Processor CE 3100, which is the first in a new family of purpose-built System on Chips (SoCs) for consumer electronics devices based on the company's Intel Architecture (IA) blueprint. The processing unit targets a wide variety of products typically encountered in people's home entertainment centers, such as optical media players, connected CE devices, advanced cable set top boxes and digital TVs.

Previously known by the codename "Canmore", the Intel Media Processor CE 3100 is a highly integrated solution that combines an IA processor core with multi-stream video decoding and processing hardware, while also adding a 3-channel 800 MHz DDR2 memory controller, dedicated multi-channel dual audio DSPs, a 3-D graphics engine enabling advanced UIs and EPGs, and support for multiple peripherals, including USB 2.0 and PCI Express.

Moreover, the Intel Media Processor CE 3100 also features Intel Media Play Technology, which combines hardware-based decoding for broadcast TV and optical media playback with software-based decoder for Internet content. When a consumer watches broadcast TV or content on optical media players, Intel's Media Play Technology software routes the video to the on-chip hardware decoders, but when viewing Internet content, the software automatically routes the video, and audio as applicable, to a software codec running on the IA processor core.

And what's the connection with Yahoo!, you might ask? Well, it's actually quite simple. Besides announcing the CE3100 media processor, the two companies have also used this opportunity to preview an application framework for televisions (TV) and related CE devices that use the Intel Architecture. This framework, dubbed the Widget Channel, is, as the name says it, powered by Yahoo!'s own Widget Engine (optimized to work with the CE 3100) and allows users to watch TV programs and, at the same time, view web content.

The Intel Media Processor CE 3100 is scheduled to arrive at various CE manufacturers, such as Samsung Electronics and Toshiba, at some point next month, which means that we might actually see it in action before the year's end.