As new Internet TV players look to invade the living room, some cable and satellite operators are stepping up their embrace of Web technology to jazz up aging interfaces and head off subscriber defections.
At the Consumer Electronics Show Monday, Cox Communications Inc., the third-largest cable operator by subscribers, unveiled a new Internet-enabled set-top box and iPad app with Cisco Systems Inc. to allow customers to search live TV channels as well as third-party online video outlets through a single guide.
The Atlanta-based cable company says it plans to integrate video services like Netflix Inc. into the set-top box and an iPad app over the course of this year, so customers can surf through live TV and streamed content all in one place.
Other pay-TV providers, including Dish Network Corp. and Comcast Corp., are making similar moves to soup up the TV experience. The action largely comes in response to the proliferation of online video available outside the cable ecosystem, including streams from Netflix and other offerings like Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime and television networks' apps and websites.
Many cable and satellite companies are also trying to appeal to subscribers who are turned off by clunky set-top guides and instead prefer Web-video devices that offer far more attractive interfaces.
Some apps, Internet-connected TVs, game consoles and Web-TV boxes such as Roku Inc.'s offer ways to search through and stream online content to the TV set. But television watchers often have to juggle multiple remotes and switch to different inputs to go between Web video and live cable television through their set-top boxes.
Guides and search features that cover all the options in one device have become a consumer's Holy Grail.
Cox's new integrated set-top box and guide promises to eliminate those pains for at least the subscribers who opt to buy the new box, which is likely to cost $5 to $10 on top of their monthly cable subscriptions.
Steve Necessary, Cox's vice president of video, said "not every single app known to man" will appear in the new set-top, but he says he plans on integrating with popular online video services, as well as music apps possibly like Pandora.
Those partnerships will arrive over the course of this year, he said.
Comcast, the biggest cable operator, is already rolling out similar cloud-based functionality through its X1 set-top box in select markets, but it hasn't integrated apps from online video outlets and says it has no imminent plans to do so.
Dish on Monday also showed off the next generation of its Hopper digital video recorder, which is using Internet-based technology to widen its customers' viewing options.
The satellite operator unveiled a new Web-based feature enabled by Sling Media Inc. that will allow Dish subscribers who pay for the new Hopper box to watch all recorded content and live TV channels on any device anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection.
One catch is that only one device at any point per household can be using Sling to watch live TV outside the home.
"We see that Internet delivery of content is probably going to become a very important aspect at some point in the future," said Vivek Khemka, Dish's vice president of product management.
The Hopper's integration with Sling and Dish's existing partnership with Roku means that "now we have technology that allows us to stream live linear television over the Internet."
Dish said the new Hopper box also has a feature to allow viewers to download DVR recordings onto their iPads so that they can watch programs while traveling, for example, on an airplane without any Internet. Any one recording can only be transferred once to a single device to prevent piracy, Dish executives said.
While Dish didn't negotiate with content owners for that right, Comcast also released a similar download feature last month for certain shows and has been negotiating with several programmers for that right.
So far, some premium channels like Liberty Media Corp.'s Starz and CBS Corp.'s Showtime have agreed, although Time Warner Inc.'s HBO is notably absent from the list.
Comcast allows up to three devices to download any one show, with a limit of 10 downloaded programs per device at any one time.
A Dish spokesman declined to discuss the operator's agreements with programmers and said that it is "part of our overall belief that customers want choice and control over their content."
Several Internet video technology startups present at CES noted the heightened pace of Web video innovation among cable and satellite operators.
"If you look at what has happened in the last two or three years, companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu proved that it's possible to deliver a video business over the Internet," said Jeff Miller, chief executive of ActiveVideo Networks, which is testing a cloud-based guide delivered to older-generation Comcast set-top boxes in Chattanooga.
"Nothing breeds innovation like competition," he said.
Cox and Dish also demonstrated recommendation features Monday. Cox's new guide will come equipped with a personal recommendation engine that creates profiles for up to eight different people in a household and recommends items to watch based on their preferences across live television, on demand content, and third-party video apps on the Web. Dish showed off a feature called "what's hot" that aggregates real-time data from Dish viewers to promote trending television programs. That feature integrates into the set -top box and into a new Dish app for tablets that combines guide data with social media.
A big caveat, however, regarding the features on the new set-top boxes is that they don't address the hundreds of thousands of cable and satellite subscribers who still have older set-top boxes and their antiquated guides.
"There's a ton of legacy systems you have to address," said Braxton Jarratt, chief executive of Clearleap Inc., a company that helps media companies deliver Internet video. "The complexity is pretty massive."
