9. Cisco Knows You Talk to Your Television

Video phones haven’t taken off, while video chat has. While the sociologists argue about why, HP and Cisco have been putting in high-end video conferencing systems for businesses that use dedicated rooms with three high-definition screens. And in two to three years, Cisco thinks we’ll have the bandwidth to have high definition conferencing at home on a big-screen TV as part of a cable TV bundle. The exact bandwidth needed, the sound quality and the price are all still to be decided, Cisco’s Patricia Lopez-Weigel told us. However, the room-to-room demo on a 65” 1080p screen with HD audio took about 2Mb per second for the upstream link and delivered impressive quality with no noticeable lag - you can make eye contact with the person you’re talking to, making it feel more like a real conversation.

Placing a video call is like making a phone call; we picked a contact from an address book, heard a brief ring tone and got connected. If you’re talking to more than one site, the system switches automatically when someone new starts talking - but adding a third connection takes the bandwidth needed up to 6 or 8Mbps. Cisco also showed us a concept service as part of a content subscription; sign up for a sports package on TV and you could get extra services including personalized highlight reels, video blogging for your favorite clips and video chat with friends and family in a secondary window on TV while you watch a game. Any game you don’t watch live will automatically show up as a recording. And when you start watching a game or the customized highlights - prioritized by metadata like the teams you follow and whether you want to see players scoring or getting injured - you can pause it on your TV and pick up in the same place on your mobile phone or office PC. You might even manage to watch most of what you pay for.