As much as I’d love to give cable the boot (especially in light of the recent Time Warner and Cablevision issues with carrying and paying for Fox, Food Network and HGTV) I still see roadblocks ahead for TV over the Internet.  YouTube and Hulu have changed the game and made major in roads into original and re-broadcasted content.  And this will only serve to bring new entertainment into more homes.  An article from wired.com today about the upcoming CES talks about Boxee Box,  a set top Internet Video box like your cable box but delivering video to your TV without your computer.  Boxee Box looks like an amazing device, it incorporates social networking as a means to find videos, but I still see big issues.

The Guide. The onscreen guide on your cable box or TiVo brings you an extremely easy way to find content, people are accustomed to using this system to scroll through channels and find shows.  If Boxee Box or other Internet TV boxes can reproduce this simplicity for finding quality video content then they’ve solved a big part of the problem.

Multiple Episodes. Finding, sorting and viewing multiple episodes of a show is key.  It’s built into TiVo if you record a season of a show.  It’s of course built into DVD and Blu-Ray when you pop in a disc. But right now it’s hard to find the second video in a series on YouTube sometimes; it’s not always in the related videos module (or the 5th video in the series is there, but not the second) and you become forced to click around to the user’s upload page and search for the video.  So once the all of the various video sources have clean standard feeds that the set top boxes can read then finding the next video in a series may become an issue if someone already didn’t create a playlist.

Quality Content. Despite all the funny viral videos that spam the net and waste your time every now and then, most people still watch TV for quality content.  Some stations such as TBS and Cartoon Network are deploying full length video of previously aired shows (albeit with a little difficulty in listing them in order).  And Hulu gathers lots of once-on-tv programming into a single space and could help change the landscape of TV once they provide access to that content.

Having a simple guided access to episodic lists of quality content will be the key to Internet Video on TV.

Till then I’ll be happy with my TiVo, upset at Cablevision, and hoping that Hulu works on delivering their content (especially to TiVo.)  And Tivo, if you’re listening, check out Boxee Box as competition despite it’s lack of a coax interface.