'Connected' homes still not quite a reality

Comcast, Verizon inch ahead with new services

For years, the connected home has been a recurring theme in tech mythology - a world in which a photo taken on a digital camera pops up on a grandmother's television screen hundreds of miles away, or a sitcom started at home is watched on a mobile device on the train ride to work.

"That's the long-sought promise, and that might be long-sought for a long time," said Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group.

For now, providers are inching toward the most basic level of connection.

Today, Comcast Corp. rolls out in Massachusetts a service that allows customers to start watching an On Demand program on the couch in the living room, then move to another room to finish the show on another TV with a digital cable box.

Verizon already allows its television customers to record programming on a digital video recorder on one TV, but then watch it on another set in the house. Verizon also lets people look at photos or listen to digital music collections stored on their computers through their televisions, and has Web-connected widgets that show up on the TV, displaying traffic or weather.

But for the dream of the connected home to work - and more importantly, for it to be useful - "it has to work seamlessly - and that's the problem right now. For all their good intentions all these services are full of seams," said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

"It's a marathon, and we're only one mile in - the goal of Verizon and Comcast is to make it the next two to three miles, without tripping, so they can stick with it for the next eight to 10 years."

The idea of shifting content from one platform to another with ease may sound technologically compelling, but with about three television sets in the typical US household, the first challenge is to make sure content that is already designed for the TV is actually shared between all the TVs in a home.

Comcast is working toward that with its new service, and plans to introduce a way to watch programs recorded on a DVR on any TV in the house, said Randy Waddell, a senior vice president.

The company also plans:

To add caller ID onto the TV.

To offer a portable DVR player that can be removed from a docking station and be used to watch recorded programs or DVDs anywhere.

To offer the capability of programming a DVR remotely from a computer or a cellphone.

But even those ideas, still in the pipeline, are far from new. "These applications have been discussed - caller ID on TV was around a decade ago," Leichtman said.

Verizon is looking at deploying some new connected home services, such as Internet-connected widgets that could display school closings or other local information. The company is also experimenting with video conferencing - a technology that has also never taken off - in a form that would require little setup.

But while cable companies are plowing forward, other companies are looking for ways to disrupt the market.

Sling Media Inc. allows a person to move media from a television set to Internet-connected devices by sending the channels he or she would see on the television to a computer or smart phone.

ZeeVee, of Littleton, will begin shipping a $499 device this summer that takes Internet content from a computer and turns it into a high-definition channel on the television.

"Unfortunately, Comcast or [Verizon] FiOS, or whatever, cannot offer everything as video on demand. What's the ultimate video on demand? It's the Internet," said Vic Odryna, chief executive of ZeeVee.

ZeeVee, which has a box that plugs into a computer and into the coaxial cable in a home, turns the ever-proliferating amount of free video on the Web, from "Doogie Howser, M.D." to "Star Trek," into a format that might eventually challenge cable providers.

"The Internet, because it's completely open - nobody controls who has access to what on the Internet," McQuivey said. "You're able to experiment and roll out business models so much faster.

"We saw this when AOL used to be a closed network, and then AOL died when they opened it on the Web. That's what a cable system is - it's a closed network."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.