YouTube on TV - hey, we did that 2 years ago

So YouTube reckons you will soon be able to play it on TV via games machines (seen on TechCrunch):

Currently in beta, the TV Website offers a dynamic, lean-back, 10-foot television viewing experience through a streamlined interface that enables you to discover, watch and share YouTube videos on any TV screen with just a few quick clicks of your remote control. With enlarged text and simplified navigation, it makes watching YouTube on your TV as easy and intuitive as possible. Optional auto-play capability enables users to view related videos sequentially, emulating a traditional television experience. The TV Website is available internationally across 22 geographies and in over 12 languages.

Very interesting - now we actually did it 2 years ago with the experimental MyPCTV rig we built (see some of our experiments here). The streamlined interface was a laptop computer. Lean back experience was by wireless keyboard. The real trick is to buy a TV with a VGA input, as that way you don't need to convert VGA output into other forms of TV input (I guess this is why they have gone for games machines first, as they have those converters onboard).

We also wrote a script that could search YouTube and assemble then play videos according to the search term. The YouTube system of course will have had a lot more coding put into it, especially the EPG, which is a very expensive undertaking to get right - just ask the BBC!

We did the rig as a proof of concept more than anything else to understand if and how Web TV would outflank IPTV / Cable TV, we couldn't see this being a sustainable business for us as a startup. Were we wrong, could we have built something that Google may have bought? Who knows - but in 2006 the picture quality was not very good when you passed it up to the TV, it needed the new higher quality picture stream and that wasn't under our control. (An outfit called Jamzee later built a similar system and attached it to a social network - good luck to them - maybe Google will buy them?)