AN OPEN PROGRAM GUIDE

You know that scrolling grid on your TV that tells you what's on? While you probably think of your guide as an example of really bad interface design, you may not realize that it's part of a multi-billion dollar market in a space called "Electronic Program Guides" or EPGs. And, you may not realize that this "portal to your television" is protected by several hundred patents owned by corporations who want to take over your television.

We think media guides should be based on an open set of protocols, backed by software, data, Internet standards documents, and defensive patents. Instead of a scrolling grid that lists what's on TV, we think media guides should be:

• Multimedia. "What's on the Tube?" went out in the 60's. You ingest streaming media on DVDs, Television, the Internet, and many other places. Current EPGs are monomedia guides in a multimedia world. Bleah.


• Real-Time. Your current TV guide is based on old technology. It delivers, as they say on the net, "same-day service in a nanosecond world." If something is happening now, do you really want some middleman deciding when you should know about it?


• Community-Based, Not Corporate-Based. What's on your media guide and what it looks like should be determined by you, not some "Portal to Television."


• Hardware Independent. You watch media on many kinds of boxes. Media guides should be standards-based so you can figure out what's on no matter which box (or boxen) you bought.

Over the next two years, we're going to do a variety of things to change this situation. If you want to stay tuned in, join the signals@invisible.net mailing list for periodic updates, or follow NetTopBox at our developer hub, Mappa.Mundi.