The Yahoo!/Intel alliance is gaining ground with Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio all on board. The platform is being baked in to TV's via Intel's CE3100 chip (PDF) which does hardware Flash decoding removing the need for an expensive PC style processor. Yahoo!/Intel recently added to their site that Flash support is coming although curiously it has since disappeared.

The implications however are clear. Online video and other streaming sites will increasingly become accessible on the TV - no PC required. Interestingly, Yahoo! is insisting that their hardware partners do not block any applications (widgets) that are carried in the gallery, although getting into the gallery is another thing.

The greater question is whether people will want this functionality. I work for an online video site and our research shows that people will only go to the trouble of pulling up an online video clip on a TV if it is 40 minutes or longer on average, once the initial 'watch a few YouTube clips' for novelty reasons wears off. The UI effort is simply too great compared to a remote control.

Another option is of course going the specialist set-top box route. Better still, build your own.

It's clear I think that we're heading towards all TV content being streamed over IP. It's addressable, it's dynamic, it's global.

A neat new service is http://worldtv.com/ - people from around the world are creating online TV channels out of clips from YouTube, Metacafe and other online video sites. A Top 40 for each country shows the most popular user created channels.