CHENNAI: The silver screen is shrinking. The 29-inch marquee might just fit into your 12-inch-computer screen soon, once Reliance Infocomm, possibly with some help from Microsoft, introduces its Internet protocol television (IPTV).

Under the brand Home Netway, it will seek to do pretty much everything Direct-To-Home (DTH) platforms are promising: movie on demand, options to pause and rewind live television or program TV to tune or record your favourite shows automatically... At the click of a button, converging telephone, TV, Internet and video, all into one set-top box and one remote control that manage all your entertainment, information and communication needs. Though Reliance officials here are tight-lipped about the time-frame of the launch, a company representative says a pilot project is on in Mumbai. Microsoft, apparently, has provided IPTV software for the tests.

"Home Netway is currently under testing at various locations covering thousands of households," the official website says. "It will redefine home entertainment and will bring distance learning, remote health care, e-governance, smart home controls, video-on-demand and numerous other digital applications into millions of Indian homes."

Through a 100 Mbps (megabits per second) bandwidth connection and a 40-gigabyte set-top box capable of storing 10 hours of programming, you will be able to watch over a hundred channels, sing along your favourite music, talk to anyone, anywhere in the world and type e-mails.

Home Netway will capitalise on Reliance's 60,000-km-long optical fibre network and hopes to cover another 5,000 towns in the country this year.

With Space TV, the Tata-STAR joint venture, launching its DTH platform in the first quarter of next year, choices will be back and the monopoly of cable operators will be a thing of the past.

Elsewhere, in a research facility in Sydney, Peter Smart, an engineer with Foxtel, is toying with three-inch-wide hand-held TV. The screen is shrinking, indeed.

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