Escaping the walled garden of connected TV

One trend on display at last week's Consumer Electronics Show was the gradual expansion in online content available on connected TVs. Major set manufacturers continue to confine their sets to a walled garden of sites and apps that they have approved, but the turf is expanding and the barriers to entry are dropping. For example, manufacturers are making application development kits widely available, instead of just providing them to selected software companies. Meanwhile, upstarts continued to announce products or technologies designed to bring the entire unfiltered Web to the TV screen. Two particularly clever ones came from Orb and Snapstick. The show also featured a number of companies that simply make it easier to connect a computer to a digital TV set, essentially turning the TV into a big computer monitor.