Internet-TV

                    Yoichiro Tomari
               Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
             Information Technology R & D Center

 We designed and implemented a networked TV, "Internet-TV", which
facilitates accessing the Internet, and put it on the market in Japan
in October 1996.
 We designed it to be used in a living room so that computer novices
can browse WWW home pages and send/receive E-mail messages
using a remote control unit without knowledge of PCs.

 User interface is one of the most important factors. TVs are used by
almost all home users. Most of them have not used PCs that are
difficult for them to use. So, TVs have to be very easy to handle by
remote control unit.
 The display resolution of TVs is generally smaller than that of PCs.
Like "Compact HTML for small information appliances", it is necessary
to define a guideline for Web access from TVs.

 Telephone charges are expensive in Japan and some other countries, so
we cannot access the Internet via phone line for many hours.
Internet-TV should have the function to access the WWW contents via
broadcasting.
 In Japan, there are different types of VBI data broadcasting, ADAMS
and Bitcast. But now they are not tuned for TVs. They require
hard disks to save the contents broadcasted. Some Internet-TVs and
Internet set top boxes have hard disks, but we do not think it is good
for TVs to have disks because the life of disks is shorter than that
of TVs.