• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 14, 2010

I have to admit that I am not among the digerati who plug their laptops or a dedicated PC into their home theater. First, if I put one more fan-operated, CPU-driven device around my HDTV, I am certain to hit a kind of critical mass. Something is sure to catch fire. Second, I just never liked the idea. Call me a PC bigot or just a wishful thinker, but I always felt that hooking up a full-bore PC to my TV somehow was one geeky move too far. I was looking for the more elegant solution to getting digital video from my AppleTV, PS3, Xbox or a more task-specific streaming media box. Worse, I didn't want to acquiesce to Microsoft's master plan of dominating my living room with Windows. This is how I rationalize myself out of guilt over the Xbox that I use most often for Netflix. Human self-deception knows no bounds ... or at least this human's doesn't.

From the Windows Media Center's interface to Boxee's, everyone has been trying to craft a better looking and acting guide for discovering Web video on a large TV screen. Yesterday GlideTV introduced a beta version of what seems to be a pretty slick interface. The San Francisco based company's "Big Screen Browser" present you with a wall of tiles that can drill into categories of Movies, Music, News, TV and Sports. The catalog is kind of quirky in that it often will drop you into opportunities to buy some piece of TV or film content rather than watch or preview it. The hooks into Netflix, Amazon and iTunes are all pretty good if your object is to buy something. If you really are looking to get some recent clips from Mad Men or have last night's MTV Video Awards must-sees surface, then it gets frustrating.

On the surface the search engine seems nicely arranged to target a query against most of the major search engines and video repositories like Hulu, YouTube, IMdb, etc. In practice, the results are mixed. I tried to search for "Ready to Assemble" to see if I might gather episodes from that branded IKEA show, and I ended up with anime and Gilligan's Island.

I am not sure what content experience GlideTV is aiming for right now, but the interface itself is quite good. Admittedly I played with it on PC and without the remote control it really was made to use, but the browser was uncluttered and kept the choices broad and sparse for navigation. The pop-up search keyboard lets you access over a dozen vertical video searches. And the multiple windows are very nicely done, with separate panes sitting on a glossy base. If you want to drop into straight Web browsing, the software will import your desktop bookmarks. Web page zooming, tab navigation etc. generally are better than on any of my consoles' sorry excuses for a browser.

As a real guide to Web video content, GlideTV's initial try at a big foot browser may have a wider reach than something like Boxee, but the latter's widget/app approach seems to result in a more focused Web video viewing result. Still, early days, as they say. But the race clearly is on to make a better Web-to-TV video browser.