Fabrizio Caffarelli, CEO of Italian software company TVBLOB, says imagination is the only limit to what a person can do with the technology.

“My idea was that we should give people the opportunity to make TV,” he says. “By making TV, I mean in the ‘over-the-top’ sense; that you can do anything you want without having to get somebody else's approval. The TVBLOB box also allows you to receive digital terrestrial or satellite TV.”

To become a “blobber,” you need a video camera and broadband connection, as well as a regular TV set. The TVBLOB box connects the various devices and automatically installs an easy-to-use interface on your TV.

With your remote control, you can decide to call a friend, family member or colleague, who is also a blobber, and participate in whatever they are doing; record a popular TV show and send it to someone who lives abroad; or create and publish your own TV program in real-time or as pre-recorded content. You can also record voices and re-encode your old movies into an .mpg format to create DVDs.

As well as combining all popular services, such as YouTube and Skype, in one, Caffarelli stresses the advantage of making use of the TV.

“People spend a lot of money buying expensive TVs and then have to cram in front of the computer to watch what is produced outside the classical video channels,” Caffarelli says.

“With the TVBLOB box, people will not only be able to produce and send quality TV out from the home, but also receive quality TV from people anywhere in the world.”

Caffarelli illustrates the advantage of this by talking about his bedridden wife. “When we have a birthday party for one of our grandchildren, we always organize it where there is bandwidth,” he says. “The party normally lasts for five hours and, during that time, we take turn filming and interviewing the kids. My wife sees all of this on her TV screen with TV quality, making her feel very much part of the festivities.”

The box, which is initially set to cost EUR 500, comes with a 160GB hard drive, which means it can store 160 hours of video. The other advantage is that you do not have to wait to receive the data being sent to you. “You receive it immediately, like you would on any TV screen,” Caffarelli says. “In fact, we can pump TV content all the way up to 15Mb in real time without need of doing any buffering.”

Caffarelli says because the TVBLOB box uses broadband, it is very cheap to stay in touch – and, if you are very ambitious, set up your own TV show.

“Today, if you want to create your own TV, you have to buy a license to use the satellite and that costs a lot of money,” he says. “Instead, you could buy enough bandwidth and, for not more than EUR 2 per person per day, stream video to your audience.”

Besides targeting the consumer market with its TVBLOB box, TVBLOB is sharing its technology with anyone who wants to create special TV portals for public and private businesses. “Our technology is based on an open platform, which means developers can invent the most incredible things,” Caffarelli says, adding that they have several pilots under way with a system integrator in Holland to create social services applications.

“For example, a local church is creating their own TV portal so an old lady can access the portal via her TV screen and watch live or pre-recorded sermons or press a button to get in touch with the priest,” he says. “The opportunities are endless and by providing our enabling technology, thousands of people can invent their own killer applications.”

Torunn Hansen-Tangen