So by now, a very large audience of carriers has determined that IPTV is the way to go as they move towards a fully converged network of offerings. The pace of development has been furious, with most deployments focused on plain vanilla TV service, possibly with a little spice of interactivity thrown in.

Well the most disruptive technologies usually start with a simple demonstration. At Walt Mossberg’s D Conference this month, we think that such a demonstration happened, and that it is going to have an order of magnitude change on the face of IPTV as we know it. A small company with telco-equipment roots, Hillcrest Labs, showed for the first time publicly its new HoME navigation system for the TV.

Big deal. From Moxi to MicrosoftTV2 to ATI’s HDTV Wonder to all sorts of interfaces, people have been trying to remake the image of the TV to make it a bigger and better home for the next generation of revenue-generating services. Indeed, there are a lot of players pounding the pavement, each trying to get the attention of the people holding the big IPTV franchise purse strings. However, it is essential that telcos differentiate their offerings if they want to get real traction in the market. Just a “redo” of the cable TV experience isn’t going to cut it.

Hillcrest is different, and any telco player who has the opportunity to see it work up close will realize how dysfunctional their existing approach to IPTV is.  HoME is that much of a disruptive force for applications being driven on the TV.

Harken back to the days of the first computers and the land of gargantuan machines and garage startups, and figuring out what works on the latest processors and screens and how to make computers usable.  Companies were truly making orders of magnitude shifts in the way people interacted with the computer.

When people look back over the history of computers, a few disruptive changes rise to the very top. Few can doubt that the advent of the IBM Model 1 PC changed the face of computing in our lifetimes by making a computer something that could sit on a desktop. How about the invention of the portable PC – a laptop to match?

Certainly right up there, if top of the list, is Douglas Engelbart’s invention of the Mouse. He took something that was the domain of engineers – complete with command line codes and search strings – and added a whole user interface that changed the face, literally, of computing. We’re just glad they did not stick with the original name: “X-Y position indicator for a display system.”