“THE WORLD LOVES TELEVISION” announced an exuberant Eric Kim, senior Intel veep and general manager of the company's Digital Home Group at the start of his keynote at IDF today, which also saw him donning a bright red jacket and prancing around the stage as a game show host.

Claiming that over 1.3 billion global households were hypnotically glued to the big bright box in the corner which tells us all what to do, Kim revealed it was high time Intel began milking this particular cash cow, by bringing the Internet into our living rooms.

Unveiling Chipzilla’s first purpose-built IA system on a chip (SoC) for the consumer electronics market, Kim showed off the firm’s new Media Processor CE 3100, once optimistically dubbed Canmore.

Bringing together an IA processor core with multi-stream video decoding and processing hardware, the CE 3100 purportedly also adds a 3-channel 800 MHz DDR2 memory controller, dedicated multi-channel dual audio DSPs, a 3-D graphics engine enabling advanced UIs and EPGs and support for multiple peripherals, including USB 2.0 and PCI Express.

As if all that wasn’t enough of a mouthful, Kim also revealed that the CE 3100 comes with the firm’s Media Play Technology which melds both hardware based decoding for broadcast TV and optical media playback with software-based decoding for Internet content, so that when users watch broadcasts or content on optical media players, the video is encoded in standard formats, like MPEG-2, H.264 or VC-1. The way this works is by having the Intel Media Play Technology software route the video to the on-chip hardware decoders.

Then, for pulling up Internet content whilst watching the box, the built-in software automatically routes the video and/or audio to a software codec running on the IA processor core.

“The Web continues to affect our lives in new ways and is quickly moving to the TV,” said Kim, who reckoned that the product could start shipping as early as next month to such consumer electronics giants as Samsung and Toshiba.

Then, surfing the Internet TV tsunami, Kim decided to bring in a Yahoo exec to announce a collaboration between the firms in building an actual applications framework for TVs and related CE devices that use the Intel Architecture. And it would be known for far and wide as the Widget Channel.

The application framework, which lets users be extra antisocial, by surfing the net WHILST watching TV, can be customised by what seemed to be an endless stream of widget options, delivered to your screen along with (surprise, surprise) a healthy big dose of on-screen advertising. But, of course, Yahoo has to make some money somehow, so who are we to judge?

Bringing his keynote to a close, and cramming in as much product placement as time would allow, Kim also declared the establishment of what he called the “Intel Consumer Electronics Network”, a member-based community of hardware, software and services, all with the purported aim of providing super-fast delivery of Internet-connected CE devices based on IA SoCs, but really all clamouring to have first dibs on Intel CE platforms.

Bah, bandwagoners. µ