Turning Flat TVs Into Digital Art Galleries

Jan. 4, 2005 — -- Did you get one of those new, flat digital television sets last year? Such fancy TVs may offer better, sharper image quality than standard TV sets, but there's still one problem. There are not a lot of "good" TV shows to watch on them.

Local TV stations and cable networks are surely beginning to produce and televise more shows in "high-definition," the digital standards that result in the much-improved video images. Still, in many areas of the United States, HDTV programming is limited to just a few hours of the day.

Now Beon Media in Seattle has a plan to fill the empty hours.

This week, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company will introduce a new "programming" service called GalleryPlayer. It will allow subscribers to purchase and display high-resolution digital images of "museum-quality" art and photos on their high-definition digital TV displays.

The idea of the service came to company founder Scott Lipsky two years ago when he wanted to show off the capabilities his 50-inch plasma TV set by displaying artwork. But getting high-resolution images was expensive since only professional photo services -- usually used by publications and media outlets -- had the digital photos he was looking for. What's more, digital services to deliver the images to his home electronically didn't exist -- nor were they easy to create.

In 1989, Microsoft's Bill Gates tried to develop such a high-tech art display called Interactive Home Systems. And although Gates holds patents on the idea, even the mighty software giant couldn't successfully commercialize the idea. (Gates did, however, install such an automated digital art display in his own home in Medina, Wash.)

But for the past two years, Beon Media has been working with several companies to make a digital art gallery service possible. The company has a working relationship with Corbis, an offshoot of Microsoft's Interactive Home Systems that now provides digital images to professional media outlets.