The switchover to digital broadcast television gave TV manufacturers a huge boost as consumers replaced their old analog TVs to take full advantage of new high-definition signals. But with the United States and several other countries completing their switchovers in 2009, and the rest of the world soon to follow, manufacturers are scrambling to find new reasons for consumers to purchase televisions.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toshiba announced one of the most ambitious of these attempts, Cell TV, which will be available in the U.S. later this year. The set is built around a Cell processor, currently best known as the heart of Sony's Playstation 3 game console. When Sony, Toshiba, and IBM formed a consortium known as STI in 2001 to develop the Cell processor, it was envisioned that the Cell would find its way into many consumer multimedia applications.

The Cell features a general-purpose processor coupled to 8 special-purpose cores that can all run in parallel. These special-purpose cores were designed to handle the kind of high-speed computations needed to process video and audio in real time, but it has taken years longer than expected for Toshiba to harness this computing power in a television, in part because there wasn't a compelling application that needed all that processing power--over a hundred times more power than is available in a standard digital television.

Toshiba's new Cell TV can convert 2-D video to 3-D.

Toshiba thinks its has found that application, by creating a TV that can not only play movies made in 3-D, such as the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar, but can convert 2-D video to 3-D on the fly. The Cell processor will make guesses about what is foreground and what is background in a frame, and then create two stereoscopic images for 3-D viewing.

The Cell TV also comes with a built-in one terabyte hard drive and WiFi capability, so content can be downloaded from the Internet, recorded from a Blu-Ray player (also built-in), transferred from a PC, and then retransmitted to other nearby TVs. And just for good measure, there's a camera and microphone also built in so you can use the TV for video conferencing.

Sharp is taking a different tack to Toshiba's approach of chewing through huge amounts of processing power. Color displays today use red, green, and blue subpixels to create different colors. Sharp has added a fourth, yellow subpixel alongside the others, in what it's calling Quad Pixel technology. The extra pixel allows for a larger range of colors, and more colors within that range--while a RGB device can produce about a billion distinct colors, the addition of the extra pixel ups that to about a trillion colors. Sharp displayed a full line of production televisions, expected to start going on sale in the spring of this year, and at first glance at least, the result rivals OLED displays for quality.

Update 21:17 EST: During the afternoon and evening press conferences at CES, the momentum behind 3-D grew, with more and more major manufacturers announcing plans to release 3-D enabled television sets and other services in 2010. Samsung announced it also was bringing out a TV capable of converting 2-D content to 3-D in real time, and Panasonic announced a line of 3-D TVs along with a partnership with DirectTV to start broadcasting 3-D content to satellite TV viewers in June 2010. Panasonic also announced a consumer-level 3-D handycam that should be available later this year.

Sony declared a huge corporate committment to 3-D video, and showed an impressive demonstration of Jimi Hendrix performing at Woodstock that had been converted from 2-D to 3-D, along with a live performace by Taylor Swift that was (somewhat redundantly for those present) redisplayed in 3-D. Sony is partnering with Discovery Communications and IMAX to launch a 3-D television network in 2011, and is also partnering with ESPN to launch a 3-D sports channel in June of this year.

These annoucements are all driven in part by the adoption last month of a 3-D standard for Blu-Ray players, allowing movie studios, who released 10 original 3-D movies in 2009 in theaters, to package their movies without worrying about format wars between manufacturers.

Eli Peli, a researcher at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston, is developing software that can enhance the quality of a TV image for people with visual impairments such as macular degeneration--a disease that makes images on the screen seem blurred and distorted.

Peli's algorithms increase the contrast of a picture over spatial frequencies that are easier for a visually impaired person to see. In his lab a remote control can be used to adjust the contrast on a 32 inch television screen connected to a PC, creating a specially-enhanced picture.

"It's simple," Peli says, showing me CNN, the movie Shrek and a basketball game all in split-screen mode. In each clip he points out the difference in resolution, even for a person with normal eyesight. In the image on the right, details like grass, flowers and a person's facial features are much clearer than in the one on the left. Peli, who is also a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, expects a grant from Analog Devices in the new year. This company has been testing his software and Peli says it is eager to build it into its hardware. He explains his work and demonstrates the system in the video below.

Video by Brittany Sauser

Over the past few months, television networks have started embracing the Web. Executives have watched as tens of thousands of users flock to YouTube, the ubiquitous video website owned by Google. A few networks went so far as to reach out to the site, opening licensing discussions for network programming.

Fortunately for us, the networks realized that they would be better served by streaming their own programming. Centralizing all of the content through Google would radically reduce the competitive environment for television online, in much the way that iTunes has dominated podcasting and music.

Of course, Google's ever-growing audience may force networks to license their content to YouTube unless they can find--or build--a competing site. And building their own site is exactly what may happen. According to this Reuters story, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that three of the major networks and News Corp. are discussing what a jointly owned and operated network site would look like.

From the Reuters article:

While a deal is still far off, the four media companies envision a jointly owned site that would be the primary Web source for videos from their television networks, the paper said in an online report on wsj.com, citing people close to the situation.

The companies aim to cash in on the fast-growing market of Web video advertising and have also discussed building a Web video player that could play clips, the Journal said.

Disney--which has taken a similar stance with its movie franchise, according to the fourth item in this MacObserver post--said that its subsidiary ABC would not participate in such a venture.

Even without Disney (which would likely be forced to play along at some point or face isolation), a jointly owned website with all network programs simply makes sense. It creates a new revenue stream for an existing product. It's an easy-use solution for consumers. The companies can also pool their security resources, which might make the videos better protected. And it allows for organic growth, as word of mouth and search optimization would make this a huge win for the networks.

Of course, the Web network isn't about the general consumer. This is all about changing demographics. A recent study found that more people are watching more video online, which means fewer people are watching traditional television. And it's not just network television that these folks are watching. YouTube has become an Internet phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands of videos. That, in turn, has caused an influx of competing websites, many of which pay people for the content the sites upload (assuming the work's copyright isn't owned by someone else).

Still, creating this site would give the networks far more leverage with Apple and Google, potentially creating a more competitive business environment. And that ultimately suits consumers.