AT&T yesterday showed off several IPTV concept applications at a press briefing in downtown Manhattan.

At first, it seemed like nothing especially new. The telco has trotted out many of these demos before — e.g., using the iPhone as a remote control for U-verse TV, and caller ID features on the TV. Peter Hill, vice president of video and converged services at AT&T Labs, demo’d both of those last fall at TelcoTV. 

On Monday, Hill was there again, and he acknowledged at the outset that some of the apps were repeats.

But there was one new thing that caught my eye — or, I should say, my ear.

Off in one corner AT&T had set up a prototype of "multimodal voice search for IPTV," which combined speech recognition, natural-language queries and an interactive program guide.

In a nutshell, it lets you tell your TV what you want to watch: "Show me recent episodes of Mad Men" or "What baseball games are on now?"

You talk into a microphone built into the remote-control, and the set-top passes the digitized voice up to a server in the network, which analyzes the request and returns the search results. The system uses AT&T’s Watson speech-recognition algorithms.

The system worked; at least, the prototype did. It was very cool, and faster than keying through a series of IPG menus (or, needless to say, typing text using an on-screen keyboard). And it doesn’t require any speaker-dependent training, according to AT&T. 

Cooler than cable? This feature, if AT&T can commercially launch it, actually is.

NEW YORK — Blink and you woulda missed it.

At 7:35 a.m. Eastern, about 100 people wearing black and red polo shirts — a couple of them with hardhats — strolled calmly through the storied main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. The "march" was to kick off Verizon’s entry into the New York City cable TV business

A few of the Verizon folks waved and murmured "Good morning, New York!" and "Hey New York, FiOS is here!" to no one in particular.

Three minutes later, the column filed up the stairs to 43rd and Vanderbilt. 

Nobody really noticed. 

Well, except for me and the two videographers Verizon hired to shoot B-roll. Team FiOS might as well have been a Japanese tour group passing through.

As publicity stunts go, this was about as unflashy as you could get.

But for cable companies facing FiOS, all this means is that Verizon isn’t just sizzle and no steak. It’s methodical. Patient. It’s here for the long haul.

Verizon today announced it now offers 100 high-definition channels in the metro New York market — well above Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

In the Big Apple’s five boroughs, service will be available initially to 300,000 households in 108 neighborhoods. By the end of 2008, Verizon expects to offer FiOS TV to 500,000 homes in New York City. 

In Q2, Verizon added 176,000 FiOS TV subs across all markets, to stand at 1.4 million video customers. That’s a notable drop-off from its 263,000 adds in Q1. But it appears to put FiOS TV ahead of Mediacom, and ties it with Suddenlink.

Here are some photos from the 3 minutes Team FiOS spent in Grand Central:

Can you spot the Verizon crew? They’re there to the left of the information booth. Honest, they’re over there somewhere…

The Verizon personnel were friendly and polite, and went largely unnoticed.

"Psst, hey buddy, wanna buy some FiOS?"

If you can’t stand to be away from television for even a few minutes, AT&T’s Mobile TV might be just the thing to soothe your media itch. 

The service provides 12 or more live channels from broadcast and cable networks — including a mobile movie channel from Sony Pictures Television — right in the palm of your hand. It’s delivered through the dedicated wireless network built by Qualcomm’s MediaFLO USA subsidiary, which also powers Verizon Wireless’ live-TV service. 

The gee-whiz factor is high. Live mobile TV has been available from other services, such as MobiTV. But the MediaFLO network, which uses a 6-MHz slice in the 700-MHz band, delivers a clean, sharp picture that in my testing in the New York area was hit by very few service interruptions. 

I accessed the service with LG Electronics’ Vu phone, and the live video on its 3-inch, 240-by-400-pixel screen was eminently watchable. 

The lineup includes familiar programs from NBC, CBS, Fox, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Comedy Central, ESPN and others. (CNN and Sony’s PIX movie channel are available from AT&T but not Verizon.) A basic program guide was easy and intuitive to navigate, using the Vu’s touch screen. 

In the mood for Godzilla vs. Mothra? That was on PIX at 9 P.M. yesterday. Need to distract the youngsters for a spell? Hand ’em the phone with Nickelodeon, stocked with SpongeBob SquarePants and other faves. AT&T and MediaFLO also offer additional channels for a limited time; while I was checking out the service, Fox’s Fuel TV was in the lineup but will continue only until early November. 

With the election one week to go, it was great to be able to watch the news channels as I commuted on the train each day. I could follow the nauseating gyrations of the financial markets on CNBC walking to work. 

Still — it’s not clear the price of the service is worth the “wow” for anyone but serious TV addicts who happen to be on the road a lot. AT&T charges $15 per month for the basic 12-channel lineup and $30 for a package that includes unlimited access to video clips, Web browsing and data. 

What’s more, the live mobile TV service has the drawback of lacking time-shifting features. The picture quality with MediaFLO is good enough that you can read the crawl on the bottom of CNN, but when I wanted to rewind it to see what had just scrolled off I was out of luck. 

Also, there’s no on-demand content available through the MediaFLO service — indeed, its presentation of traditional linear TV programming runs counter to the notion that shorter, "snackable" chunks are what mobile users want. AT&T does, however, separately offer short video clips from ESPN, Weather Channel, Disney Channel and others. 

Otherwise, I had only a few quibbles. For one thing, the volume on the Vu phone didn’t turn up loud enough (at least for my ears), and the audio was easily drowned out by Manhattan jackhammers. 

But really, how much out-of-home downtime does the average Joe or Jill have that could be occupied with television? Note that most people in the U.S. drive to work instead of taking mass transit. 

If mobile TV were included as part of a regular wireless plan, especially if it were MediaFLO’s fairly high-quality service, I could find reasons to watch it. As an extra cost, though, I can bear to wait until I get home to catch the latest episode of Paris Hilton’s My New BFF.

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At a Glance: AT&T Mobile TV


Description: 12 live channels provided through Qualcomm’s MediaFLO USA unit
Availability: 58 markets including Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
Channels: CBS Mobile, CNN Mobile, ESPN Mobile TV, Fox Mobile, Fox News, NBC 2Go, CNBC, MSNBC, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Sony’s Pix
Price: $15 per month for Mobile TV Basic (linear channels only); $30 per month for Mobile TV Plus (linear channels plus unlimited video clips, Web browsing and data)
Device reviewed: LG Electronics’ Vu touch-screen phone ($99.99 with two-year contract after a $50 rebate)
Dimensions: 4.25 x 2.16 x 0.51 inches
Battery: Up to 3 hours talk time / TV viewing; 10.5 days standby time 

TiVo is reheating a classic/cliched TV-commerce application: ordering a pizza with your remote control. 

The DVR company announced a deal with Domino’s Pizza to let users with broadband-connected TiVos order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, "right from their TV sets." (You can’t pay through the TV, though: the Domino’s guys take cash on delivery.)

It’s a breakthrough in "couch commerce," according to Rob Weisberg, Domino’s vice president of precision and print marketing. No need to even get off your derriere to order an awesomely high-calorie food product! 

Of course, the idea is more than a decade old. Time Warner’s Full Service Network featured pizza-on-demand in Orlando in 1994.

So where are the one-click-purchasing cable TV-commerce applications today? Some are out there — TWC’s Oceanic in Hawaii, for example, recently launched HSN shop-by-remote.

Cable operators are having enough trouble trying to monetize video-on-demand, much less pizza. Anyway, it seems like most people don’t have much of a problem with picking up the phone to call their local pizza parlor. Note, however, that "t-commerce" is on the road map for Canoe.

TiVo, for its part, is able to introduce potentially interesting new services like TV commerce but suffers from the law of (relatively) small numbers. Of the 3.6 million TiVo subscribers as of the end of July, only about 800,000 have connected their DVRs to a broadband pipe, and of those about two-thirds regularly use the broadband features, according to the company.

Here’s what actually would be a breakthrough: If your TiVo could figure out what kind of pizza you prefer based on your viewing habits. Fans of Dancing With the Stars would surely go heavy on the cheese.

Now that Joost has officially opened its doors to the teeming Internet millions, I took another look at the service that — according to its prelaunch hype – delivers a brand-new kind of TV experience.

Well, kind of. But on the whole it’s pretty disappointing on two major counts, where "old-fashioned" TV 1.0 still holds a major advantage: Joost looks worse than regular, standard-definition TV, and it doesn’t deliver the satisfying immediacy of live linear programming.

Joost is, basically, a VOD service with a decent selection of mainstream content and good navigation and search features. The startup says it’s stocked 15,000 video clips and full-length TV shows, from CBS, Major League Baseball, MTV, Turner Broadcasting System, Comedy Central and National Geographic Channel, among others. If you’re interested in seeing, for example, some recently aired CSI episodes, you can watch them on Joost.

But to anyone who has ever watched TV (i.e., everyone), the video on Joost is uneasy on the eyes at anything more than postcard-size screen. At full-screen size (1280×1024 on my PC) it’s herky-jerky and a bit blurry. As cable and satellite providers race toward HDTV, Joost is a step in the other direction.

Maybe as broadband-access speeds ratchet up, Joost could start to rival standard-definition TV. But it’s definitely not there today. In the meantime, ABC.com’s "high-definition" streaming videos look better than anything on Joost.

Another bummer: Nothing on Joost you can tune into is happening "now," which — yes, even in the time-shifted world of DVRs and Internet video — is a big part of watching TV. 

For instance, the 16 CNN segments currently on Joost are mostly longer-form features. And then we’re back to the first point: While Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Warriors series is something I might watch, I’m not inclined to spend an hour and half in front of my PC watching low-quality versions of the episodes. And I wasn’t interested in clicking on the interactive ads that popped up for Bank of America or the movie Resident Evil: Extinction.

As for the touted "social networking" aspects of Joost, perhaps I’m just too old to care about chatting with other anonymous Internet users while I’m watching TV. I would just be complaining about the video quality the whole time, anyway.