On June 28-30, 2011 CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase took place in Santa Clara, CA. Over the next few days we'll share some of the summaries from sessions with our readers. 7 Things to Know About Your Future TV

The connected TV is on the verge of a lot of great things, according to speakers at this week's Connections, a conference series put on by Parks Associates.

Here's what we took away from some of the Connections panels.

1. The cloud is coming home.
The suggestion came up that a box could send video traffic around the home network, using the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard."The problem today is that the platforms don't really have the memory space, and the consumer experience becomes a wait for the ad to pop up," said Russ Shafer, head of marketing for Yahoo Inc., Connected TV.

2. But not any time soon.
"The infrastructure required to put everything in the cloud is humongous," said Paddy Rao, vice president of products for Sling Media. He knows that because he's been watching EchoStar Corp. LLC, Sling's new corporate overlord, put content up on the cloud.

3. Free samples work.
Bismarck Lepe, a founder of Ooyala Inc. , described his company's experiment with trying to get people to pay for video. Ooyala used a range of prices and, maybe more importantly, a range of time spans for a free preview window, from 30 seconds up to nine minutes.

4. People still love their broadcast TV.
Ammo for those who don't believe in cord-cutting: 93 percent of the people in an Ericsson study were found to still watch broadcast TV. "So, this idea of cord-cutting is incorrect," said David Price, an Ericsson vice president of business development.

Well, that's one opinion.

5. Moore's Law is going unused.
The processing power in the set-top box is always going up, but "we're not using it," said Jaime Fink, senior vice president of technology for Pace.

6. The user interface counts for a lot.
It's the main reason why Netflix has caught on with online consumers, said Jim Funk, a vice president with Roku Inc. "People really like the experience," he said. "Although the numbers are pretty small, they're growing."

On a separate panel, the same point was made by Edgar Villalpando, senior vice president of marketing for ActiveVideo Networks Inc. "The reason Netflix is successful isn't their library of content. It's good, but it's not because of that. It's because they have really good navigation," he said.



But:

7. You won't have to wave at your TV.
At least Peter Schwartz, senior director of product management for Vizio Inc., thinks you won't. His company has been looking at Microsoft Kinect, which reads body movements, to see if it's an option for replacing the remote control. He didn't sound convinced.