Intel has been pitching media companies for the past several months on a Web-based television service using a set-top device the chip giant is building, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The service, aimed at the U.S. market, would bundle U.S. TV channels much like cable and satellite TV providers already do but deliver them over the Internet through the Intel-branded set-top boxes, according to the newspaper. Intel itself has not made the rumored plan public. The WSJ cited unnamed sources "familiar with the effort" as providing details about it.
Intel has devised an interface for the "virtual cable operator" service that would let users browse programming and hopes to make it available by the end of the year, according to the WSJ.
The media companies reportedly being pitched by Intel were not named in the article. Intel has asked some of those companies "for 'rate cards' that lay out what particular channels or types of on-demand programs would cost as part of its subscriptions, but it doesn't appear to have struck programming deals yet," the paper reported.
Intel, which the WSJ believes is determined "to move ... beyond the computer industry," faces a couple of major hurdles in "scarce bandwidth and the high price of TV programming."
The chip giant has been involved in efforts to create a new television offering before. Most famously, Intel was a key player in the original Google TV effort, which used Atom-based set-top boxes before turning to ARM chips to power an interactive television overlay. Prior to that Intel and Yahoo teamed up a widget-based platform to embed applications and ads on HDTVs.
But Intel appeared to bow out of the television game last October when it shut down its Digital Home Group and reassigned engineers who had been building chips for TVS to focus on tablets. In the past few years, concurrent efforts to reinvent television by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other computing companies have also met with limited success.
Intel, however, may have simply been reassessing its approach to television instead of giving up on its TV ambitions entirely. As the WSJ notes, the company last year formed a new business unit called Intel Media that's being led by Erik Huggers, "an Internet-services specialist who had helped the British Broadcasting Corp. launch a high-profile service called iPlayer."
Huggers has said that Intel plans to "go further up the food chain" as it develops future TV services, according the paper.
UPDATE: An Intel spokesperson responded Tuesday to questions about this article, saying that Intel "does not comment on rumors or speculation."