It’s interesting to spend time with the folks creating the guts of the brave new world of digital entertainment. It brought me face-to-face with some of my assumptions about the meaning of “IPTV” and the fact that there are other sets of assumptions at work in this space.

Those of us who began our new media journey in the IP world have embraced the many-to-many democratization of the Internet. We chose what we want and “pull” it.

But the folks who come from the “old media” world of broadcasting have a definitely old-media model of reality. That model is all about old media “content providers” – aka broadcast and cable networks – using digital technology to deliver content. They chose what they want us to get and “push” it.

It’s such a given in this world that the content providers are the center of the universe that an entire session I attended as part of Motorola’s IPTV 101 seminar given in conjunction with the Connections show was sidetracked by discussion of this distinction.

It came up because a few members of the audience were confused. They thought that “IPTV” meant that you could watch anything you want – last week’s episode of “Lost” or MySpace videos.

That was not the presenters’ model.

“Our view of IPTV is a managed service — IP delivered content over a managed network,” is how one Motorola speaker put it.

So I asked Marty Stein, Senior Marketing Director at Motorola, why such a provider-centric view, pointing out that in the voice realm it wasn’t the phone company delivering leading-edge technology. Video is a much more technically demanding medium, Stein counters.

“The bandwidth requirements of video and the ‘unforgiving’ requirements of video delivery with precise timing makes it much more difficult to have an acceptable viewing experience on the public Internet,” Stein explains.

Fair enough.

However, once a democratizing platform like the Internet is in place, you can’t lasso the horse back in the barn. There are a lot of talented engineers out there working on just this problem. One example is Plainview, NY-based NeuLion, which builds private broadcasting networks for content providers.

In the NeuLion model, the public Internet is where content distributors connect with their audience. Content is delivered via the NeuLion platform, a VPN. The company delivers TV quality video to any device you want – including TV sets. NeuLion also provides the entire support infrastructure, like billing and set top boxes.

Anybody with content can be a TV network. And customers are likely to respond favorably to this model. Right now NeuLion’s customers are niche networks with specialized or local following. In other words, the audiences that new media pundits tell us are the future.

The NeuLions of the world are likely to be more in touch with consumers than the traditional players. In a recent Infonetics survey of customer satisfaction, Shoretel and Cisco – definitely “new media” businesses – beat traditional telecom providers.

Coming out of the IP world, Cisco and Shoretel bring a “have it your way” model. Unlike traditional players who expect things to work the way…they’ve always worked: we tell you what you can have and you pay extra for every feature.

It’s pretty clear that we’re not going to go back to the Ma Bell model for our phone service. Likewise, it’s unlikely that IPTV’s early adopters – let’s face it, that’s us — are going to lie down and let NBC or Comcast decide how and what we’re going to watch.

I’m looking forward to the next disruption. I have a feeling it’s not far off.

This week is the Connections show in Santa Clara California, my hometown, out here on the edge of Silicon Valley. I was drawn to this because it seemed like an opportunity to check up on the “networked home” and “digital lifestyle” boosters.

Signaling the escalating importance of IPTV, Motorola put on a full day workshop, “IPTV 101” where I picked up some interesting statistics.

An average US household today has 25 digital devices – DVRs, cell phones, TV sets and the like, according to Motorola’s research. For the high end of the market, that number is 37. And, it goes without saying, all of these are (or will be shortly) network-aware.

Looking a short way into the future, Motorola projects that by 2010 almost half households will have video game consoles, 57 million will have DVRs, 82 million will have high speed Internet access, and 97 million will have some type of HDTV. And set top boxes will have on the order of 1 TB drives inside.

Equipment purchases are driven by an explosion of content. Which also drives a corresponding explosion of bandwidth requirements.

Add up concurrent content like “picture in picture,” recording something else while watching a program, interactive information and gaming, downloading content like video, networked DVRs, and pretty soon just one TV is sucking up your entire ADSL bandwidth.

Here’s the bandwidth Motorola is projecting services providers must be able to deliver by 2010.

Today, the average high speed Internet connection today is between 6 and 25 megabits. In 2010, the lowest tier of users will require about 19 megabits, which can be accommodated by current technology and build-out plans. But the numbers go up from there.

Early adopters – about 30 million households by 2010 – are going to need 40 megabits. And the “fringe market” – those are the folks who buy every new gizmo the minute it hits the market – are going to require a monster 58 megabits.

That’s a pretty big fire hose.

Judging from the e-blizzard of press releases coming out of CTIA, you could spend from now until next year trying out all the new stuff available on the “third screen.”

Here are a few items that caught my attention.

Maybe not the sexiest application, but a strong contender in my book for the most useful is Fremont, CA-based ABBYY’s Business Card Recognition (BCR) utility for smartphone Symbian, S60 or UIQ platforms. The software captures data from business cards using the built-in digital camera, extracting contact information from the image directly to the telephone address book.

Another interesting product is Telular’s Wireless PATH (Premise Access Transport Hub) that lets you use cellular networks instead of conventional wired networks for voice calls, high-speed data transmission and faxes. The company is promoting the PATH to “enable rapid deployment of wireless services in emergency or disaster situations, and when business operations are disrupted.” I for one would be happy to have a pocket-sized version that I can take on the road.

Motorola’s new MC35 Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA - new acronym alert☺) adds a barcode reader to the growing suite of mobile applications. This makes mobile data entry simpler by eliminating the need for special purpose devices.

Atlanta-based Firemobile aims to unchain online banking from your PC. Now in addition to yakking on the phone while you’re sitting in a restaurant or walking down the street, you can also check your account balance and make your mortgage payment.

If you’re stuck in traffic you’ll be interested in INRIX Traffic for Windows Mobile devices. The service delivers real-time and predictive traffic conditions on Windows Mobile devices in about 60 U.S. metropolitan markets, with additional markets planned in the coming months.

If you get caught in a traffic jam anyway, fastmobile will help you stay on top of email with its push email that lets you receive, reply to and send email from a handset. Currently available for MetroPCS subscribers, fastmobile also lets users save and sort messages and synchronize email accounts.

Don’t feel like checking email? You could use the time to do some “photo flirting” with FunMobility Flirt Pix service, a cross-carrier application that lets subscribers view photos and exchange visual messages anonymously.

Motorola makes it easier to listen to music in your car with the Automotive Music & Hands-free System T605 car kit that streams music from a Bluetooth phone directly through your car’s sound system. Available only through Verizon, the system puts phone calls through the sound system as well, pausing the music while you take the call.

Finally, San Jose, CA-based Pinger this week expanded its voice messaging service to include most US mobile customers and Blackberry users. The company has also expanded the service to allow members to ping anyone’s mobile phone, regardless of whether the person is a Pinger member.

Now, just don’t get into an accident while you’re doing all this stuff on your phone.

It took almost a century for the telephone to become a platform for doing things that Alexander Graham Bell never dreamed of when he uttered those history-making words, “Mr. Watson come here, I need you.”

But it’s taken a mere decade for Internet telephony to become the mechanism driving a myriad of applications that were unheard of not too long ago.

Most of the time we drive new technology by what we want to do with it. Recently, I allowed a new technology to drive me. And it was well worth it.

That technology, by start-up TeleNav of Santa Clara, CA is an application that — as someone who gets lost driving home — I’ve been waiting for a long, long time: A navigation system on a mobile phone. And like so many recent developments, it marries cell phone technology and VoIP.

Like on-board navigation and stand-alone GPS systems, TeleNav gives you audible turn-by-turn directions. It also provides am easy-to-read, full color 3-D map display. But TeleNav eliminates the extra gizmo — always a plus in my book. Directions are downloaded to your phone in realtime, so it doesn’t get out-of-date like OnStar. And it uses cellular data systems and a smart phone, so it doesn’t ring up a big air time bill.

It does some things that GPS devices don’t - like providing a gas station guide by price and restaurant lists by type. TeleNav can route you around accidents and roadwork and includes a pedestrian mode. The “yellow pages on your phone,” is how TeleNav Director of Communications Mary Beth Lowell describes it.

Right now, TeleNav is in an enviable position, sharing this market space with only one other player, Motorola’s VIAMOTO.

You can use TeleNav two ways. You can go to the company’s website and program your destination, which is downloaded to your phone. Or you get directions over the phone by speaking or typing the address.

TeleNav does all this far more inexpensively than other navigation systems — $9.99 a month plus the cell carrier’s data service. The application has run with Sprint Nextel service for a while and last week the company added Cingular — including the new iPAQ device — Boost Mobile and SouthernLINC Wireless. The application runs on any smart phone, including PDAs, and uses the GPS chip that is in most phones today.

For devices without a GPS chip, TeleNav sells a GPS add-on for $119. The company also offers NavTrack, an integrated system for fleet management that provides dispatching, tracking and reporting as well as real-time directions.

You simply download the application to the phone by making a call. “TeleNav is one of the most popular applications for Sprint Nextel users,” reports Ms. Lowell.

It all sounds great. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. So I’ve been taking TeleNav on a test drive for the last month.

The one thing that I worried about — moving out of range of a Sprint signal — only happened once. Not an issue, I decided.

But what I did have a continuous problem with was the system’s speech recognition. If you load the instructions online, this isn’t a problem. But my principal interest in TeleNav is as something I can use on the fly when I’m lost.

On my maiden voyage, instead of taking me a few blocks away in Santa Clara to my yoga class, TeleNav was all ready to navigate me to the town of Santa Clarita — about 400 miles south.

The way the voice menu works is that you tell TeleNav to “go back” if the place name or address isn’t correct. I found myself screaming, “go back” repeatedly in complete exasperation. The application also uses a lot of power, too, so be prepared with your charger.

After a few weeks, I was ready to say that TeleNav isn’t truly ready for prime time. That is, until I used it for a drive from the Southern Tier of New York State to northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a drive that I have made many, many times over the past three decades.

It’s the drive I made as a college student, heading to my parents’ for holidays.

It’s the drive I made on a Wednesday morning in August 1981 when I was called at work with news that my father had died suddenly.

It’s the drive I made in 2002 when I was forced to acknowledge my mother’s cascading mental decline.

It’s the drive I made last July when my mother was dying. And the drive I made on my way back to California three weeks later, after her death.

So last week I decided to trust this fraught excursion to TeleNav, expecting confirmation of the route I had used for 35 years.

I was nothing short of astonished when the pleasant TeleNav voice told me to turn around and take another road.

At first I was ready to call the whole thing off. This thing is useless, I said to myself.

But then another impulse said, See where it takes you.

So I did, figuring I’d know if I was headed seriously wrong before I got too far off track.

It turned out that my intuition - unlike my sense of direction - was on track.

TeleNav drove me through Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region. Perhaps not as well known as the Pocono or Lehigh Mountain regions, it’s an area of breath-taking vistas and picture-book rural farm towns. Even the region’s forlorn vacation destinations of yesteryear possess a certain charm.

It was the happiest trip I had made that way in many, many years. And, to make the whole thing sweeter, TeleNav took about 20 minutes off my trip.

Now, I could have gotten the same result from any other navigation system, including an old-fashioned road map — assuming I had enough spatial reasoning ability to read one correctly, which I don’t. But there’s a message here.

We hear a lot about how technology keeps us working 24/7 and militates against surprise and serendipity in our lives. But maybe that’s superficial - good for selling magazines and TV news shows, but one that doesn’t hold up if you think about it.

Like anything else — from the wheel to algebra to the printing press to the telephone — Internet technology is just one more tool in our portfolio of human-ness.

I’m sure that back in the 15th century there were many social scientists bemoaning the fact that the printing press took the “magic” and skill out of story-telling; failing to imagine a world where literally anybody, even English Language Learner George W. Bush, can read Hamlet anywhere, anytime.

More recently — last Wednesday, in fact — New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman updated the perenial complaint by describing a taxi ride where the driver was talking on his phone and watching a video, while the columnist was writing on his laptop and listening to an iPod. Technology, Friedman concluded, was hogging our attention and cutting off the human connection.

As I was reminded last week, technology isn’t just for doing things faster or smarter — or avoiding conversation with chatty cab drivers. It can just as easily be an avenue for the magic always waiting for us if we would just follow its prompting.