IFA 2008: Panasonic Ultra Thin TVs & BD Players Revealed

It will be interesting to see what Pioneer will be bringing out in their 10G plasma models since they will be using Panasonic panels.

Since moving out to Canada, I purchased a PZ850 that has VieraCast in it. It plays YouTube clips surprisingly well, and searches for clips quite quickly. As with any IP based technology, it will only ever be as good as the user until they can make it so simple that it barely requires thought to work. However, by being very specific about my search and enabling the continuous play feature, I was able to watch the entire 'Comic Strip Presents...' film 'Eat the Rich' from the 80s, which I thought I'd never see again.
Not sure how funny I find the alternative comedy of the 80s any more, but the Motorhead soundtrack is superb.

As for what Pioneer can do to improve over Panasonic, it's all down to the image processing. The PZ850 has a significantly better picture than the PZ800 because it uses a much more sophisticated ISP inside it.
This also feeds over to power consumption. Although the new panels will be more efficient, it doesn't translate directly to power savings since the ISP has to process the image so much to make it look good on a particular panel. Just think how much new GPUs consume compared to the latest CPUs.

As a chap wrote on another site, it would be nice if Panasonic would allow playng of content from a home server (like my Buffalo TeraStation Live), but they'd have to support so many different codecs that it'd be too expensive to produce (what with royalties for the proprietary codecs and having to grossly over specify the processor since open source codecs often require far more processor resources to decode).

I wonder whether NeoPDP isn't simply the result of Pioneer technology-sharing for a good deal with Panasonic who will be making their panels from 2009. Pioneer were after all the first to present very similar super-thin panels at the start of the year, stating they expected to merge the tech with their next gen kuro tech in the future...