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A friend of mine says: "I don't watch TV but I watch an awful lot of video". A lot of my friends online are like that. I didn't watch any TV until I recently got that let's me watch TV on an old laptop. Actually, it turns my computer into a DVR, which is really cool. But a lot of what I watch I has been suggested to me by friends, either on BitTorrent or YouTube. It's a lot about recommendations from friends, whose tastes I share.

What about bridging social networks with TV networks? Certainly, I'm not the first one to think about that. Tom Coates, who writes the excellent Plasticbag blog, has on the subject that was part of a presentation that he did. Interestingly, one of his ideas - video chat with friends while watching TV - seems familiar to something that I saw yesterday with the Philips set top box with a webcam.

On one of the hundreds of huge flat panel screens, I watched a demo by one of the set-top box software manufactuers, . It caught my eye because it had some really nice on screen animation that reminded me of the cool cube scrolling that I've seen on my Mac.

I sat down for a demo of a mock-up of what they want to do with set-top boxes. They said that most people only watched a few of the hundreds of channels possible on cable or satellite TV after they flicked through the electronic-programme guide. Yup, that makes sense. They made it possible to see a lot more related content, not only other channels but also things you had saved to your boxes hard drive. Yeah, many set top boxes now have hard drives, getting up to a few hundred gigabytes these days. You could also zoom through programmes not only by genre, but also by other films the directory of a film might have made or possibly find performances by the musicians who contributed to the soundtrack of a film or programme. Cool.

It all had really flash graphics with all kinds of animations that made the old picture-in-picture trick look so last century. But what really caught my eye was the idea of possibly seeing also programmes that friends had suggested either by watching them or finding them on the internet. It's really only a matter of time between video on the internet and broadcast TV become indistinguishable. One of the big themes at the conference was IPTV, or TV delivered over wired or wirelessly over the internet. The computer really hasn't broken into the living rooom yet, but obviously set top boxes are getting smarter. And the distance between computers and TV is going to become very small.

What about you? What is more important, the TV schedule or what your friends recommend to you?