After we have access to a bazillion things to watch on-demand, how will we find it? Here is a startup with no customers yet. I quote from their press material because they claim that "a consumer [can] browse 50,000 content choices with a few clicks of a remote control that has 90% fewer buttons than traditional remotes."

Rockville, Maryland-based start-up, Hillcrest Communications, unveiled its HoME application suite last month at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference.

The company was founded in 2001 by Dan Simpkins, who serves as its president and CEO and who previously founded Salix Technologies, which was sold to Tellabs in 1999 in a stock deal that valued it at $300 million. In January, 2004, Hillcrest completed a Series B funding round in which it raised $10 million from New Enterprise Associates, Columbia Capital and Grotech Capital Group.

According to the company, the HoME suite, which will be formally launched later this year, is designed to solve what it describes as "two critical points of pain" for service providers, consumer electronics companies and consumers: the proliferation of content choices and the proliferation of consumer devices. The heart of the application suite is dubbed "Spontaneous Navigation" which it claims "reinvents how content is presented and navigated on the television."

The main elements of the HoME application suite are:

The Loop (a remote control which features what the company describes as an "ergonomically designed interface," sporting just two buttons and a scroll wheel to control all programs and devices);

HoMEtv (an EPG that lists linear channels, VOD programming, and DVR-stored and Internet-delivered content);

HoMEmedia (a suite of applications that allows viewers to access, manipulate and display personal media, such as home movies, photos and music); and

HoMEbuilder (a software development kit that will customization of HoME's various applications).

Hillcrest says that it has filed "dozens" of patents for its technologies.