How much of what’s currently shown on the television screen could be shown on a remote with a touchscreen? The TV menu (things like contrast, setting the time, etc.), especially anything with any kind of drill-down, definitely; tracking upcoming shows (the built-in guide you get with cable); comments and chat present a new kind of content to augment this.

I just read this article about smart remotes, so I am all about rethinking the remote. Remotes with screens, speakers, multitouch and other more sophisticated input, accelerometers, gyroscopes, Bluetooth rather than optical sensors. There are a lot of ways you could see the new generation of smartphones (and tablets) influencing remotes.

This happens in trivial ways already, like using your iPhone as a remote control for your home media system; but I’d love to see something that takes an ecosystem of four different screen sizes (phone, tablet, laptop, and TV) and works the relationships instead of just swapping content around from one to the other.

For instance: why is the web browser on the Wii so terrible? Why aren’t there dozens of channels you can buy or download like WiiWare that focus on email, YouTube, etc.?

Is this a good time to squee about how much I love that Wii has Netflix streaming? It’s so perfect I feel like every content company should be doing this.

Other random comments/thoughts:

I’m reminded of Russell Davies’ posts about how the ubiquity of screens makes them mundane and boring. And the recent BERG post about tinkering with ubiquitous/boring tech to find out what else you can do when you combine several items.

It also seems worth noting that I’m writing this from a living room couch in viewing range of a laptop, a tv, an iPhone, an iPad, and there’s a Chumby (not turned on) hiding behind a stack of DVDs on top of the ‘media center’ (or whatever we call that piece of furniture these days). It feels like there’s still a lot of room for things to shake out of this array of viewing devices.

XBox is experimenting with streaming ESPN for a fee as part of XBox Live. (Increasingly convinced Gates/Microsoft don’t get enough credit for innovation in this sphere.) We’ll see if sports content providers don’t look for other ways to market and stream directly to consumers. And if they do, whether it’s to set boxes like XBox, post-PC devices like the iPad, traditional PCs, or a mix.

The number of channel choices will probably shrink, which is a good thing. Nobody — NOBODY — needs hundreds of tv channels to choose from.

I won’t say any more because I’ll go off on an anti-TV tirade and I know how popular those are.