More, more, more. That was the consensus of Monday’s Digital Hollywood roundtable on the implication of connected TVs and set-top boxes (STBs), which panelists said are attracting a wider range of application developers and leading to a broader selection of content available on more than just TV screens.

“If you want to watch it on your cell phone or your big screen [TV] or your laptop, that will be available,” said William Leszinske, general manager of Intel’s consumer electronics group.

Achieving that vision is another story. One challenge is keeping STBs from getting overly complex, which has been a chronic problem with first-gen units that are basically a PC grafted onto a STB, panelists said. That complexity can be a turn-off for consumers. “We’ve got to make it easy,” said Joe Seidel, director of the partner ecosystem team at Microsoft TV.

Complexity also increases the cost of STBs, further limiting the market. “It has to get to consumer electronics price points” rather than being more like $2,000 PCs, Leszinske said.

That view was shared by Jim Jones, managing director of Scale Venture Partners: “How much this costs determines how quickly it’s [adopted].”

Cost and complexity apparently are limiting adoption even among people building Internet-enabled TVs and STBs: When panelist Matt Johnston, who heads business development and strategy at Zodiac, asked attendees if they have a PC connected to their TV, only a handful raised their hand. That, Johnston argued, is why it makes sense to focus on the myriad capabilities of existing STBs, which can support enhanced services such as gaming and voting even though they lack a PC-class brain. “Let’s take what’s there instead of shoehorning Web services where they don’t fit,” he said.

Some panelists argued that PCs can play a role, such as by residing in the home network that handles video and broadband. “The PC becomes a good citizen of that network,” Seidel said. For example, the STB could work with the PC to fulfill a subscriber’s search for videos of motorcycle crashes instead of conducting that search on its own.

Monetizing existing and forthcoming capabilities was another hot topic. For example, MSOs and telco TV providers currently don’t know much about who’s sitting in front of a TV screen, let alone their interests beyond, say, which VoD program they’re watching. But the more intelligence that creeps into the home network – regardless of whether it’s embedded in each device or residing only in a PC – the more power consumers have to search out specific video content. Those detailed requests set the stage for targeted ads that cater to those interests.