There's a big flat screen TV on the wall. But on the coffee table, the big game is actually playing on an iPad.
"TV really means any screen that you have in front of you," said Ashley Still with Adobe Video Solutions.
The concept is called "TV Everywhere." And the company is Adobe -- the makers of Flash, Photoshop, and now Project Primetime.
"It tells you what is live on air right now and you can simply click on that," Still said.
At its core, Primetime is a tool for TV networks to put their live programs on all different kinds of devices without having to build a whole slew of apps from scratch.
"An iPad experience as well as an Android experience as well as an Xbox experience as well as a desktop experience," Still said. "That is, for a large media company, millions and millions of dollars of cost that we believe we can make much less expensive."
Now, live TV has commercials. So in apps like Watch ESPN, Adobe invisibly replaces the ads on the air with ads aimed directly at you.
Adobe picks the ads based on your viewing history and if you provide them your age and gender. Tech analyst Rob Enderle says this could actually make commercials more enjoyable.
"Surveys say that if you provide users with an ad they want to watch, they're much more interested and much more engaged than if you watch, for instance if you're showing me a feminine hygiene ad, I'd be much more interested in watching ads for jaguar cars for instance," said Enderle Group principal analyst Rob Enderle.
For premium cable channels you log in through your cable company. Adobe says if you're already paying for the channel on cable, you shouldn't have to pay on top of that to watch the shows on Hulu Plus or iTunes.
And Enderle points out, most users don't. In the TV of the future, the good old commercial break is probably here to stay, "Whether it's over the internet or elsewhere, ads are what's funding programming today," Enderle said. "Folks just haven't been all that interested in buying programs whether it's movies or anything else."
