Fan TV coming to Time Warner Cable in first national rollout

The revolutionary Fan TV set-top box and viewer guide will soon be available to Time Warner Cable customers across the country, marking the first formal roll-out of a product that delivers a combination of live TV, pay-TV services and online video on demand through a minimalist receiver.

Fan TV, which San Francisco-based start-up Fanhattan unveiled 11 months ago, is unusual in at least three respects. All the programming, including broadcast TV, is transmitted via Internet Protocol, à la an online video service such as Netflix. The viewer guide offers several different ways to find movies and TV shows, integrating "over the top" options from the Web with those from live TV.

And the Zen-inflected set-top is not only far more attractive than the typical cable box, its touch-controlled remote is a breakthrough in ease of use. The heart of Fan TV is the guide, whose combination of online offerings and live TV listings with reviews, social-media tools and other resources from the Web is unlike anything cable operators have offered to date.