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The picture quality with the AiTV is very good and very sharp. The screenshots included with this review do not convey the very good picture quality of the AiTV.

The AiTV home page is simple and functional in design and the home page reminds me a little bit of what the TV Home page looks like on the WebTV Plus boxes since there is a TV picture in the middle of the screen. The AiTV has an Internet menu on the left side of the screen where there are selections for News, Sports, Entertainment, Stocks, and Chat. At the bottom of the left side are selections for Go (such go to a specific website address), Search, Email, and Setup (if you want to go back into the Internet setup for the AiTV box). On the right side of the screen is a formatted picture-in-picture for the TV picture. Below the picture-in-picture are selections for TV Schedule (the TV program listings) and for My Channels (channel scanning). Below those selections are mini-banners which are currently for Paradise Innovations, the maker of the box, and PlanetWeb, the software company that designed the browser for the box. Those mini-banners will most likely be replaced by other advertisements when the actual set-top boxes are sold to consumers.

What I like about the AiTV is the picture-in-picture (or "picture-in-graphic" as described by the Paradise Innovations literature). You press the Win button on the right side of the keyboard to get the picture-in-picture window which can show a TV show or a webpage. You can resize and move the picture-in-picture to a different part of the screen. The resizing and moving of picture-in-picture is new for set-top boxes and the AiTV has this resize/move capability. By default, the picture-in-picture is in the upper left-hand portion of the screen. When you press the swap button, the contents of the main portion of the TV screen and the picture-in-picture switch places.

You can change the channels by pressing the CHannel up and down buttons on the keyboard or by typing the channel numbers on the keyboard.

You can't watch two TV channels at the same time using the picture-in-picture capability (but you can have the same channel in both the main screen and in the picture-in-picture). What you have is the capability to watch a TV channel and surf the net at the same time on the TV screen.

You can scan six channels at the same time using the AiTV's channel scanning capability. You can begin scanning by pressing the My Channels on-screen button on the AiTV home page or by pressing the scan button on the keyboard. The AiTV appears to use a cache to continuously show six different snapshots of six TV channels at the same time. One of the channels is shown in real-time, but freezes for a moment after about thirty seconds to update the other five snapshots of TV channels with freeze frame images. You have to click on one of the six mini-TV pictures to bring a particular TV snapshot into real-time. The AiTV doesn't have a true interactive EPG (more on that below), but the channel scanning is a very cool substitute for easily navigating between TV channels when you don't want to type in a TV channel or use the channel up and down keys.

A very interesting key is the Video Overlay key which overlays TV video over whatever Internet content you may be viewing. I would describe the Video Overlay capability as picture-ON-picture. Maybe that's why Paradise Innovations describes the picture video capabilities as picture-in-graphic. While watching a TV show in full-screen mode, a webpage appears mostly as a transparent full-screen watermark.

You can move around a webpage with the Video Overlay turned on and you would be literally watching a TV show at the same time. Not all of the webpage will be transparent. For instance, if you click on one portion of a page and press the Video Overlay key, then only the portions of the webpage with the same color will be transparent. Other portions of the page that are in different colors will not become transparent. (More about the Video Overlay capability below.)

Another useful key is the Zoom key. You can enlarge a part of a webpage by pointing the cursor at that part of the page and pressing the Zoom key to get a Zoom window. You can also move the Zoom window around the screen. This is particularly useful for reading tiny text in graphic images.

As previously mentioned, as well as scrolling up and down a webpage, you can scroll horizontally if a webpage extends beyond the right side of the screen.

Can you connect a VCR machine to the AiTV box? Yes, you can. I hooked up a VCR to the AiTV, watched a few movie videotapes, and was able to surf the Internet and do email while watching the videotapes. For regular TV, you can either connect the AiTV to cable TV or to a TV antenna. There is a setting in the AiTV setup to tell the AiTV whether you are receiving cable TV or only over-the-air TV broadcasts.

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