I love it when cable operators take bold steps to enhance the subscriber experience. So I felt great when Liberty Global, a huge operator in Europe, announced an ambitious new video platform called Horizon at IBC earlier this month.

It’s great that Liberty has put so much effort into building a platform that brings together so many advanced TV services. But, in the end, we’re still talking about a really expensive set-top box with a complex middleware stack.

As terrific as Liberty Horizon surely is, I’m hoping that it’s the first step toward an über-platform that includes apps running from the cloud. Running it all from the cloud means the customer doesn’t have to download app updates, the operator benefits from reduced support and hardware costs, and it assures a consistent experience across multiple devices and hardware configurations.

A cloud platform that could span nearly ever device available would provide the economy of scale that content providers, advertisers and developers need to profit from the extra cost that interactive programming requires.  Serve it all up directly to my TV, instead of another set-top box, and you’ll really have me grinning. Kudos to Liberty—they’ve moved our industry forward by showing how different services can be integrated into one user interface. Now that they’ve planted the seed, I just hope it gets a little rain from the Cloud to make sure it not only survives, but thrives.

This video’s been out for a while, but if you haven’t seen it (almost 15 million of you have), it’s pretty mindblowing. It’s called “A Day Made of Glass…Made Possible by Corning.”

Now try to get past the thought that people are going to be distractedly walking into each other just about everywhere. We’re already training for that with our smartphones.

Think about something else you don’t see in this video: hardware. Beyond some small personal devices, you don’t see physical keyboards, you don’t see black home theater boxes, you don’t see TV set-top boxes, you don’t see “computers.”

You see a world full of ultra-thin interfaces, some of which you can even roll up like a poster.

As Mat Honan pointed out so succinctly this week on Gizmodo in his post “The End of Silicon Valley,” the age of hardware is ending. The age of software is upon us. And it’s not going back the other way.

Really, we’re entering an age of increasingly robust user interfaces that will pop up virtually wherever and whenever you need them.

You won’t hear whirring hard drives. You won’t feel the heat coming off overworked, overpowered processors. You won’t need to lug around a laptop, or buy specialized furniture to hold all of your home theater or office equipment.

But the levels of the applications we use will somehow be beyond anything that’s possible today.

How can that be? How will all of those interfaces and appliances run without each having their own computers inside?

The answer is the cloud.

To make everything you see in the video work and connect, those interfaces will all leverage the power of the cloud.

I mean, do you really want every appliance you own to have loads of expensive computer hardware and a full-blown operating system? It wouldn’t be cost effective, and the headaches from system crashes and updates would be unbearable. As seen in the video, do you really want to troubleshoot your bathroom mirror, or your kitchen countertop, or that office table thing that helps you make effective fashion decisions?

You’ll have apps that run in the cloud, that can be fixed and updated in the cloud. Soon, that’ll be all you need… besides some glass that displays the best user interfaces the tech world can muster.

That’s progress, if you ask me. And in a world where so much seems to be sliding backwards, I’m hanging my Dodgers hat on the promise of videos like Corning’s every time I walk into the ActiveVideo offices.

Maybe I need to cut down on my rabid daily consumption of tech news, because this one threw me for an existential loop: “Survey Finds One-Third of Americans More Willing to Give Up Sex Than Their Mobile Phones.”

I mean, really?

More concerning than the 33 percent who’d give up sex before their mobile phones are the 22 percent who’d give up their toothbrushes (and, most likely as a result, sex), and the 21 percent who would give up their shoes. Yes, their shoes.

These, my friends, are what you call “first world problems.”

Now there’s lots more interesting and/or disturbing data in the study, but this tidbit really stuck out to me: 83 percent of iPhone users thought other iPhone users would make the best romantic partners.

If that doesn’t prove the power of effective branding, as well as the power of app platforms to facilitate meaningful social connections, I don’t know what does.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some teeth to brush, some shoes to put on, and some email to check on my phone. Yeah, that’s right, I’m doing all three. I might even get fancy and read some email while I brush my teeth.

There’s this thing about road signs when you’re driving down the highway, especially when you’re in unfamiliar territory: As soon as you pass one, you’re on the lookout for what’s up ahead.

That’s kind of how I’m feeling now that “CloudTV-Powered” connected TVs have hit the retail shelves for the first time. It’s another milestone to see our handiwork in Philips’ 4000 and 5000 TVs, but there’s still plenty of road to be traveled.

While CloudTV is behind the dozen-plus casual TAG Games that today are part of the Philips experience, gaming is really the first leg of a greater journey. What’s more important is how the ability to create apps once in the cloud and stream them to any connected device will impact everybody who has a stake in bringing apps to television.

The cloud – specifically the CloudTV approach – simplifies the entire apps-to-TV ecosystem. Developers can write apps once to run on any device, reducing development cost and increasing market reach. Cable and IPTV operators can offer the same experience across any wired or untethered device as part of their “TV Everywhere” offerings. CE manufacturers can leverage existing apps to quickly build a content portfolio.

Here’s a real-life example of how that works: TAG Games (Sudoku, High Stakes Hold ‘Em and others) that were written once using the CloudTV platform are providing the same experience whether they’re being played on the Time Warner Cable system in Hawaii or on the Cablevision system in New York or on a Philips 4000 or 5000 TV. These apps, written once, can pretty much run anywhere.

Because CloudTV apps run in the network and not on the device, the quantity and quality of available apps are limited only be the imaginations of the developer and the other ecosystem partners. As an example, check out what Cablevision has done to out-web the Web when it comes to video navigation.

So keep your eyes on us, because when it comes to the cloud, we’re doing the driving. And getting there, as they say, is half the fun.