Toshiba this week showed off the company's prototype Cell TV at CEATEC Japan here.

The demonstration was similar to what Toshiba offered during the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. But the Japanese company was much more forthright in pitching specific advantages of "Cell TV" in real-world applications.

Toshiba's Cell TV simultaneously displays on its screen 48 video streams stored in a hard-disk drive unit.

The next-generation TV should be able to display and play back video content -- coming from various sources -- not only in high resolution but also in an easy-to-view manner, said Yoshihiro Nishida, senior specialist at Toshiba's core technology center.

During its demonstration, Toshiba's Cell TV showed off on its screen 48 video streams stored in a hard-disk drive unit.

The same Cell TV could also time-slice a single video program in 48 segments and play them back on the same screen at the same time. "This lets viewers choose a specific video segment they want to see," said Nishida.

The Cell processor can also decode eight live broadcast streams simultaneously, Nishida added, when the Cell TV features eight TV tuners.

"Channel changes get much faster on Cell TV, because live video streams are already decoded simultaneously," said Nishida, "just like in the good old days of analog TV."

Today, one of the drawbacks of digital TV is that it takes at least one or two seconds to accomplish a channel change, he explained.

When asked who else will be using Cell processor for similar TVs, Nishida declined to comment.