Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner believes that people will soon expect to have a browser on their television, allowing them to surf the net from the comfort of their sofa. 

“It’s very simple to me. We want a browser on our TV,” he exclusively told Pocket-lint in an one-to-one interview.

The comments will strike a cord with Google’s Google TV offering, which has so far failed to gain any real traction in the US. And a UK release, while promised, has failed to materialise.

They also come on the back of the announcement of Opera's new SDK for TV and set-top box makers to embed the company's browser into their products. 

Opera, who already has a browser on the Nintendo Wii console, believes that although Google has so far failed to make an impact, there is an urge and a need for browsing and enjoying the web on your big screen television, be it through a browser or widgets and apps.

And while Philips has a full browsing experience on its sets, it's not widespread enough at present.  

“We are seeing lots of web users on the Wii,” said von Tetzchner. “The sooner manufacturers put an Internet button on the remote control, the sooner we’ll all want to use it.

“We don’t want to be away from the Internet. As we get more immersed we don’t want to be without it.”

It is also his belief that broadcasters are keen to put web content in programming, using offerings like HTML5, rather than relying on interactive services like the red button, or the teletext services of yesteryear.

The Opera embeddable browser engine for TVs will let users browse the web and access a host of rich associated web applications directly on a telly.

Do you want to browse the Internet on your TV? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below...