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by Andrew Starling

Television and the Web are two media on a collision course. Surely it won't be long before they merge and we see them both on the same screen. We'll happily toggle between the two and the modest crossover bits in the middle - interactive TV or TV Web channels or whatever they're called. End of story. Everybody lives happily ever after, especially those with shares in AOL Time-Warner.
March 13, 2000

Or maybe not. Here's an alternative scenario, and one I believe is more likely. How about the Web/TV combination follows its own separate path, becomes a new market, quite different to what's gone before, distinct from both current television and the Web as we know it? Not only that, but it becomes more important than the current Web, drawing in higher revenues and a greater number of viewers. It becomes almost a new medium in its own right. In newspaper terms, if the Web is a broadsheet and the TV a magazine, the new combination becomes a popular tabloid.

It's a notoriously difficult area to get to grips with, this future meeting point between the Web and TV. Last September, Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, said Interactive TV was dead. Around the same time, Forrester Research said it was "the next wave of the interactive commerce goldrush" - destined to rival Internet advertising revenues within three years. Microsoft bought WebTV back in April 1997, and despite the undeniable marketing muscle of the company it still has only around one percent of the global Internet market. So, Microsoft has hedged its bets with WebTV for Windows, a method of viewing TV on your PC, rather the Web on your TV screen.

A lot of fine grit muddies the Web/TV crystal ball. Technical factors, cultural factors, speed of change, and the inevitably desire of large and powerful companies to mess with the market to make sure they come out on top, no matter what the best solution for the customer might be.

TVs Are Rotten

Let's start with the complication of technology. TV screens produce awful pictures compared to PCs. The definition is poor and you only get 544 pixels (individual points of light) across the screen, or less on some systems. Most PCs manage 800 pixels, or at worst 640. So the moment you take a Web page and try to squeeze it on to a TV screen, you've got a major technical problem. It physically won't fit. Also, because the definition is poor, and we usually watch TV from a distance, the regular text on Web pages becomes impossible to read.

The answer is, if you want to view a Web page on TV, you have put it through a mincing machine first (or software equivalent) then reconstitute it at the right width and with bigger text. In practice, this means the handful of people who view the Web on WebTV don't see quite the same Web the rest of us see. They see a children's large-type version, with narrower, longer pages.

Also, they're not allowed to scroll. They have to go up and down pages in discrete chunks, entire screenfuls, effectively splitting long pages into a sequence of smaller ones. Flash 4, Java, and the more sophisticated end of JavaScript are all disabled. Anybody who is familiar with the Web on a PC soon tires of using WebTV. All in all, it's a pretty dumb version of the Internet, and the pages that look best are dumb pages designed specifically for TV viewing. But don't sneer too much, because a few years from now these may outnumber regular Web pages for PCs.

Two other big technical factors that need to be considered are High Definition TV (HDTV) and flat screens. The introduction of both these technologies - and by introduction I mean prices falling to reasonable levels - will give a big boost to convergence in its classic one-machine-shows-all-media form.

HDTV is 1000 pixels wide, so quite suitable for viewing regular Web pages once the text has been magnified a little. Flat screens mean a change in perception of our TVs and PCs (the slim screens are suitable for both) which creates an ideal changeover point for the two to be combined.

I'll come back to the consequences of all this later, but first let's follow the idea of perception and look at cultural factors influencing the guesswork on how the Web and TV will combine.

Another Room, Another Name

We perceive the TV as a medium for entertainment. It's often the focal point of a family home and viewed socially. PCs are more of a business tool, far more likely to be viewed alone. The two are almost Play and Work personified.

Getting over this cultural perception is no easy task. Do you really want to hunt for suppliers of photocopy toner on your TV, or invite the family to join you on the sofa to watch a movie on your laptop?

This cultural distinction works against convergence. It's technically feasible right now to watch TV and use the Web interchangeably on the same screen. But it's hard to forget the old roles. It's likely that even as combined viewing devices become more common, they will still be seen primarily as either TVs or PCs. More often than not, the way we think of them will depend on which room they're in - it's a TV when it's in the lounge, and a computer when it's in the study. It will take another generation to lose this preconception.

If that's not enough to discourage convergence, then contemplate this for a statistic. According to a Cyber Dialogue survey, in the fourth quarter of 1999, 10.2 million US adults spent an average of 7.3 hours per week surfing the Net while watching TV in the background. Try converging that!

OK, so you've put a small TV window in a corner of their browser. Very clever, but you can do that right now with an $80 PC tuner card, and less than 2% of US Internet users bother. When it comes to seeing the two media on the same machine, they don't show wild enthusiasm.

Big Business

Now let's add the corporate marketing factor into the equation. Technical superiority isn't a major concern for big business. For profit and market dominance, it often prefers the inferior option. Was VHS really better than Betamax? Was Windows 95 better than Mac OS? Does Internet leader AOL offer the world's best browser?

History teaches us that just because the Web on TV looks mediocre, that's no reason to suppose it will fail. If the right selection of big businesses want it to succeed, it probably will. And the businesses that have a vested interest in it succeeding are the TV companies. They're plenty big enough and well placed to draw our attention to whatever they feel like drawing it to. And they'd like us to stick to their medium rather than setting off on wild adventures around an anarchic Web.

We're starting to see the introduction of walled gardens, of Internet access to limited areas of the Web, and a lot of this is coming from the cable and satellite TV companies. They promote their own Internet areas and those of fee-paying associates, but try to keep you off the Web at large.

Sometimes the walls are impenetrable. You're stuck in the designated areas and that's that. Sometimes the barriers are subtle hedges of technology. For example, on satellite TV you get very fast satellite downloads for the core company Web pages, but slow modem access for the rest of the Web. You're likely to stick around the fast corporate area, exactly as you're supposed to do.

Big Planet

Finally, a few demographic factors are worth a mention. The main one is that TVs massively outnumber PCs in the world at large. It's hard to get exact figures, but there are roughly two billion TVs active in the world, and maybe a billion PCs, over half of which are in offices rather than homes. TVs outsell PCs by a factor of about four to one. And lest we forget, the current number of Internet users is less than 300 million.

There's not much hope of bringing the Web to the world's masses via the PC. It's simply too expensive. That's one of the reasons why the Internet's current penetration rate is only about five percent of the Earth's population (yes, unbelievably, there are 6 billion of us). But if it can somehow be incorporated into the ubiquitous TV, the Web's chances of spreading into shanty towns and adobe-walled villages around the world are very good indeed.

Which Means?

So what's the grand conclusion to be extracted from this mass of overlapping factors? There isn't one. There are two. The first is that TVs and PCs will probably converge as flat screens become cheaper. But it's no big deal because the resulting machine will still have the role of a TV or PC depending on the room in which it's parked. And in any case this will only be relevant to a tiny percentage of the planet's population who can afford the new combination and quite like the idea.

Because TVs are so commonplace, affordable, and have the backing of big business, the Web on TV will be a big success. It'll look crap and have very limited functionality (the Half-Assed Web) but that's good enough for the Great Unwashed. It will also attract the most money, the biggest investment, the most advertising, sponsorship, and the biggest slice of ecommerce. Why else did AOL buy a TV company?

If every TV company in the World decides it can make money out of walled Web areas, with plenty of ecommerce companies paying to get inside those walls, or can make money just out of Web-styled interactive TV, then it won't be long before the Half-Assed Web is as big as the full-blown version we all know and love.

Truth and Accuracy

There's a big analogy here with the newspaper industry, especially the direction it took in the UK in the seventies. Before that era, newspapers were broadsheets read by educated people. Then some bright spark thought - why don't we make a smaller, cheaper, more entertaining newspaper for the masses?

A tabloid. And so the famous Sun tabloid newspaper was born, which now sells more than all the UK broadsheets combined. Yet it didn't steal their markets. It created a new one, a bigger one with easier access through uncomplicated writing, wit, irreverence and pictures of bosoms.

And that's what the Web on TV will do. It will bring a watered-down version of the Internet to an enormous new global market that can't be reached through PCs.

Though of course there is one more complication we haven't mentioned yet.

Hold on, the crystal ball is clouding… and clearing again. What does it show? Oh dear. A billion Internet-enabled handhelds and mobile phones.