What Convergence? TV's Hesitant March to the Net
PALO ALTO, Calif. — You would be hard-pressed to find a screen today that does not have Internet access. It's not just the PC and the phone — online content appears in elevators, in the back of taxis and at your airplane seat.
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2009 the industry had spent years predicting a merger of television and the web — coverage stretching back to CNET's 2005 look at the Internet's future for TV and the Journal's late-2007 piece on the same collision. Yet while connectivity spread everywhere else, TV makers remained cautious about putting the Internet inside the set itself. This piece captures that hesitation at a hinge moment: months later, hybrid Internet-TV efforts were showing real traction in Europe (hybrid broadcast-web models making progress), suggesting the lag was strategic rather than technical.
First-order effects
- TV manufacturers face immediate pressure to decide whether to ship connected sets now or cede the living-room screen to external boxes and PCs, since online video is already reaching every other kind of display.
- Content owners gain a new distribution surface — screens in taxis, elevators, and planes — but must format and license programming for these fragmented out-of-home contexts before the TV itself comes online.
Second-order effects
- Set-top boxes, game consoles, and PC-to-TV bridges become the interim winners: if televisions stay 'dumb,' intermediaries capture the connected-TV relationship and the viewer data that comes with it.
- Broadcasters and cable operators watch their gatekeeper position erode as web delivery matures — the European hybrid-TV progress later in 2009 shows networks adapting by blending broadcast with IP rather than resisting it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the TV's value shifts from the hardware and the channel lineup to software and services — whoever controls the interface and the app platform on the screen, not the tuner, owns the customer.
- The eventual outcome is likely an open question between walled-garden TV platforms and open web delivery; which wins will shape regulation of content access and whether pay-TV bundles survive in an unbundled world.
The trend: This is one data point in the slow, contested migration of television from a closed broadcast appliance to a networked software platform.