Bring the Web to the Living Room, the TV is Just Another Screen

The Wall Street Journal Online is at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What they’re finding is that after more than a decade of trying, the goal of marrying television and the Internet seems finally to be picking up steam:

A key factor in the push are new TV sets that have networking connections built directly into them, requiring no additional set-top boxes for getting online. Meanwhile, many consumers are finding more attractive entertainment and information choices on the Internet — and have already set up data networks for their PCs and laptops that can also help move that content to their TV sets.

Amid other developments pegged to this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp. plan to announce support from several major consumer-electronics companies to sell TV sets that come with software, dubbed widgets, that make it easier to call up Web content on TV sets using ordinary remote controls rather than computer keyboards.

“You are going to see very broad adoption of this open technology by the best brands in the TV industry — not just for specialty products but deeply penetrated in their product lines,” says Patrick Barry, Yahoo’s vice president of connected TV.

Much is made of the Netflix moves, which I posted about here and here. Today Carlo Longino at TechDirt takes us to the next logical, if difficult, step for traditional broadcast TV:

So will the further spread of internet content to people’s living rooms hasten the demise of the TV channel? This is an idea that we’ve been kicking around for a few years now, that TV networks should unbundle their shows and move away from their schedule-focused format. In short, they need to stop thinking of themselves as broadcasters, and instead as content distributors, adapting their distribution networks to changing technologies and their viewers’ changing demands. Certainly DVRs are already doing this, and some cable companies are taking the steps that TV networks won’t by creating remote DVRs. But instead of embracing these developments and working to successfully monetize them, networks simply just try to shut them down. They must realize that television sets are nothing more than another screen for many types of content, not just on-ramps to network TV schedules. As it becomes easier for viewers to access internet content on their TVs, this lesson should become much clearer.

RELATED: At a Sep 25, 2007 Dickinson College talk, Vint Cerf, Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, imagined how advertising might work in a world of instantly downloaded TV.

LATER: Mashable disagrees, “When you watch TV, you want to watch TV, and little else (except perhaps eating popcorn). When you want to interact, you use your computer – which is probably not that far away from your TV set.”