What Convergence? Television's Hesistant March to the Net

The New York Times currently features a very interesting article regarding how the internet, despite being seemingly present everywhere(from our personal computers to our phones to elevators and taxis), has largely escaped the single biggest screen in our lives--the television.

As provided in the aforementioned article, there is currently a debate concerning whether televisions should be able to gain access to the web, and if so, the means for doing so. It appears that television manufacturers, for the most part, simply do not want Internet on TV. Greg Belloni, a spokesman for Sony stated, “Sony’s stance is that consumers don’t want an Internet-like experience with their TVs, and we’re really not focused on bringing anything other than Internet video or widgets to our sets right now,” said Greg Belloni, a spokesman for Sony. Widgets is an industry term for narrow channels of Internet programming like YouTube.

Nevertheless, Intel has created a chip called the Intel Media Processor CE 3100, which allows full browsing. But it has been adopted by only a handful of television manufacturers, and only in limited fashion. Manufacturers seem to prefer to keep their customers in a walled garden of selected content. It also seems that Intel itself may be part of the problem as TV manufacturers are wary of having Intel come to dominate the chip market. Richard Doherty, an industry analyst at Envisioneering, a consumer-electronics market research firm believes “[e]ven companies that are working with Intel have told me that they don’t want a single-supplier solution if they can help it." He added that Intel’s entry in the market has accelerated the development of Internet-centric TV chips at competitors like Broadcom, Texas Instruments, ST Micro, Free- scale and NXP.

Despite the current backlash amongst television manufacturers, it seems that it is only a matter of time before there is more complete convergence between television and the internet. The true question, as a marketer, is how to take advantage of the eventual combination of these two mediums.