Of interest:
01:34 PM ET 02/04/97
Internet overtaking TV among consumers, execs say
By Michael Shields
DAVOS (Reuter) - The Internet is drawing hordes of people
away from their television sets but will have to become more
like TV if it wants to boost its mass appeal to consumers,
computer industry executives said Tuesday.
In any event, the two media are converging rapidly in a
trend that will accelerate when digital broadcasting replaces
the dominant analog television system around the world, they
said at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos.
``We recently completed a survey of our customers, who told
us in the consumer segment that they prefer to be on the
Internet than to watch television at home,'' said Michael Dell,
the 31-year-old chairman of computer maker Dell Computer Corp.
Raymond Lane, president of Redwood City, Calif., software
company Oracle Corp, predicted the distinction between
television and the Internet -- the global network of computer
networks -- would soon start to blur.
``There will be a convergence in the next couple of years,
maybe sooner than that,'' he told a panel discussion.
This will lead to customized newspapers and video called up
at the touch of a button as a powerful rival to television.
``This is a slowly adapting marketplace, but I think
broadcast television, as alternatives for profiling and
customization are offered, will diminish,'' Lane said.
Computer workstation maker Sun Microsystems Inc.'s chief
technology officer, Eric Schmidt, said the breakthrough will
come when digital broadcasting puts television on the same
technological footing as computers.
``At the point when the television signal that the average
person gets is digital, there is tremendous leverage to browsing
the Internet model and the digital bits that you see on your
screen,'' he said.
``What I worry about is that we will hit a limit in our
industry in the number of people to whom it makes sense to be
online,'' he added.
``To get to the 70, 80, 90 percent kind of market that
television has, we are going to have to have a model that looks
a lot more like television and a lot more like entertainment
than any of us have seen so far.''
Lane was a bit more skeptical of forecasts that the Internet
could crowd out television in the battle for consumers.
``The consumer is slow to adapt, always. You can push the
cost down and simplify things, but consumer behavior is very,
very difficult to change,'' he said. ``This is going to be a
very predictable and relatively slow-growth rate for our
industry.''
On the hardware front, Lane said the trend was toward
affordable computers rather than high-powered machines.
``I am much more optimistic you will start to see very
simple, low-cost devices. You don't need the complexity if you
just have a limited set of tasks, if you do e-mail all day or
are connected to a local area (computer) network,'' he said. |
