My Goodness, Jermoluk (@Home CEO) must be talking about ACTV. Wait till the rest of the world finds out!
The television I look at differently. I [don't] believe in Web surfing on TVs. I don't think people are interested in typing on keyboards and leaning forward and trying to interact with their televisions. I believe in one-button, one-click interactivity on the television set: See an ad, one click, buy the product, or [with] one click, go to another. Or, say you're watching CNN election news, and they start [announcing the results from] Georgia. You can say, "I want to see [the results from] California." You click a button and bring [them] up. It's interactive TV. I almost hate to say that because five to 10 years ago, people had a bad taste in their mouths [about interactive TV].
People have been talking about interactive TV for decades. But it's here now. We're going to be able to do this. One-click interactivity. People channel-surf today; it's nothing more than that. [Now] you'll have a choice, and that's going to be killer, and [the whole thing will] be funded by advertising.
Our best estimates are [that] in the year 2000, $288 billion will be spent on television advertising. Today, the advertising [money] spent on the Web [is about] $2 billion. During the next two years, how much of that $288 billion do you think could shift into supporting interactive TV? [That could be] a dramatic shift.
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