Internet Overtaking TV Among Consumers, Execs Say
DAVOS, Switzerland - The Internet is drawing hordes of people away from
their television screens but will have to become more like TV if it wants
to boost its mass appeal to consumers, computer industry executives say.
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 annual meeting of the
World Economic Forum 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 Dell
Computer.
Raymond Lane, president of California software company Oracle, forecast the
distinction between television and the Internet -- a global computer
network linked by telephone lines -- would soon start to blur.
"There will be a convergence in the next couple of years, maybe sooner than
that, so that...we can each get what we want by basically pre-formatting it
to do the arbitrage, the search for information when we are not on line, so
that when we do turn it on the information that is broadcast to us is
information that we want to have," 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.
Sun Microsystems'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 on line," 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 network,"
he said.
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