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To: John J H Kim who wrote (1422)	2/23/1998 7:56:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

The essence of the internet is its interactivity. No one could sell at $40/mo a service that would enable someone to get content for an extra charge. This is why broadband failed some years ago. Once the extended infrastructure is in place then operating overhead can be drawn out of content per view and be worthwhile. PC users are willing to pay for the high speed access. This has enabled a major financial hurdle to be cleared. The advent of PC cable telephony will take another major step toward solidifying the quality infrastructure and encouraging ubiquity. So it is the PC that got the ball rolling so that economies of scale are possible for broadband services including tv box office. I believe the interactivity factor makes the PC functionality whether the tv is the monitor or not, far more valuable than the tv's unidirectional and inflexible delivery. If we are talking about delivery devices, then the tv to me has a substantially different characteristic than the PC. I don't agree with this merging concept. You can go back over this thread and find that we have discussed all this in detail last fall. For the value add, you get more punch for the dollar invested in a PC that controls the tv than buying a settop box for that purpose. The settop running Windows CE or equivalent will not have the power and flexibility available to a device built around local storage. Email, telephony, and entertainment are not local storage intensive, but when you have to do PC work, you need storage. It has been argued that business applications like telecommuting are far more important to ATHM. You are suggesting that that argument is false.

To: John J H Kim who wrote (1422)	2/24/1998 5:33:00 AM
From: Roger Bass	Respond to of 29970

This TV/PC debate is a very old chestnut indeed. Though you can argue that much of the technology is convergent, the two will clearly remain different applications. There is the so-called 'ten-foot, two-foot paradigm' - the kind of things you do two feet away from the screen with a keyboard (pace voice recognition) in a study, are not the same as the kind of things you do ten feet away from a screen in the living room. One is essentially interactive, the other is (today) essentially passive. Certainly you can imagine small amounts of interactivity gradually seeping into the TV experience (think 'zapping plus'), but we're not going to see an overnight sea change in the way people use TVs, just because the box has a gigabit two-way cable out the back. Entertainment, and eventually applications like 'clickable advertising content', will be big business, but that doesn't mean it'll be the same thing as a PC.