FYI Why PC and Television Will Never Meet
By JAMES GLEICK
Riddle: it has a big screen for displaying information and entertainment,
speakers for lifelike sound and a thing you hold in your hand to click
your way through various content sources. It reminds you to "tune in
often to see our latest updates!" So which box are we talking about: the one with too many channels and nothing to watch, or the one that says, HTTP/1.1 Server Too Busy?
You're not supposed to be entirely sure. The major consumer-electronics manufacturers, cable-television networks and software companies are betting on a convergence of television and personal computers into some common form. They now believe that the living room of the future will have a box -- a digital box, of course; a really cool box -- for Web browsing, channel surfing, Web surfing, channel flipping, zapping, clicking...checking E-mail, managing your money and watching "I Love
Lucy" reruns.
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Television is passive; computing is active.
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In their different ways, both boxes already ooze convergence. Your
computer has "channels" on the desktop, if you have the latest version
of Windows. Your television is going digital, even if you aren't rushing
out to spend $8,000 on a magnificent high-resolution HDTV set. Your Web browser can already receive multimedia entertainment streams -- music and video on demand. You can sign up for a service called WebTV and explore the Internet without any PC at all -- just a little box sitting atop your television set. Or if the PC is your box of choice, you can use WebTV for Windows to watch any television station in a window on the computer screen. Confused yet?
"It's a very, very different experience," says Steve Perlman, co-founder
and president of WebTV, which is now owned by Microsoft. "We're moving
from 20th-century television, which is primarily about being on the
right channel at the right time, to a kind of television where there's
almost an infinite number of channels and everything's on demand."
In the world of convergence, your TV-watching habits and your
Internet-surfing habits will, supposedly, be one and the same. For
example:
You want weather. Instead of waiting for your local forecast or the
hurricane-watch segment to roll around on the Weather Channel, you'll
click on the one you want, and it will start right in.
You're enjoying a music video, and you want to order the CD. Zap. Or
maybe you want to jump to a chat session about the performers.
That travelogue about Tuscany has you so mesmerized that you want to
click on some icon instantly to reserve a villa and two coach seats on
Alitalia.
You want the best of television news -- up-to-the-minute video from the
scene of the action -- but you want it now, without waiting for the top
of the hour, and you want to jump to related articles in text format
too.
Most of all, you want to be able to find your way around. The proverbial
500 channels is nothing compared with the uncountable information
sources of the online world, where every Webmaster is a broadcaster.
Channel guides and search engines will be the first selling point of
every digital-television product in the foreseeable future.
The Internet may be chaotic compared with television, but at least on
the Internet people set their own schedules. If you want to watch
Geraldo at 10:22, you will click or zap or download Geraldo at 10:22. If the phone interrupts, you will simply press Pause. "Our children, in the early part of the next century," Perlman says, "will be asking us how we
could stand watching TV where you had to wait till your show was on."
In the bedrooms of teen-agers, a sort of convergence may already be
here. MTV Networks recently surveyed the time use of 4,000 Americans
ages 4 and up and found the young, by and large, keeping their own
television sets and personal computers running at the same time. They
tend to jump back and forth between them more democratically than their
elders. "We made a distinction," says Betsy Frank, executive vice
president for research and development, "between technological
convergence -- the day when everything comes out of one box -- and
behavioral convergence, which is the way these kids are behaving right
now."
Presumably they're zapping their way to the "Baywatch" site, one of
several that have provided special hooks for the WebTV product. For the
most wired-up of the beach-and-body show's viewers, it offers the
following information-age enhancements:
"Exclusive" video footage, which turns out to be a few seconds of
promotional material so low-grade it could never be shown on actual, you
know, television.
A "Baywatch"-sponsored discussion forum and message board (current
topics: "self tanners," "Give Marliece more meatier roles" and "Do you
guys hate me?").
"Baywatch" Fun Facts. ("Ever wonder how much sunscreen the cast of
'Baywatch' goes through in a year?")
The "Baywatch" extended theme music (3 minutes and 17 seconds' worth).
It's multimedia.
What, you're not impressed? You prefer to absorb "Baywatch" by, like,
lying back on the couch?
Television stations can't yet let you watch your own individually
delivered version of each sitcom, complete with Pause and Rewind, unless
you go to the trouble of programming your VCR. There just isn't enough
carrying capacity in the existing wires and satellite broadcasts -- not
enough bandwidth. If you've ever watched streaming video come from a Web
site via telephone wire, you saw a comically jerky picture the size of a
credit card. Everyone is waiting for, praying for or spending money on
more bandwidth.
Meanwhile, hardware companies like Philips Electronics, noticing that
many of their present and future consumer products are digital through
and through, are embracing the notion of convergence as tightly as they
can. A digital television is automatically a programmable television --
so there's convergence right there. "I'm not saying it becomes a PC,"
says Cees Jan Koomen, president of digital video for Philips, "but
digital television will almost by definition become a programmable
device. It will allow for different types of content and an explosion of
possible channels."
Programmability can seem scary, admittedly. The word has not exactly
become synonymous with reliability. "The programmability should be
such," he says, "that you should not find yourself in a situation where
your TV is going to freeze because of a software bug." He does promise,
when convergence comes, to make programming VCR's "a very, very easy
task."
But is this really what we want? Our posture -- our whole physical
layout -- screams otherwise. We sit 18 to 24 inches from a computer
screen, a distance suitable for reading, but four to six feet from the
television, a distance suitable for placid entertainment. "TV is for
laying back," Koomen admits, "and the computer is more for leaning
forward."
At the computer terminal, we are pretty much alone. At the television,
we can watch in groups; a person can get in trouble by being too
interactive with the remote control.
Television is passive; computing is active.
Television was the ultimate cool medium for Marshall McLuhan; he didn't
try Web browsing, but he would have noticed that it is hot.
And no matter how the technology advances, it's hard to imagine being
happy reading paragraphs of text from across the room or watching
wide-screen movies in a tiny Microsoft window.
"The computer industry is very desirous of you buying a new monitor
every couple of years," says Gil Schwartz, senior vice president of
communications at CBS. "Conversely the television industry reaches you
over a monitor that you may have had since you were a kid. That is not
Bill Gates's vision. TV is interested in maintaining 100-percent
penetration. Convergence tends to battle that."
Like all the networks, CBS is determinedly expanding its Internet
presence. But Schwartz believes that the online and broadcast worlds
will remain complementary -- supporting and feeding off each other, but
not melting into each other.
We do have different modes of existence, depending on mood and time of
day. Our leaning forward and clicking has made the Internet what it is.
We fight our way through the underbrush, and we become information
providers ourselves. And then we park ourselves down, lie back and let
mass-media entertainment wash over us, on a box that never suffers a
General Protection Fault.
"Any sort of model that replaces television with a complicated
interactive unit that you have to get to know in a sophisticated way,"
Schwartz says, "well, I'm wondering."
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