Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Future of TV and the Internet



I think that it is obvious that the world of traditional television is merging with the internet. I saw an ad in Entertainment Weekly magazine for a TV from Samsung with a feature called Internet@TV. Yes, it's a flat screen HDTV with great resolution, but it has access to websites too. It has widgets you can use to check news, stock quotes, weather or sports scores from the internet. You can check out Twitter, see what's for sale on E-bay, and look at pictures from Flickr on your living room TV. In the future people will watch a show, and when they go to commercial they can check their Facebook page or buy something off Amazon. Netflix has a box that can be connected to a TV so that movies and shows can be watched immediately. For that matter they can be watched via the Netflix website too. Who will need to get them through the mail? As it is now it seems that most either watch internet videos on a desktop computer in a home office or they watch it on a laptop. In the future all living rooms will have TVs where people will sit on the couch with the family and watch videos from You Tube or Hulu.com. This is exciting, but between watching shows via websites and/or on a DVR where people skip through commercials, will local businesses want to buy commercial time on TV?