What Convergence? TV’s Hesitant March to the Net

[groovedaddy]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — You would be hard-pressed to find a screen today that does not have Internet access. It’s not just the PC and the phone — online content appears in elevators, in the back of taxis and at your airplane seat. Some companies have even tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to get the Internet displayed on a refrigerator door.

So how is it that the Internet has largely escaped the single biggest screen in most of our lives — the TV?

An intensifying, and perhaps surprising, debate is playing out around this question and others. Should televisions be able to get access to the Web? And not just the thin slices of the Web allowed by a few services, but the whole cacophonous, unregulated, messy thing? And if they should, how should they?

Now a movement is afoot by chip makers big and small to spur a new generation of TVs with full browser capability, like a personal computer. In October, Intel released its own TV-centric chip, and many other semiconductor designers and manufacturers are doing the same, industry analysts said.

But perhaps the most surprising thing is not how long it is taking to get the Internet on TV but that, to some degree, that slow pace is deliberate. Television manufacturers simply do not seem to want it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/technology/internet/16chip.html?th&emc=th

[msongs]

1. thus begins corporate media efforts to strangle free internet and repackage it as a controlled

commodity where every sub unit of the internet is available only under corporate imposed access restriction and controlled packaging costs:

bundling of services vs higher priced stand alone
financially charged limits/layers on upload/download bandwidth
strip-mine marketing of all your traffic and data
storing your traffic history

and of course corporate buying and selling of politicians from the city councils to the congress, dems, repubs,and independents alike.

this is the business model used by charter inc and now charter is declaring bankruptcy in an attempt to screw all its creditors.

way to go charter!

Msongs