Focus turns to spreading Web to TV

Lots of people who use the Web all the time think its integration with television - an idea being pushed by companies like WebTV - is pretty stupid. This is because lots of the people who use the Web all the time have a fairly narrow vision of the world.

It's not that they're not saying they aren't people who are not intelligent and resourceful and interested in global politics. But Web-users still tend to be computer fans. They love the fact that the home computer which they find so useful also enables them to connect to a vast digital smorgasbord called the Internet.

They forget that, despite the endlessly rising figures for people online, the collective number is a tiny sliver of the world's population.

Even in the western world, where the Internet audience is rapidly expanding the number has been considered too small to be of great interest to advertisers until very recently.

All of that is changing, of course, but the Internet is still not a mass medium in the way that newspapers or radio or television is. Why? Because it doesn't pass what I call the "mum metric". My mother doesn't use the Internet.

She uses all sorts of household technologies, including baffling ovens with embedded microprocessors and digital readouts that leave me unable to bake a potato without her help - but she has no use generally for a computer and certainly isn't going to start fussing with Windows or a Mac just to get online.

And then, there's the problem of performance. If you use a computer regularly you grow used to wading through the idiosyncracies of these hideously complex machines. You learn to deal (albeit unhappily) with system crashes, frozen screens, error messages and the rest.

But the mass market would never tolerate those glitches in an entertainment medium.

Imagine if you had to log on to your TV in order to watch Ireland play a crucial football match, but just kept getting a busy signal.

Imagine losing your connection to Friends 10 minutes into the show.

Imagine the TV set crashing at a cliffhanging moment of a film, while you desperately try to reboot. And how many people would own televisions, no matter how badly they wanted to watch the Simpsons, if sets cost around a £1,000?

But bring the cost down to about £200, and make getting online as easy as using a television remote control, and then you can gain serious eyeballshare (as the American marketing term goes). Then the Internet becomes a true mass medium and the doors are thrown open for all sorts of innovations - Web content that is complementary to a television programme, new Web/television hybrid shows, video on demand delivered over the Web to your television, integration of telephone and video on your TV.

And of course, there's a huge new market there for businesses to reach.