In the NYT today, this round-up by John Markoff of “it’s-TV-no-wait-it’s-the-internet” news from CES:
In the battle for the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an array of content in video-on-demand programs.
But fending off the Internet’s openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago.
At the onset of the dot-com era, large online service companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN tried to lock customers into electronic walled gardens of digital information. But it quickly became apparent that no single company could compete with the vast variety of information and entertainment sources provided on the Web.
The same phenomenon may well overtake traditional TV providers.
Potentially, IPTV could replace the 100- or 500-channel world of the cable and satellite companies with millions of hybrid combinations that increasingly blend video, text from the Web, and even video-game-style interactivity.