Hunting Today's Great Couch Potato
By Bill Frezza
Just when you thought the specious strategy of "digital convergence" had been put out of its misery, it's come back with a vengeance. The dream that television, telephone, cable TV, consumer electronics, personal computers, entertainment, information, Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Internet are all going to merge into a unified business
under a homogenous technology platform just refuses to go away. The latest pronouncements of the convergence cult scream at us from both the trade press and our daily newspapers. To practiced ears, this sounds like the death chant of ol
d media, desperately clinging to the idea that broadcast-centric, advertiser-driven business models can be transferred to the Internet.
 Yet the siren song has seduced none other than the industry's Big Three--Microsoft, Intel and Compaq--who hav
e joined forces to promote a PC-friendly version of recently codified high-definition TV (HDTV) standards (see "Digital TV Limps to the Starting Line," at techweb. cmp.com/nc/716/716colfrezza.html). These folks want to make sure nothing stands in the way of a Wintel world.
Know Your Prey
Sure, Web surfing and channel surfing bear a superficial resemblance to each other. They both involve pushing buttons to change the picture on a tube. But that's where the resemblance ends.
Web surfing is purposeful: It's about searching for something you haven't seen yet. Channel surfing is purposeless: It's about running away from something you've already seen. Web surfing engage
s your brain, forcing you to make a series of value judgments. Channel surfing is mindless, a ritual wandering in a hypnotic trance that lies at the heart of the TV experience. Web surfing challenges the intellect. Channel surfing induces stupor. These are not comparable experiences and never will be.
Classic Madison Avenue advertisers have little use for eyeballs attached to a discerning intellect. They vastly prefer pouring subliminal messages into eyeballs attached to brains that have been temporarily neutralized. You cannot do this to a Web surfer.
Survival of the Smartest
The television set will continue to dominate the den and living room. The equipment will be produced by consumer electronics manufacturers, not computer companies, mostly because computer companies have no idea how to make money building boxes that only cost $500.
The dominant mode of content delivery will be broadcast, regardless of whether the broadcast is done over the air, on cable TV, through rented videocasse
ttes or via satellite. As they have for decades, some people will sit mesmerized in front of the boob tube to relax and to be entertained. The PC industry needn't lose any sleep chasing couch potatoes that do this for six hours a day--these are a dying breed.
The PC will dominate everywhere else--be it in the office, the bedroom, the kit
chen, the laptop, the pocket or the study. Every member of the family will have one, probably more. These all will be networked, but it will be a long time before there will be sufficient bandwidth in our local distribution systems to waste on sitcoms and talk shows. We occasionally will watch embedded video on our PC screens and play games, but the dominant mode of interaction will be active, not passive.
We will go to our PCs when we want something. Attempts to waste our time shoveling intrusive advertising at us will fail. Only when we have time to kill--something that is happening less and less often--will we turn on our TVs.
Madison Avenue moguls that make bi
g bets on convergence believing they can sell eyeballs attached to PC users will lose their shirts. PC manufacturers that make big bets on taking over the living room will be humbled. Don't feel too bad, they can't win them all.
Bill Frezza is a general partner at Adams Capital Management. The opinions expressed here are his own. He can be reached at frezza@alum.MIT.EDU or techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.
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