When TVs and PCs collide

Imagine seeing this ad: Two guys stand together in a field of white. “I'm a PC,” says one guy. “And I'm a TV,” says the other, before burying his rival in put-downs.

With the rise of IPTV and online video, among other trends, TVs and PCs increasingly are crowding each other's turf, posing plenty of questions about how the roles played by these devices will shift over time — questions that are particularly nettlesome for an industry trying to build business models around consumer behavior. As the functional overlap between TVs and PCs grows, where should service providers aim new applications? And which device will people prefer for which applications?

“The TV experience will start to migrate toward the PC experience,” said Mark Wegleitner, chief technology officer for Verizon. “We'll have to come up with navigation and search and other functions that allow [consumers] to use the TV much like they're using a PC today, to the point where these two devices become blended.”

The real fundamental difference between TVs and PCs dictates much of their purpose: namely, that we sit 18 inches from our PCs and 18 feet from our TVs. In general, TV will have dibs whenever the quality of the video is a concern and when immersion is desired, such as with movies. But the more control and interactivity that people want, the more the PC wins out.

“Do you really want to see a YouTube video on a 45-inch screen?” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group. “That's not what it's conducive for.”

Think of consumer activity on a spectrum ranging from 100% information to 100% entertainment — from PC to TV. In the middle is a gray area, Wegleitner said, “where, on an application-by-application basis, I flip back and forth.”

If TV is tasked with more PC-like duties, the already ballooning remote control will need to be seriously overhauled, for starters.

“If you're going to subscribe to the idea that the TV set will migrate to PC functionality, then you need to do better than the remote control,” Wegleitner said. “But in this generation of electronic devices, I'm not sure that's all that big a jump. I have a qwerty keyboard on my cell phone. My BlackBerry has a keyboard I can operate with my thumbs. To put one of those in the hands of a TV viewer isn't all that big a deal.”