Will digital TVs make PCs obsolete?

[Gregg Lengling]

The Asahi Shimbun



This is the last installment in a three-part series on the broadcasting and telecommunications industries.

Some electronics manufacturers are so confident in next-generation, Internet-compatible digital televisions they are portending the demise of the personal computer at the very hands of the do-all boob tube.

Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. operating systems and central processing units a thing of the past? A practical joke, perhaps? Is the sake flowing too freely during board meetings?

No, they're dead serious-and they're willing to tell anyone who'll listen.

``Television sets will take the place of personal computers in the coming age of broadband Internet service,'' Sony Corp. President Kunitake Ando told a trade fair in Las Vegas in January.

Never mind that domestic shipments of PCs surpassed those of TVs in 2002-10.02 million units to 9.63 million units, respectively. Ask many in the industry, and they'll tell you the figures point to a saturating PC market; 10.02 million units does, after all, represent a year-on-year decline in shipments.

And so the battle begins. To whet consumers' appetites, manufacturers are rolling out a variety of new cross-platform products.

At a Sony showroom in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward, a salesperson informs visitors that the world of television is changing. He points to a 50-inch plasma display television hooked up to a home media server called CoCoon, which, in addition to its broadband Internet connection, is a smart recorder-it records TV shows it thinks the owner would be interested in seeing, judged on logs of previous recordings. The programs are stored on the unit's hard disk and can be effortlessly deleted should the user not be pleased with CoCoon's choices.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., maker of Panasonic, has a number of projects related to the Internet on the go. It plans to release an Internet-compatible television this year and is considering setting up a Web site together with an Internet service provider to offer such information as weather forecasts and traffic information for the TV.

``It's time we start thinking about the roles TV can play in the network,'' said Matsushita Electric Managing Director Fumio Otsubo.

But despite all the talk of the growing interplay between the two media, electronics makers have to be proceeding with a certain amount of trepidation, aware as they are of the failed attempts of those who attempted to make the transition before them.

In 1997, Sharp Corp., Sanyo Electric Co. and NEC Corp. marketed TVs equipped with a telephone jack to connect to the Internet. Sales were so sluggish that they were forced to discontinue production.

An NEC official said the snag was that the TV required owners to sign up for a new phone line, at a cost of several tens of thousands of yen, while phone rates themselves were also quite high.

Times have changed, of course, with high-speed Internet connections such as asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL) becoming widespread and prices for such services falling through the floor.

Not all electronics manufacturers are bent on seeing the TV regain its crown as the sole focal point in the living rooms of the nation, however.

Some, whose mainstay is PC production, want to see the computer retain its stranglehold over the Internet service arena. As such, they are marketing PCs that can be connected to TVs.

Other electronics companies are working actively to develop all kinds of home appliances that can connect to the Internet.

So while it remains to be seen whether the TV can put the squeeze on the PC, or vice versa, what is certain is that the efforts of domestic electric appliance makers are helping to thrust households headlong into the broadband network era.(IHT/Asahi: March 15,2003)