Both TV screens and PC screens will continue to improve Ð to get smaller and improve in quality. Most will be flat-panel displays. One new form will be the digital white board: a large wall-mounted screen, perhaps an inch thick, that will take the place of today’s blackboards and white boards. It will display pictures, movies, and other visual materials, as well as text and other fine details.
However much like a PC the set-top box becomes, there will continue to be a critical difference between the way a PC is used and a television is used: viewing distance … A big-screen TV across the room doesn’t lend itself to the use of a keyboard, nor does it afford privacy, although it is ideal for applications that multiple people watch at the same time.
Your television set will not look like a computer and won’t have a keyboard, but the additional electronics inside or attached will make it architecturally a computer like a PC. Television sets will connect to the highway via a set-top box similar to ones supplied today by most cable TV companies.
Many homes are already attached to two dedicated communications infrastructures: telephone lines and television cables. When these specialized communication systems have been generalized into a single digital-information utility, the information highway will have arrived.
A variety of PC-like appliances will allow each of us to stay in touch over the highway with other people as well as with information. These will include digital replacements for many of the analog devices, including televisions and telephones, that surround us today.
The highway will come about because of a confluence of technological advances in both communications and computers. No single advance would be able to produce the necessary killer applications. But together these will. The highway will be indispensable because it will offer a combination of information, education services, entertainment, shopping, and person-to-person communication.
Most viewers can understand video-on-demand and will welcome the freedom it provides. It has the potential to be what in computer parlance is called the “killer application” for the highway.
You’ll be able to use your infrared remote control to start, stop, or go to any previous part of the program, at any time. If someone comes to your door, you’ll be able to pause the program for as long as you like. You’ll be in absolute control.
Movies, television programs, and all sorts of other digital information will be stored on “servers,” which are computers with capacious disks. Servers will provide information for use anywhere on the network. If you ask to see a particular movie, check a fact, or retrieve your electronic mail, your request will be routed by switches to the server or servers storing that information.
The information highway will make it feel as though all the intermediary machinery between you and the object of your interest has been removed. You indicate what you want and, and presto! you get it.