Josh Bernoff, a television analyst at Forrester Research, believes that even as the TV and the PC take on attributes of each other, they will continue to exist separately. Nobody is going to buy airline tickets or monitor their finances on their television set. Digital broadcast news could provide viewers with simple choices to tap into this trend. In the future you're going to have so much bandwidth and so much storage capability that all boxes in the home will essentially be the same. The challenge for broadcasters, then, is to take a page from the Web.
Broadcasters have to change their business models.
But our customers today are largely our advertisers. Our relationship with viewers is extremely indirect, mostly through Nielsen ratings. As digital television rolls out, this relationship will have to change. Schmidt says that broadcasters could use the new spectrum to develop e-commerce and transactional revenues. Regardless of whether they are reaching people through the TV or the PC, broadcasters could wind up building relationships they never have had before with viewers.