But today I want to talk about the real interactive television, and about its future. In the old world, services like television and cable and telephone constituted different ways of delivering different products. The conduit defined the content. But the rules where conduit defined content have been rewritten by digitization. And that's television.
Televisions are almost all still analog.
Where broadcast digital TV is available, it is not yet carried on cable. To watch cable, you would have to watch it on your old set, or employ a converter that dissipates much of the resolution advantage of digital transmission. That's a little like riding on a train and having to move from first class to coach class at the border. For years visionaries have predicted that the future of television was, in fact, not really television at all, or at least not the television we have all been used to, but rather something more like the computer. A single device would be a multimedia source of news, information, and entertainment.