The same law transmogrified the Internet itself. Created in the early 1970s by the Pentagon to preserve military communications in case of a nuclear doomsday, the Net is now an expanding instrument for peace and dialogue among nations. For the same reasons why woolly mammoths no longer roam the earth, TV can not remain as it is. Natural selection favors the Web's interactivity over TV's static flatness. The Web is hot.
Some serious questions remain to be answered.
TV's resolution is much lower than a PC monitor's, meaning that graphics that look stunning through a computer may turn out fuzzy on the set's bigger video screen. Critics also cite TV's lack of a hard drive to download and store information from the Net. And current video transmission over phone lines seems to move like a glacier. WebTV thinks it has worked out many of those problems. By tweaking the screen image to reduce flicker and add crispness.