"We Love television," Intel Senior Vice President Eric Kim said at the Intel Developer's Forum (IDF - click here to watch the presentation ) while rolling out new System on a Chip (SoC) hardware during his keynote. Mr. Kim once again preached the same Gospel of Convergence we've been hearing for nearly a decade now. Convergence between the computer and the living room. Convergence between the television and the Internet. Only, they don't call it "convergence" anymore, because that's embarrassing. It's still "WebTV" by any other name.

The new technology is interesting enough, I suppose. Hardware decoders, HD video playback, basic computer/Internet on a chip and software to go along with it (notably widgets from Yahoo!, Blockbuster and CinemaNow so far). The concept is that the future of television is seamless integration with the InterWeb - something that's pretty hard to not see coming. The argument that Mr. Kim makes, however, is that:

1. People want more info. For example, 43% of Superbowl viewers browsed the Web during the game.
2. Television is social, as evidenced by 98 million American Idol voters.
3. The integration needs to be simple, which was illustrated with a 2-button remote control.

 Broadly, I think Mr. Kim and Intel are right and the new "world's first CE-optimized television chip" is a small, evolutionary step forward in the convergence direction. And the technology is probably pretty good. And this is Intel's big annual conference, so hyping up new chips is a part of the game. But still: is this really all that exciting? I mean, it's not like it's a new iPod or anything.

More specifically, I don't buy the first two points. (1) People sometimes want more information while viewing, but most of the time they don't. Sports? Sure. Other than 12 minutes of actual play in a three hour football game, you've got plenty of time to look up stats and whatnot. Baseball, golf, soccer - lots of opportunitues to multitask and browse the Web. Further, the CEA study cited doesn't tell us what people were doing on the Internet during the Super Bowl. Maybe they were downloading pr0n? That's something Dad can do on his laptop while watching the game, but I'm guessing Dad doesn't want that ON the television at the same time. There may be other types of TV viewing that might be enriched with "rich content." The News? Naw: the whole reason for watching a 30-minute news program is to summarize the day. Educational? Naw: I can go to PBS.org after the program for plenty more, but not during the program. Movies? Drama? Comedies? In fact, I argue that MOST television does not benefit from the Internet. "We Love TV" sure, but we really love to sit on our butts and watch most of the time.

I also don't even get how people voting on their cellphones during American Idol demonstrates the social aspect of television in point #2. Sure, we are social creatures, I agree with that, I'm just not sure interaction with rich content counts. Furthermore, browsing the Web and the intense clickity-click interaction does not lend itself to group interaction in a single location, i.e., the living room. You think fighting over the remote is problematic now, just wait until you have families browsing the Internet together. People IM and twitter and text during shows, maybe even laughing at the same jokes simultaneously while watching a program "together" across the country, but once again, a seperate, dedicated device is always going to be better for this.

I definitely agree with the third point, which is that the convergence needs to be simple or it will fail. See also: TiVo. My cable television at home is already way too complex, but that's the retarded UI and programming decisions Bright House Cable makes in my area. The highest channel is 1306, which is completely unbrowseable, but there aren't that many channels and it is totally broken up with huge blocks of channels with nothing on them, inaccessible premium channels mixed in (sometimes every other channel is a premium channel), blocks of music-only, blocks of On-Demand content, etc. It's a nightmare. I really don't see how adding MORE rich content to this will help and can see a lot of ways it'll make it worse. I don't think it's just the cranky old man inside of me that finds all of the banners and crawls and stocks and weather and breaking news graphics and station bugs annoying. That anyone thinks it's a good idea to add more is astonishing.

Which brings me to my final observation. Mr. Kim is absolutely right that the rich television is coming and that it needs to be simple. Where I think Intel is making a mistake (and it's the same one WebTV made long ago), is that we are not going to see Television + Internet ever work. What is going to happen in the next couple of years is that the Internet is going to replace TV and, with or without Intel's hardware (most likely with!), someone is going to come up with a convenient, simple frontend GUI that is NOT a Web browser that will let me manage and customize my 1,300 cable channels, give me access to tens of thousands of shows on-demand AND add rich context-sensitive content when I want it.

The sentiment isn't that "We Love TV" is wrong, it's just that "We Love Internet" more.

References:

• We Love Television - Eric Kim's Keynote at IDF, August 20, 2008. [* Ironically difficult and annoying to watch, at least in Firefox, where I needed to DL a wmp plugin, which then proceded to pop up the presentation's slides in the wrong window, with a new tab created for each slide. Yea: what I said about the frontend GUI. Needs work.]