Since displacing the radio as the darling of the living room, the television experience has continued to evolve. From B/W to color, from analog to digital, from “free to air” to “multichannel pay-TV”, innovation has followed the path of making the “video watching experience” better and providing the consumers more and more channels. EPGs and search functions have soon followed to allow the consumer to navigate and find content more easily in this new ocean of content. Similarly, the internet has followed an evolution driven on the premise that amount of knowledge and information available on the web will grow and grow, and the appetite, and the curiosity of the consumer to search for, discover, and consume this content will similarly grow and grow in a very open nature. The innovation has been around how to assist the consumer in finding “the needle” in this “haystack” (better known as the world wide web).

For years, convergence of the web on the television set has been promised, yet all previous attempts have not succeeded. First was “WebTV”...a web browser on the TV. As the first device that would allow consumers to access the web without a PC, it sought to replicate the internet experience on the TV. At its height, less than 1 million people in the USA subscribed to the service, thus achieving less than 1% penetration. Later attempts have included interactive TV by Pay TV operators, and lately 3rd party STBs (mostly focused on bringing video content on the web to the TV) and Ethernet connected TVs. While these "innovations" have succeeded in providing technical solutions, none of them have truly been embraced by consumers in mass market levels.

The challenge has been that these two have developed along separate paths and that past innovation to bring these together has been to haphazardly throw the web content on the TV without much thought of what the consumer will value nor the how he/she will consume the web content on the television screen. None of these have looked at how the two different paths of TV content and web content can truly become one. If future attempts to provide consumers with the best of both worlds on a TV screen are to succeed, a different innovation perspective must be taken. A deeper look at what makes innovation successful and what are the current underlying trends in both the TV and web is a start.