WebTV: An Idea Whose Time Has Not Come

One of the next big things for the Internet these days is the WebTV, which is a pretty bad idea — for now. What's the point of WebTV, and who are the people that are going to use it?

It's for people who want to use the Internet (probably because everyone is telling them they have to be on the Net if they're anybody at all), but they don't want to buy or learn how to use a computer. So give it to them via something they already know and use: the television. In essense, the Web will become one giant cable channel.

The problem is this: the Web is slow. With anything slower than a T1 connection, it will take Web pages forever to show up on screen compared to the immediacy of television. Net surfers are a lot more patient than channel surfers, and it's doubtful that many WebTV users are going to want to wait.

And after the wait, what's there? Not much compared to television. (Not that TV's loaded with wonderful stuff...) Even the most graphics- heavy sites aren't much compared to television, and to create a site that rivals TV in terms of animation and sound would take awful long to download. Plus a lot of the Web's content is text-based — online magazines, for example — and reading pages on WebTV from across the room won't be fun. And will there be a printer port to get hardcopy of Web pages?

Until high-speed Internet connections are a common household item, or unless people want to sit patiently by (and close to) the TV, WebTV is just going to leave a lot of people disappointed. Buy a computer; that way you can at least use it for something else, too.

Uploaded January 1997