It once looked as if the internet and the television would converge on the computer screen – but TV shows no signs of giving up the fight for survival, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

ONCE UPON A time, watching TV was easy. Check the listings for the time a programme is on, make sure you’re at home and turn on the TV set at the appropriate time.

Channels were limited to the major networks, making viewing a fairly simple choice. Everyone watched the same programmes, at the same time. If you missed a programme everyone else was talking about the next day, there was little you could do but regret it.

But that all began to change in the mid- to late 1970s, when technology began to transform what people did with their televisions and how they consumed TV programmes. First, video recorders enabled people to tape shows and watch them later at their leisure, and cable TV began to pipe in hundreds of additional channels.

Then came set-top devices allowing people to digitally record their shows, and DVD players with hard drives at the ready for storing content. Then computers began to incorporate television tuners, people started uploading and sharing TV content over the internet (often illegally) and TV made the leap to the ultra small screen on mobile handsets.

And now, television sets – which already look pretty much like a computer display – are becoming more like computers.

It wasn’t long ago that we were all trying to figure out whether or not to buy a HD-ready TV. Now, it’s all about internet-ready TV sets – not to mention 3D.

But an interesting thing has happened on the way to all this long promised convergence. For a long time, it was assumed that convergence would happen on the computer, and the computer would become the centre for home entertainment. Pundits also predicted that television viewing figures would plummet as people spent increasing amounts of time online. What would presumably follow would be a stagnation of television sales.

Certainly, the number of people who watch television programmes on their computers has ballooned, thanks to broadcasters like the BBC, RTÉ and TV3 offering online catch-up services that stream recent programmes, and commercial offerings such as Hulu.com, currently only available in the US.

But people seem to have fallen further in love with the TV. Instead of declining, sales of sets have not just been rising, but at times have hit triple-digit growth in booming markets such China. The most recent global sales figures for televisions indicate a 26 per cent rise in sets sold year on year in the second quarter, with many manufacturers rapidly adopting advanced technologies like LED, 3D and internet connectivity, according to analyst DisplaySearch.

Despite the global recession, sales of television sets indicate a continuing consumer appetite for TV viewing and a willingness to pay for its most novel forms. Korean electronics firm Samsung, now the leading television manufacturer, reported a 43 per cent increase in second-quarter TV sales compared to the same quarter of the previous year, shipping more than nine million flat-panel TVs in that quarter alone. One of the first producers of 3D TVs, the company also sold 500,000 of those in the same quarter.

This points to another trend: people seem to have decided that, if things are going to converge anywhere, they’re going to converge in the TV itself. At the beginning of the decade, Microsoft and Intel were talking about the desktop PC as the entertainment heart of the home. But people didn’t want to gather around a computer in their sittingrooms – they still wanted to sit in front of a TV. That realisation, brought home by poor sales, caused Intel to abandon a sittingroom PC product called Viiv in 2007.

On the other hand, history until now has not pointed to any enormous yearning for full internet access directly on television sets. Consider the failure of Microsoft-owned WebTV – critics say Microsoft didn’t put enough additional research and development into what, at one time, was considered a hot Silicon Valley startup and an obvious way for people to access the World Wide Web, which was, at that point, still quite new. But many WebTV users found it awkward to sit on their sofa with a remote keyboard on their lap, trying to read e-mail or website content on a screen halfway across the room.

A decade on, and despite much hype, it’s still unclear what consumers will do with internet capability on their television. While some sets are being sold as internet-enabled – an add-on that can increase the cost of a set by between €100 and €200 – and several chip manufacturers, including Intel, are offering special chipsets that include TV capability, very few people are actually viewing the internet on their television sets.

In 2008, only 1 per cent of televisions sold in the US were internet-enabled. Still, analyst Parks Associates estimates that this will grow to 14 per cent by 2012. And, while a relatively modest 58 million people globally watched some form of internet TV in 2009, either on a computer or on an internet-enabled television, C21Media estimates the audience will grow by 400 per cent to 298 million users by 2014, generating revenue of over $6 billion.

Many feel a tipping point has been reached over the past few weeks, with the launch of Google TV and Apple TV. Google is using its YouTube platform as a place to make full TV programmes and films available for purchase to stream to a computer or a net-enabled TV, while Apple launched a new set-top device that will let people stream TV and films from – where else? – the Apple iTunes store, to an ordinary television set. Amazon, another formidable player, has said it too will launch a TV service.

But none of these services is quite the same as having browser-based access to the internet on a TV.

That suggests no one in industry has quite got the hang of what we will want from that hybrid internet-TV creature, or what full convergence will mean for internet, media and broadcast companies. But Alan Smeaton, professor of computing at Dublin City University, founding director of DCU's Centre for Digital Image Processing and a researcher in the area of digital video and web sensors, can make a guess.

Already, he says, our viewing has moved far away from his own experience as a child. In his home filled with older teen and early twenties children, "we never sit down and watch TV together as a family. The best we do is sit down and watch a live sporting event. But even then, while we watch, I have my iPad and they have their laptops. I think we're moving towards what's called second screen viewing," he says.

He explains that he doesn't think internet-enabled TVs will be used, as if they are giant computer screens in our sittingrooms, for surfing the web – at least not for group viewing. "That would be too awkward. Only one person would use the live screen."

The workaround to that problem is second screen viewing. "People watching the main television set will have their feet up on the table and their laptops or iPads on their laps, and they'll choose what overlay of supplemental media they want to view.

"For example, if they are watching a movie, they might want to look at IMDB.com (the internet movie database) to get background on the film or an actor. All this goes on in our house right now – this viewing of supplemental information. But you need ways in which you can aggregate all that information."

That challenge to constructively and productively filter the web's deluge of information is the basis of a collaborative project between DCU and Dublin design company, Notion. They chose the recent World Cup as a trial subject and aggregated everything they could find on the web relating to it, says Smeaton, from videos to stories to tweets.

Then they worked on ways to automate the selection of highlighted content, based on viewer sentiment. The work has already generated some interest from large international corporate broadcasters interested in the potential for sporting events.

But whether second screen viewing based around a primary, internet-enabled main television screen is the way of the converged TV future, or just a starting point, is anyone's guess. "It's all out in the future for how the market will want to consume this kind of content," says Smeaton.