Not so distant future : TV and Internet are going to be the same.

I was reading this article "Commercial Success" on FastCompany :
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/99/getting-ahead.html?partner=rss

When by reading a short comment made me realize something :

They want a visionary--someone who can see not only what's happening now but what's possible in the next 15 to 20 years. Someone who understands participative media and that TV and the Internet are going to be the same thing.

This made me realise that I havent had this notion yet. Sure I knew about Internet based television and interactive tv, but I didnt realise how soon these two independant peices of technologies are due for a... a... merger; for lack of a better word;

Almost every channel worth its salt has its presence on the internet and we have score of tv programs which whose content is based solely on the internet.

Basic problem with video on dialup and the 128 kb lines is that the video play rate is faster than the download rate and you have so many jerks and stoppages in the playback. With internet access geting cheaper and cheaper by the day and a T1 or a T3 line being not so rare, It is not long before we have TV channels being delivered via the Internet.

A typical situation would be when a user could simple change the language of the tv program to suit his needs or even better just record the program on to his harddisk. You could also access content from any corner of the globe and have at your disposal hundreds of channels.

Podcasting will take care of the limited content the tv channels seem to have these days which could mean the death of reruns.

I am starting to like this scenario...