Merge TV and Internet? Please Don't.

Television industry veteran Michael Kokernak authored a MediaPost Video Insider article yesterday entitled, "Why Not Merge TV and Internet?" He reflects on the transition to digital cable and proliferation of TV content available on the Web, and opines that "[w]e...should probably be concentrating our efforts on how to combine the Internet and the digital television experience so consumers get content delivered through one seamless 'platform.'"

I am not exactly sure what Mr. Kokernak has in mind when he talks of "combining" Internet and TV into "one seamless 'platform,'" and, sadly, the rest of his article does not serve to clarify much. But if by "combining [the two into] one seamless 'platform,'" he means transforming the television set into a Web browser and vice versa, I don't think it is a good idea.

From a consumer's perspective, television and Internet serve two very different purposes, and it seems unwise (if not impossible) to try to literally combine them. The Internet should complement television, not replace it; just as the Internet has not replaced books and magazines, but rather has been added to a vast array of communication media. Certainly, e-books, blogs, online journals, and various wikis offer similar (if not identical) content to many books and magazines; however, the advent of these electronic versions has not meant the death of printed materials, because the usage situations are different. "There is a time for everything."

Successfully integrating media means that television content and Internet content should reflect and supplement one another. A friend of mine at TMP Directional Marketing, a local search marketing firm, once told me that every time a client launches a new billboard, for example, she adds the words and phrases from the ad as SEO keywords, so that the audience can effectively search online for more information based on the billboard they saw. The same should be true for TV content - media companies and advertisers need to make available (and easily searchable) complementary Internet content before they launch any newscast, show, or commercial on TV.

Integrating media does not mean that consumers want their televisions to act like the Internet, or vice versa. As pertains to the television industry, consumers use the Internet primarily to gather information related to something they heard or saw on TV, or to access content that they missed during its original TV broadcast. They use the Internet actively and up close. Consumers use their television sets for entertainment (or for passively absorbing information) - they want to sit back, relax, and watch a show on their big-screen HDTV half-way across the room. Consumers don't want to have both on the same physical platform. I don't want to always watch TV on my 15" computer screen; nor do I want to click around the picture on my big-screen TV in the same way I click around the Internet.

Hopefully that is not what Mr. Kokernak intended at all; hopefully I misunderstood his use of the words "combine" and "merge." Plus, he has spent his career in the television industry, and founded a company - BackChannelMedia - that allows tv-watchers to click icons on the television screen that send emails with links for additional information to the viewer. Perhaps that is closer to his vision for "combined" Internet and television. And perhaps his market research shows that this vision truly is a hit with consumers.