"Moving from broadcast TV to broadband TV changes the whole industry," says Gates's IPTV czar Moshe Lichtman. While cable and satellite companies have limited channel capacity, the Net—which, you'll recall, can host billions of Web pages without a sweat—has room for everything. You can stack as many shows on the screen as your eyes can handle. When you watch baseball, you can monitor several games at once, or choose to view the game from several different angles at the same time. A future presentation of the Masters Tournament might let you follow any golfer for every minute of his round.

Since the Internet is open to any digital content, your television will merge with other activities. Someone on the phone? You'll get caller-ID information on the TV screen. If you don't feel like fast-forwarding past the commercials, check your credit—-card bills. And you know those news-channel "tickers" that run on the bottom of the screen with headlines, weather reports and updates on Britney Spears's wedding status? "Ninety percent of that stuff you don't care about," says Gates. "We'll let you have a custom ticker [with stock quotes, scores and other information that you pick]."

"Once you put this stuff up nobody knows what will happen," says SBC's Randall Stephenson. What some people think might happen may not please media middlemen like... SBC. While IPTV originally requires a reliable high-bandwidth platform to ensure top-quality reception, fast connections will eventually become commonplace. In that case it might be feasible for programmers to reach the mass audience without going through a gatekeeper, be it a telecom, cable provider or satellite service. Video would be served directly, like everything else on the Web. "Most flat-panel TV sets will have Internet connections in their future," says Steve Shannon, founder of Akimbo, a Web video service that has content deals with more than 100 partners, including CNN, Turner Classic Movies and the BBC.

Others focus on the prospect of outsiders' gaining access to your TV set, as bloggers have invaded media on the Web. "Already there is more data downloaded for video over the Internet than there is for music," says Mike Ramsay, cofounder of TiVo. "What happens when a 14-year-old creates a BitTorrent browser that's easy to use and plugs right into your TV? You go from 500 channels to 50 million channels." We soon may find out, as a number of open-source-inspired Internet efforts hope to open the floodgates. "We have tools to let anyone make high-quality videos to reach millions of people," says Tiffiniy Cheng of the Participatory Culture Foundation in Worcester, Mass. "We'll give a channel to anyone who wants a channel."

Given that future programming will be largely on demand, a "channel" could simply be a periodic video blog, a set of fly-fishing videos or a streamed soft-porn Webcam. "The cost of establishing a traditional programming vehicle and securing distribution is incredibly high," says Jeremy Allaire, founder of online distributor Brightcove. In the era of Internet television, it will be as simple and cost-effective to create a microchannel as it is to create a Web site.

How Would You Figure Out What To Watch?

"By the time you scroll through the listings, something else would already be on," says Bradley Horowitz, head of video search at Yahoo. His suggestion? A personalized home-video page that stores your favorite channels and seeks out stuff you'd like. "Instead of a list of shows, you'd get 'Here's what's hot,' or 'Here's what psychologists are watching'."

Does this mean that traditional programming like "Desperate Housewives" and "The Daily Show" will get overwhelmed? Not necessarily. If two obscure animators at Web site JibJab could get millions of viewers for their Internet-based Bush/Kerry campaign video, would a 2015 "Sopranos Reunion" have any difficulty reaching a mass audience? "There is a consistent hunger for good stories and good characters," says HBO's Carolyn Strauss. David Hill, a DirecTV exec, contends that no matter how open the distribution is, the public will flock to tiny islands of quality, even if quality is defined by what's always been on TV. "People who say that everyone can be a David E. Kelley have no clue of this business," he says. The result may be that when all the time-shifting and space-shifting is accounted for, most people will watch the same stuff by the same creators.

In fact, even with today's relative abundance, most people stick to only a few channels. According to Nielsen Media Research, households that receive about 60 channels usually watch only 15. Households whose systems can receive 96 channels (around the national average) actually watch... 15.

What's more, a recent study conducted at the UPenn Annenberg School for Communications showed that when people were offered more programming choices, they stuck to fewer selections—and, alarmingly, watched fewer news shows.

This doesn't surprise Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor and author of "The Paradox of Choice." He fears that people may stick to a small group of selections that don't challenge any of their assumptions. "I worry about 250 million separate islands," he says. It's a long way from the first era of television, when there were so few choices that almost everything you viewed was a mass-shared experience. Schwartz does concede that when you have millions of options to choose from, you're more likely to find ones that really appeal to you. But even then, you won't necessarily be more satisfied. "Whatever you watch," he says, "you'll know that there's something else on that's good, and regret you're not watching it."

Can it be that in the vast world of television's tomorrow, we'll be nostalgic for the wasteland?

Courtesy of Newsweek, Inc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032542/site/newsweek/