Bill Gates Says Internet will Revolutionize Television

Press Release - February 4, 2007

The internet will totally revolutionize the television industry over the next five years, according to Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, who predicts the eventual total integration of TV sets and Personal Computers.

“I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we had,” Gates told a group of business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum.

The skyrocketing popularity of web-based video services like YouTube have already begun to trigger a worldwide decline in TV viewing hours. More and more viewers are beginning to appreciate the increased level of user control granted by internet services.

“Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible,” Gates explained. “You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it,”

“Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior,” he went on to say.

The transition to IP-based television is sure to radically alter the the television advertising industry, as companies shift their promotional budgets onto web-based media. YouTube co-founder, Chad Hurley, says that advertisers will soon have access to a much wider range of targeting tools, enabling them to specially tailor their ads to very specific user demographics.

“In the coming months we’re going to do experiments to see how people interact with these ads to build an effective model that works for advertisers and works for users,” Hurley commented.