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There will be more than 30 more million European Digital TV homes accessing the Internet by 2005, according to Vision's new report "Internet@Digital TV".

" We are very enthusiastic about the potential for accessing the Internet via TV," says Barclay Dutson, President of the Vision Group, who has advised on several new media launches, including Channel 4 TV and the Astra satellite. " For many people the Internet will be a part of everyday life. TV viewers will increasingly be 'Internet trained'. The audience will want to access the Internet from several devices, and the television set will certainly be an important one."

Forecasts to date for interactive TV are too low

Vision states the following reasons: Interactive services such as Teletext and Ceefax have mass markets in Europe: more than 28 million a week in the UK alone. This is evidence that people will interact with their TV set if the information is valued.

Whilst there are as yet no figures on the correlation between the ownership of digital TV and of the Internet, there is evidence from the USA that a high proportion of Internet users are multi-tasking, with 10 million simultaneous users of both TV and PC, from the 25.5 million Internet homes.

Vision's consensus forecast is that European digital TV will have 56 million homes by the year 2005. Forecasters for the Internet seem reluctant to look much further than 2002, but forecasts for Internet homes are higher than those for digital TV. TV broadcasters now find themselves launching into what will be a much more Internet aware Euro audience than they first thought. The audience will increasingly be "Internet-trained", and ready to use the Internet via their TV as an alternative, or even secondary means of accessing the Internet for the different kind of information they want from a leisure environment.

"Intelligent cache" computers store in real-time the most demanded pages on the www, with currently over 100 million pages stored. Digital TV broadcasters will be able to broadcast via services such as digital satellite (or a digital terrestrial multiplex or digital cable) the most popular "consumer" pages selected from this cache.

Real Time Interactive Audiences

Vision expects that the technologies enabling Internet via TV will develop dramatically. Already, web browser technology is being incorporated into chips for the first integrated digital TV sets. By the year 2000, the digital set-top box in your home is expected to incorporate a hard disk of 2 GBytes, rising to 100 GBytes by 2010. A recent US study by IBM found that as little as 6 GBytes of information provided the needs of 80 percent of Web users over a 30 day period. Keener Web users will be able to purchase additional hard drive memory modules economically.

Clever audience research and predictions will help forecast what the mass market wants on the Web, and the real-time web caches will provide instant market evidence. It is already clear that services such as sports, news and weather are prime web audience drivers.

Electronic programme guides are being developed to enable web access with the touch of a remote control button. One leading digital TV player has informed Vision that they are considering using a wireless digital telephone connection between the modem and the telephone socket, so that connecting to your telephone is made easier. The price of Web access is coming down dramatically. In the UK, we now have free web access. In Germany, VIAG Interkom, BT's German joint venture, has launched Planet Interkom with Internet access for 3.5 pence a minute on top of the price of a local call, which can be 15 per cent lower with discounts. And soon, we will have 2 way high bandwidth service direct via your satellite dish with the new generation of Ka-band satellites. Astra is commissioning the first generation of 2 way satellite dishes this year.

Vision believes the internet has an immense range of products, but little bandwidth. Digital television has immense bandwidth, but fewer new products . New technologies Vision has advised on, such as VCRs and the Astra satellite system, have reached 60% or more penetration within 10 years. Digiweb will follow a similar growth rate.

If web-surfing and e-commerce are made as easy as TV and packaged in a way which makes them accessible to otherwise passive viewers, Vision forecasts take-up will be at least 30 million Euro Digiweb homes homes by 2005.

You can send E-mail and report orders to info@visionconsult.com