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The world’s largest and most influential software company, Microsoft,
plans to create television sets that are more like computers. These TVs
would present programme options in windows on the screen and would learn
from their owners’ habits which channels they prefer.

Microsoft’s success in the computer industry comes from IBM’s choice
of the company’s Disc Operating System, or DOS, as the standard operating
software for IBM personal computers in 1981. Microsoft has now sold 80 million
copies of the software and 10 million of Windows, its software which presents
data in an easier to use graphical format.

The TVs would be Microsoft’s first venture into consumer electronics.
According to Nathan Myhrvold, head of the company’s advanced technology
department in Redmond, Washington, the company has built several prototype
TVs that are ‘smart’ and contain microprocessors identical to those in personal
computers. The software for the TVs is based on Windows and it can be controlled
from a distance with a light pen, tracker ball or joystick.

As an example, Myhrvold considers a viewer who watches a lot of news
but mostly foreign news, and a lot of sport but mainly baseball, and with
one team an obvious favourite. When switched on, the TV will display a foreign
news station in one window, and a schedule of forthcoming baseball games
in which the viewer’s favourite team will be taking part.

The longer the viewer owns and uses the TV, the more it learns about
the viewer’s preferences. This creates what Myhrvold describes as ‘the slippery
slope phenomenon’: the TV can start to target advertisements precisely at
the viewer.

Myhrvold claims that Microsoft will be ready to license the software
needed for smart TVs by next year. They will recognise speech and handwriting
with 95 per cent accuracy. When the viewer gives the TV a line from a movie
or song, the set displays the title and tells when it is next scheduled
for broadcast on a music or movie channel. The cost will be ‘a few hundred
dollars’ on top of the price of a conventional TV.

The Dutch electronics company Philips has for many years been developing
home automation systems which use a TV set to control a network around the
house. Philips believes that Microsoft’s ideas are best suited to the US
because cable TV is much more common there than in Europe. ‘The ideas depend
on services that would need to be standardised by the broadcast industry,’
says Iris Merker of the company’s consumer electronics division, ‘and we
all know that is not an easy process.’