From the May 30 Newsweek: "It's a transformation as significant as when we went from black-and-white to color — and it's already underway. The promise is that you'll be able to watch anything you want, anywhere — on a huge high-def screen or on your phone. "Forty-four years ago, when Newton Minow famously described television as a vast wasteland, he might have hit the bull's-eye on the wasteland part. But he didn't know from vast... But compared with what's coming, our 2005 experience is only half vast. Tomorrow's television? Now we're talking vast... The 'New TV' mantra: Anything you want, any time, on any device "It'll be a cosmic video jukebox where you can fire up old episodes of 'Cop Rock,' the fifth game of the 1993 World Series, a live high-school lacrosse game, a ranting video blogger and your own HD home-movie production of Junior's first karate tournament. While it's playing, you can engage in running voice commentary with your friends, while in a separate part of the screen you're slamming orcs in World of Warcraft. Then you can pay your bill on screen. "And if you ever manage to leave your home theater, you can monitor the whole shebang in your car, at a laptop at Starbucks or via the laundry-ticket-size screen on your cell phone. The ethos of New TV can be captured in a single sweeping mantra: anything you want to see, any time, on any device... "Start with the hardware. Ever notice that no one uses the term 'TV set' anymore? That's because people can watch on anything from a traditional box in the den to their computer, to a screen on the seat back of a JetBlue plane... "Video-on-demand provides another way to bypass what programmers offer at a given moment — and millions are already experimenting with it, commonly choosing old episodes of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' to the usual prime-time fare. VOD libraries will inevitably expand to the equivalent of the mammoth music boxes of iTunes and Rhapsody... "While time-shifting changes the when of television, 'space-shifting' tinkers with the where... A company called Sling Media sells a device that allows you to watch the program playing in your living room on your computer, anywhere in the world. Other schemes are designed to beam programming directly to gadgets not normally regarded as TV devices... The Internet could eliminate media "gatekeepers" "All these elements come together in what may be the most significant development of all — the movement of the television platform to the Internet... "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... "What some people think might happen may not please media middlemen like... SBC... 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... "Others focus on the prospect of outsiders' gaining access to your TV set, as bloggers have invaded media on the Web... 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 Tiffiny Cheng of the Participatory Culture Foundation in Worcester, Mass.  "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... 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." Read this entire Newsweek article at MSNBC.com