The Web future.

The TV industry, like the phone industry, operated for decades in a regulated environment. As a result, the top management of those businesses in many cases consists of people from the legal side or the financial side. Most of the Web companies, on the other hand, are run by technology types.

As Internet telephony evolves, it will become crucial that both the TV screen and the computer screen have displays comparable in quality to HDTV. That's where line doubling technology from Faroudja Laboratories, Panasonic and others comes in.

Faroudja's technology, for example, creates a screen resolution equivalent to 960 lines (compared with the 1080 lines of HDTV and the 525 lines of the existing NTSC standard). So a $75 chip may be what's needed to modify existing NTSC sets to accommodate line doubling. Faroudja's 480p (progressive) digital signal, with the equivalent of 960 lines of screen resolution, can already be processed by the new digital cable box that will be introduced next year. Microsoft's Bill Gates told an audience at @the Consumer Electronics Show that he'd like to push the 480p as soon as is economically possible. According to TCI'S John Malone, Faraudja's technology now makes it possible to get four high-resolution signals out of one six-megahertz broadcast channel.

It may be possible to inexpensively modify the NTSC standard to accommodate Web sites with a clarity far surpassing that of DBS or today's digital cable.

Currently, a high-resolution, full-motion video picture is 740 pixels by 480 pixels; by contrast, a VCR delivers a picture that is only equivalent to 320 pixels by 240 pixels. So, although today's small video images on the Web are grainy and jerky, as the bandwidth of Internet carriage increases, the pictures will become smoother and more like TV.

To touch briefly on the further potential of Webcasting, we should mention hyper-video technology. San Francisco-based Veon Inc. has developed a platform that will allow hypervideo - that is, a hot spot within a video image that users can dick in order to access other video (e.g., commercial spots).