The Future of Television

You can get e-mail on a television screen. You can watch DVDs on your computer. It's not hard to envision a future where the same screens serve up both the interactivity of the Internet and the wide range of entertainment available on TV.

Americans have shown an appetite for giant screens and Sharp and Panasonic have obliged with diagonal measurements as high as 108 inches.

Many people now have digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, which allow them to save shows to a hard drive, and even let the machine choose shows it thinks its owners will like. This kind of flexibility may become cross-functional, with recorded shows available on a portable player or on multiple screens in the same house.

At the same time, it's becoming easier and easier to bypass commercial programming altogether and create your own. Internet video sites such as YouTube and Google Video have become a hit, often with such mundane fare as a home video of a kitten falling asleep. New technology will make it easier to create and share your own work, or turn your life into a reality series.