A consumer applications analyst at Dataquest says the future of WebTV and the use of set-top boxes to access the Internet will be short-lived."The set-top box on its own really has no future," says Dataquest's Paul O'Donovan. "The stand-alone set-top box will just disappear. They will probably disappear in the next 18 months to two years as digital television arrives... But in the long term, the functionality will appear within the TV or through digital set-top boxes."With regard to WebTV, O'Donovan says,"Microsoft has a history of announcing bold technology strategies and being perfectly prepared to drop them if they don't work. They may take the technology of WebTV and put it in other devices."

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