Amid the "convergence" craze that's merging the PC with TV, some products are beginning to fall by the wayside. U.S. manufacturers begun to scale back their PC-TV ambitions after poor sales, major Japanese electronics makers are abandoning the Net TV, big-screen televisions assembled with ready-made Internet access.

Sharp and Mitsubishi have stopped producing Net TV models and will exit the market once inventory runs out, according to industry sources quoted the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. Rivals Sanyo and NEC have temporarily ceased manufacturing. Sharp has sold just 8 ,000 units in Japan in the last 18 months, while Mitsubishi has sold 7,500, according to the business daily. None of the four companies markets a Net TV in the United States.

The failure of these companies to turn this hybrid box into a hot product will not be a first. The PC-TV, a straightforward joining of a PC with a big-screen, performance TV, failed to capture widespread U.S. consumer imagination. Major vendors Gateway and Compaq jumped into the market in 1997. Less than one year later, Compaq began edging away. The entire American PC-TV market went from sales of 7,000 units in 1996 to 10,000 last year, reports International Data Corporation (IDC). Gateway has enjoyed some success selling to the education and corporate- use markets, but demand will peak at 11,000 in 1999 before declining to 3,000 in 2002, IDC predicts.

Despite the dim demand for these fancy products, other convergence boxes show promise. Digital TV set-top boxes such as the WebTV models sold by Philips, Sony, Mitsubishi, and others seem to better match consumer demand. People are moving from couch potato to mouse potato it avail of the new interactive services with Digital TV. But, as the number of users spending time in front of their computer screens increases, online TV services like ProteinTV will begin to challenge the way in which people watch television.

http://www.webTV.com/

http://www.proteinTV.com/

((c) Ninfomania)