"Television sucks the brain right out of the skull." - Marshall McLuhan

There was never any question in my mind that TV would not just survive, but dominate. The Internet has grown in popularity in direct proportion to how much it resembled TV. When it was nothing more than newsgroups and text dominated sites, only handfuls of nerds used it. As the visual image replaced the written word, it grew in popularity. Only when TV show length videos started appearing did it become serious. Ultimately, the Internet will primarily be TV delivered by a different, more flexible, method. Remember, before TV came though cable, the word "cable" was synonymous with telegram messages. (an ancient form of e-mail)

TV is a state of mind. For the most part, it is passive, mindless, repetitive and empty. It revolves around the visual image and avoids the written word because reading requires more brain function. This is why, in a society increasingly full of morons, TV will dominate and the text in the once text-heavy Internet will shrink to brutish grunts and chirping Twits. TV thinking has won out.

I actually think the Internet has peaked. Sure, the technology will get prettier, shinier and more popular. But, as TV becomes distributed by the Internet and the differences between the two fade, we'll stop thinking of the Internet as anything other than a TV delivery mechanism. As with most things, popularity is the worst thing that ever happened to it. Because the Internet became so popular, the traditional big boys like Bell will be moving in, buying it up, controlling access and dominating content. Ultimately, the old media will use its money and connections to stay on top. The biggest thing we have to look forward to from a merger of TV and Internet is a dumbing down (and costing up) of both.

CTV may have been taken over by Bell, but it's only because Bell wants to be a TV network. Ideally, Bell wants monopoly on TV supply and delivery. This purchase brings such a monopoly a little closer. Bell is the dominant satellite TV provider and may someday figure out how use their phone dominance to deliver TV. CTV is Canada's No.1 TV network with 27 stations, 30 specialty channels and 30 radio stations. That's why it was so laughable when Bell cried poor recently and threatened "local" TV (what dat??) stations across the country if they didn't get a cut of cable's action, or when BCE's George Cope hysterically claimed "Our acquisition of CTV more than levels the playing field in our increasingly competitive industry."

The idea there is "increasing competition" in this oligopolistic industry is a complete farce. The reality is that much of the "competition" for CTV comes from other channels it owns. Rogers dominates cable delivery, has a phone presence, but was late to the TV party. CanWest only has paperboys to distribute its product and it's run by village idiots who somehow found a way to bankrupt this massive company. Canwest's corpse is currently being picked clean by vultures. Other than Shaw (the most active Canwest vulture), all other players exist just hoping they'll be bought out by one of the big boys. Bell is just far too big, too strong and has too much clout in Ottawa. That matters far more than anything else. The bottom line is none of Bell's "competition" can hurt them.

(NOTE: As an interesting aside, lost in all the high-tech talk is that the ultra-rich Thompsons will be leaving TV and will control The Globe and Mail again.)

I see these types of mergers as actually nothing more than a end-run around the net neutrality debate, highlighted especially in the Canadian TV space where networks like CTV are nothing other than licensees of American content.

How will this work. Let's first even just look at the Fibe service offering as a primer. I've recently found it ironic how only just now that we are seeing the availability of significant bandwidth to the consumer and the emergence of Video as the "content de jour", the availability and blind integration of YouTube, Netflix and their ilk into television hardware (all meeting the promises of the great Internet bubble of a decade ago) that we are also struggling to keep up and have caps on traffic - for example Fibe 25 gives you an awesome 25/7 down/up service, but guess what only 75 GB of monthly traffic. Whoa is me the poor middle-class non-technical family who happily uses their Roku, Apple TV, Google TV or whatever only to find that the average of 3 hours of TV per day people watch fills up their measly monthly bandwidth quota's in say 1 week (or less) and merrily continuing on at the small print rate of $1 - $2 per GB. This means that that latest HD episode of Modern Family from iTunes won't be $.99 it will in fact be $2.99. This is going to make the gravy train of cellular minute overages look positively philanthropic.

What will then happen is the Content/Provider pairings such as Comcast, Verizon, and now - what will it be called ? CTell maybe - will say ok we won't shape the traffic across our network (though we know they will but that's another story) but will say view content from our sources and voila we won't count those bytes against your cap. And thanks to the style and structure of both business and regulation regarding content licensing as it's emerging in the now "re-localized" global Internet ( as any poor Canadian who's heard all these raves about Hulu only to try to use the service and see the "not licensed" banner will attest ) the Canadian conglomerates will be able to benefit arguably even more as the consumer will only be able to get the content from the appropriately "authorized source". The consumer will say no problem, but will unwittingly contribute to what will emerge as the true future of non-neutrality which (as alluded to above) will have nothing to do with the actually management of traffic/content but will have everything to do with how much it will cost a consumer to cross the walled gardens of the individual media-tech-oligopoly's.