We're still on the future of television and the question at hand is, "How does information retention from TV commercials compare for those viewers who are watching the commercials fast-forwarding on a Digital Video Recorder versus watching them the old fashioned way while headed to the kitchen for a snack?" The answer, according to a study cited in one of this week's Links of the Week links, is that there is no difference. We get as much from commercials as they fast-forward as we do if they are running at normal speed. While this is probably a cheery thought for TV executives and advertisers, I find it says nothing good about the efficacy of TV advertising in general, just that our standards are low.

But you know, it makes some sense because as we fast-forward, most of us are really watching what's on-screen, trying not to overrun the return of our TV show. Our attention tends to be entirely focused on the screen. If true, and if ad agencies and TV networks have known this fact for long, it explains why SonicBlue's Replay TV — the only DVR that actually cuts the commercials out using a technology they call Commercial Advance — is about to die under a legal onslaught that so far hasn't affected any of its competitors. Advertisers might actually be happy if we all get DVRs, just not Replay.

TV networks, too, are nervous about Replay because of another feature called Show Sharing that allows users to trade recorded copies of shows, which isn't illegal in itself, but the networks claim cutting out the commercials violates their copyrights. Yeah, right.

By the way, how does Replay's Commercial Advance know what is a TV ad to be able to cut it out? Apparently, Replay listens for the temporary volume increase that broadcasters have long told us does not accompany commercials. Liars.

What's far more disturbing, though, is the fact that our TiVo boxes are watching us and reporting our viewing habits back to their mother ship. And this is highly detailed snooping according to TiVo's own report of the most replayed and most freeze-framed moments from the recent Academy Awards telecast. They not only know what you are watching, but how you are watching it on a second-by-second basis — information that of course will be sold to the very advertisers who think they are being subverted by TiVo technology.

If you are watching "Debbie Does Dallas," your TiVo knows.

These facts are what we are living with today, but what will television look like five years from now? The probable answer is that there will be lots of little changes that will together alter the face of TV, but you'll still be able to find "I Love Lucy" playing somewhere.

Broadcast TV won't go away because the license holders won't give up their licenses. Cable TV will still be with us, though it will be all digital, and cable will be competing fiercely for local telephone and Internet service. Satellite TV will probably be the big winner as a pure entertainment medium because it scales so well.

There will still be television advertising, but it will be different than today. Product placements will be big, but what will be even bigger is what they represent, which is making the commercial indistinguishable from the program. There are several ways to do that right now, and we can see many of these techniques at work in soccer broadcasts where there generally are no commercial breaks until halftime. So the ads go in a box on-screen or text ads crawl underneath like the CNBC stock ticker. There are classic techniques, too, that might come back, like when Ed McMahon walked across stage to work with the dog doing Alpo commercials; not even Replay would interpret that as a commercial. Or advertisers can literally BECOME the show as Bob Hope did with Texaco or Ronald Reagan did with General Electric half a century ago.

Then there is the 10-second commercial. If we can absorb as much at fast-forward, why not make commercials shorter than they presently are? In fact, why not make them so short that we won't bother to fast-forward past them at all?

TV technology will change, too, but here we have to expect a lot of subtle changes rather than one single change. Too often we fixate on a single idea, but life and commerce are far more complex than that, especially when technical trends are interacting.

DVRs are just such a trend. My newest one (I have two) has two tuners so I can record one show while watching another show live, or I can record two shows at once while watching a third show that has been pre-recorded. With the exception of breaking news, I'd gladly watch everything 24 hours later at the time and at the speed I choose, which apparently Hugh Hefner has been doing for decades with the help of VCRs and lots of domestic help. Now we can all be Hugh Hefners.

There is a real trend toward larger screens and higher resolutions, made possible in part by the advent of digital television and by DVDs presenting us with a practical source of higher-resolution content. We'll see that continue, but advances in nanotechnology will probably bring back the video projector as a viable alternative to huge rear-projection TVs.

Then we can combine technical trends. The next 12 months, for example, will see an avalanche of WiFiand HomePlug products intended to network not just computers but also televisions, home theaters, and audio. The goal here is mainly to eliminate all wires except the power cord, with self-discovering components that will find each other using technology like Apple Computer's Rendezvous, which has conveniently been made Open Source. From the manufacturer's standpoint, there are two important drivers here. One is to make it easier to add and configure systems, lowering both support costs and fear of wiring complexity on the part of potential buyers. But even more compelling for manufacturers is the idea that we'll all throw away our old stuff and buy new.

For consumers, this kind of networking offers a great increase in utility, making it possible to watch any DVR or any other video source from any room. Think about that for a moment and you'll see what a powerful concept it is.

Yeah, but where is the Internet in all this? The Internet has its place, but the cost of bandwidth and simply the lack of available bandwidth are going to make unlikely some of the scenarios we were excited about five years ago. We won't have a peer-to-peer HDTV-quality network anytime soon simply because nobody is willing to pay what it would actually cost. The dream that every viewer could have his or her own channel is just that, a dream. Today, DSL and cable Internet users are provisioned by their ISPs with about 11 kilobits-per-second of Internet bandwidth, which means 4,000 customers share a 45 megabit-per-second DS-3 line. Even if video compression brings DVD-quality down to requiring only 256 kilobits-per-second, which I believe will happen within three years, that is still 25 times the current available bandwidth. If Moore's Law stays in effect, it will be 12 years before our bandwidth costs and availability match the concept of a video channel for every home, much less for every viewer.

This doesn't mean the Internet won't be an important channel for delivering video entertainment. It just means that we'll have to either settle for lower quality pictures or give up the idea of watching live streams. But the Internet for downloadable video makes a lot of sense, especially if ISPs invest in proxy servers for big downloads of popular content by many users. Streaming is a gimmick, but Internet downloading will change television forever, and I am betting my own NerdTV will prove that.

And NerdTV, which is coming Real Soon Now, is a prime example of how TV programming is likely to change, targeting niche audiences and leveraging PC-based production technology and inexpensive Internet downloads to reach those audiences. NerdTV, which will begin as a weekly program and accelerate from there, requires a total of only three people to create each program, making it probably the cheapest network show in the history of television. Extend this model to other types of programming — drama and comedy, for example — and suddenly Internet distribution will enable 10,000 would-be Spielbergs to make and distribute their movies, some of which will be pretty darned good. The key here is not just the technology, but getting away from the idea that you have to fill a cable channel to make beautiful TV. Rather than replacing traditional TV, the Internet will become TV's minor league, and the best shows will be eventually moved up to the majors.

The Internet also makes possible for the first time ever a direct relationship between producers of content and viewers. In the old days of 1999, we'd talk about this disintermediating the networks, but the more modern view is that it will become just another source of revenue for producers. Maybe you and 100,000 of your friends would pay a dollar per episode to watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That isn't enough revenue to make new shows, but it is more than enough to justify an alternate distribution method for enthusiast viewers.

What brings all this to mind for me is that next week is the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas — TV's version of Comdex. For the second year in a row, I'll be speaking there, but this time I'll be speaking about NerdTV.