See this is the future of television. So why haven't the networks seen it?

Three events in the past two weeks have convinced me traditional television and traditional television viewing is being e radically transformed.

On Friday German publishing giant Axel Springer and Dutch consumer electronics producer Philips announced they had developed a system that will make it possible for television viewers to create personalized channels from their favorite TV and Internet video content.

And last Tuesday Sony, along with six of the biggest US cable operators Comcast Corp, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems Corp and Bright House Networks, signed a deal that enables US consumers buy digital televisions that can receive a cable service without a set-top box.

Finally, last week a syndicate of Japan's largest electronics manufacturers announced that it may have reached agreement on a standard for a new internet television and new set, which will let users browse websites and watch streaming programs at the touch of a remote control, could be on sale as early as March 2008.

In each case, the opportunity was clear to all but those in what is now called "heritage media". Traditional network based and free-to-air television is being increasingly forced into a wider choice set that sees the television screen as a portal for all content and interactivity - both linear and non-linear - global, national and local.

Add to this increasingly expanding opportunities for delivering content to mobile, laptop and gaming devices, and you can see why brand owners and television network owners are fast becoming small fish.

The new Phillips software-based system, called TV Digital Personal, will be available on Philips television sets in Europe in time for Christmas. It will also be available for free download onto personal computers and can be used on digital video recorders and mobile devices.

TV Digital Personal is based on Springer's digital TV guide, so in effect another walled garden with yet another EPG. The software called APRICO is not unlike TIVO and automatically learns viewing preferences and suggests additional programming based on what has already been chosen by the viewer enabling the viewer to build their own channel.

Advertising could possibly be microtargetted according to viewer selections with an opt out permissions. This will be in addition to the regular TV commercials already embedded in programs.

The Sony announcement establishes a new US technological standard to be adopted by 2009 that will enable a new generation of TVs to include video-on-demand, digital video recording, interactive programming guides and other services.

By adopting a Java-based application called tru2way as a US interactive standard, it will enable the adoption of new "plug-and-play" interactive devices that can be used with TV sets.

The technology will also make it easier for consumers to receive the full range of cable-based services on other devices such as laptops, MP3 players, and cell phones.

Japan's new internet television is the brainchild of the TV Portal Service Corporation founded in July 2007 by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Sony Corp., Sharp Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd, set up a TV Portal Service with So-net Entertainment Corp., a Sony-affiliated Internet service provider and shareholder and is backed by the Japanese Government.

The companies aim to establish a global standard for the service and its portal, operating under the name acTVila, connects TV users free of charge to various web sites that provide consumer-oriented services, such as news and shopping.

From July Sharp will also sell TVs with an additional internet portal that offers access to Yahoo! Japan - the country's most popular website - as well as digitized print magazines and high definition video-on-demand.

In the end all of these announcements are still announcements but what they signal is indefatigable - television screens can no longer be viewed as just technology but as the conduit for an increasingly complex dialogue between media and content owners, producers, users, viewers, technology makers, brand owners and their agencies. And, if all the talk is right, the traditional television industry is showing all the signs of being undone by technology and its users just as the music industry was late last century.

Yahoo7 tries another strategy shift.

Seven Network's announcement that it's Yahoo joint venture is undertaking yet another restructure not only points to a strategic shift in its operations but may also be a portent for the future of general media-based portals.

Last week Yahoo7's acting chief executive Rohan Lund, was reported to have presented yet another new strategy to arrest the site's declining fortunes as it continues to loose market share. The new strategy sees Yahoo7 abandoning what has been described as a "relentless advertising focus", to concentrate on both news and search as it seeks to oust Google as Australia's leading search engine.

According to reports in The Australian, the strategy is designed to do "anything to drive traffic to the portal" with Lund quoted as saying that the portal aimed to be home page for every Australian going online.

It's both a fairly naive assertion and a blind strategic assumption that against an ever changing landscape, Yahoo7 believes it can arrest the near 80% consumer and advertiser drawing power of Google.

And it's a lesson that Lund would do well to learn from his similarly well meaning predecessors.

For example, I've been online long enough to remember (and use) portals such as Apple's eWorld (see pic), Netscape, Lycos and Excite. All of which, except for eWorld, still exist in some form or another but whose drawing power in this market is either non-existent or negligible.

Hitwise, an internet ranking company who's data is based on market share of visits from a sample of nearly 3 million Internet users in Australia most recently ranked Yahoo7 in 10th place with just .9% of total Australian traffic.

This compares to Goggle's first place with a total share of nearly 10% of Australian traffic followed by 9MSN's meagre but significant 2.6%. Also in the top 10 is Myspace (2.17%), Hotmail (1.85%), Ebay (1.85%), Facebook (1.11%) and Youtube (0.95%)

Based on these figures theYahoo7 strategy has an uphill battle to overcome the status quo on both internet news and search.

And while some of its free-to-air news market dominance may also rub off on the online new service, what about the other Network 7 content and its ability to bring traffic and point of difference to the site?

Network 7's digital strategy is lagging behind both the ABC and Network 10 on areas such as after telecast access to immediate downloads. Downloading is becoming a huge threat to all Australian television networks as viewers become time shifters (as we have noted previously, even US television audience measurement is now done on the basis of total viewer ship including time shifting) and overall television viewing continues to decline.

It will be interesting to see if 7's Tivo marketing announcement is somehow bound into the notion of on-line content and directing free-to-air and subscription traffic flow, but right now it's fairly light on detail.

Further, the Yahoo and 7 team could flounder for the very reasons predecessors like Excite did. In 2001 former Excite founder William Hearst III, described the demise of the portal this way:

"The strategy was to build a national brand that could compete against AOL. To the extent that we spent money pursuing that strategy, which may not have
been the right strategy, perhaps, but to the extent that we spent money chasing that strategy, " Hearst said.

"One of the lessons--and I hate to say it--is that you can gain a tremendous advantage by partnering with big, well-established companies, and people are
going to continue to do that. But those companies are going to find it very difficult to put their new start-up venture ahead of their own corporate responsibilities. So when you have a start-up controlled by big, established companies, it's going to be a little different than a real, stand alone start-up."

And this is really the conundrum for Yahoo7. When the joint venture was announced in December 2006, it was widely anticipated by joint venture chairman John Marcom that it was "in a prime position to capitalise as viewers change the way they consume television programmes."

But since then Yahoo7 has been slow to move and perhaps its unwise pursuit of Google, Fairfax and 9MSN underpins how wrong footed it has been.

Interestingly, as Hearst notes, perhaps it's no longer the case that the nation's leading television company no longer needs Yahoo to be its digital arm and that going out as a real stand alone company (in much the same way Fairfax has) and building its own identifiable set of online brands and services from its massive content base should be re-examined.