• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, January 5, 2009 11:30 AM

The once-lofty goal of marrying television to the Internet is coming closer and closer to reality, The Wall Street Journal reports. The missing ingredient thus far has been set-top boxes that have networking connections built directly into them. For example, Netflix today is expected to announce a deal with LG that will make its online video rental service available on a new line of high-definition TVs created by the Korean electronics giant. Netflix offers more than 12,000 movie and TV titles.

This and other Internet-TV developments are on display at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is a decidedly more subdued event this year than it's been in the past. Both Yahoo and Intel also plan to announce deals with major consumer electronics makers to sell TVs that come with software, or widgets, that make it easy to call up Web content from your remote control. "You are going to see very broad adoption of this open technology by the best brands in the TV industry -- not just for specialty products but deeply penetrated in their product lines," says Patrick Barry, Yahoo's vice president of connected TV.

Perhaps. The Journal notes that industry executives have been talking about the marriage of the Internet and the TV since the mid-1990s. And yet, fifteen years later, the topic remains hot because of the potential impact on existing business models. Bringing the measurability and choice of the Internet to television has been considered the Holy Grail for marketers, who are often said to waste ad dollars in the drive to reach television's large, inefficiently measured audiences.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »