They tried to make cars turn into airplanes and amphibious craft – not all innovation makes sense….especially if the business model is known to be fragile.

This whole Hybrid discussion is fundamentally based on an end-to-end system from Content Creation to Consumption but has multiple owners of many or different parts of the system with nobody having responsibility except perhaps for a small part of the chain – If the system breaks in this brave new world – who do you call The Broadcaster, The PayTV Operator, The Telco, Google, Sony, Philips or your favourite brand of CE device or even the ISP who throws his hands up and says not my problem…call Ghostbusters?

That was the downfall of WebTV in the past actually, not what it offered but the cost to support it in a fragile Broadband world…which today is more robust, further spread and is faster; better but still fallible and prone to huge outages…if you can have all the bandwidth that they promise fantastic but if you live in the countryside you are not necessarily connected as in the city – therefore it is not a level playing field as in traditional Broadcasting.

We have a long way to go and its not an HTTP Adaptive Streaming or an HTML Browser that is going to be the magic wand.