Rumours of the death of television have been greatly exaggerated, according to the director of research at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaking at a seminar last month organized by the Canadian Advertising Research Foundation, Barry Kiefl says those who predict the Internet will supplant television don’t understand the different audience needs and interests that television and the Internet fulfill.

In the near future, Kiefl says, the cinema-quality picture and sound promised by digital tv will make it extremely difficult for the Internet to compete for the viewer’s attention.

‘For a new audio-video medium like the Internet to compete with the massive journalistic and entertainment conglomerate that tv represents, technical features such as the bandwidth and speed of delivery will need to be upgraded,’ says Kiefl. Additionally, he says, the medium will have to be available universally, at little or no additional cost to the consumer, with the fee perhaps buried in the user’s cable or telephone bill.

While acknowledging that a good 40% of the Canadian population now use the Internet, Kiefl says they’re spending little time online and, further, their use of the Internet has had a negligible effect on television viewing levels.

To supplant what he calls television’s essential role in the social communications hierarchy, Kiefl says Internet content providers would have to program content that can compete with television. And to do that, he says, they’d need to secure the rights to distribute major league sports, Hollywood movies and syndicated programs, they’d have to buy and commission original entertainment programming, and they’d have to produce news and other information programming of high journalistic standards.

‘In other words, for the Internet to transcend its role as a search engine for useful and ancillary data, it would need to become another form of tv.’

Not that Kiefl doesn’t see big changes ahead. But he says they’ll most likely come in the form of greater interactivity with one’s new digital television.

As an example, Kiefl says digital tv stations could broadcast free Web-type pages – accessed via built-in Internet software – to provide a high-speed Internet experience as part of the television broadcast.