Introduction

Convergence is a term that has gone in and out of favor in the media business. Many people in the media and technology worlds, from Emperor Gates to Steve Case, have envisioned a world where all content was consumed on a single do-everything device available over a single delivery channel. One faction saw the PC as the only device anyone would ever need for entertainment, work, and communication. Naturally, the Internet would be the only delivery channel necessary. Such was conventional wisdom in 1995.

That dream of realizing a PC-centric media world came face to face with the real world, and the meeting wasn't pretty. The broadcasting industry wasn't about letting the PC take the place of good ol'TV. The 1995 EIA/IEEE Conference ...

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