Bill Gates sees dramatic change for TV in the next five years

By Simon van Wyk

In tune with Bob Garfield’s Chaos 2.0, AdWeek reports that Bill Gates is talking up the tremendous upheaval wrought by technology on traditional media.

Speaking at the opening of Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit in Seattle, the Microsoft Chairman said he believes “newspapers would be all online in just five years” noting their “inexorable decline” and offline directories “face a similar challenge when competing with the richness of Web search engines for local information”.

And in line with our ipTV story and podcast, he believes “TV will finally mesh with the Internet to form a new experience that combines the traditional richness of video with the interactivity of the Web”.