Broadcast media will be killed by the interweb

INTEL'S LEADING BRIT, Sean Maloney reckons the Interweb will deliver a near-fatal blow to conventional commercial television over the next couple of years.

"The internet is going to hit broadcast media like a ton of bricks in the next 24 months," he told the Times in a puffy sort of piece you normally see on film stars, yesterday.

Lewisham lad Maloney, who aims to the tucked up in bed by the time George Bush says his nightly prayers, reckons advertisers will be increasingly wooed by the web, where they can better target their brain-washing propaganda.

"We don’t know what TV ads work any more," he said. "The idea of paying a lot of money for a commercial TV message that gets broadcast to everybody, whether interested in your product or not at a time of day when you don’t know if any of them are paying attention, is really unattractive. You want to advertise your product to someone who is interested. That’s all about to unfold.”

He's not the only one, of course. Google and Microsoft are engaged in a fierce battle to get the web ad. world stitched up between them, and Yahoo is like the tennis ball being battered about between the two.

Having put a PC in the home of everyone who can afford one, Intel now wants to put one in the hands of those who can't. For such reasons Maloney is unapologetic about Intel stiffing the OLPC project by going its own way.

And if you consider how much the likes of Google learns about you in the searches you make and the email you send or receive and the porn you watch, you'll know that your hand-held computer of the future will be stuffed with targeted adverts based on the preferences you've displayed in the past.

And the chips inside the gadget will be working at least as hard on behalf of the advertisers on the other end of the pipe as they will for you. µ