Few will use the big Internet connected telly in the corner

IS THERE A GREAT FUTURE for Internet protocol televisions? Social trends appear to suggest that people prefer chatting with other people instead of just sitting idle, watching the talking heads and actors blather.

Apparently people are switching from watching telly to social networking as their primary form of entertainment. The INQUIRER imagines this is because people find that passively watching the vicarious experience presented by reality TV just isn't enough anymore.

Yet we are told that everyone wants to surf the entertainment frontier looking for programmes worth watching via IPTV. Through Internet TV, every possible sort of visual content will be made available and you will be able to tweet about it. Oh yes, the idea has been that consumers will advertise programmes for the broadcasters by telling their friends how much fun they are having watching another cheery episode of Eastenders.

However, when social networking becomes people's primary form of entertainment, are they really going to sit down and watch telly programmes, or long form video as the marketing speak goes? Probably not.

The social networking Jetsons, when not maintaining their jetpacks and flying cars, will more likely be using individual tablets or netbooks to communicate with real-world and social website friends on their own. Dinner, if families observe traditional meal times, could still see them watching TV while polishing off their meat and two veg, but beyond that the household telly could become quite a neglected device.

Instead, the tablet or laptop and its comfortable touchscreen user interface will become the personal video on demand device, with people watching short bits of programmes between chatting with their friends and responding to strangers' tweets on topics of mutual interest. Each family member will be in their own corner of the living room or in their room, sharing with the world but not with each other.

So then the IPTV home cinema telly starts to look like rather a lonely figure. Expensive and not easy to use by a group for any social networking, which is designed around the individual, the flat screen behemoth of yesteryear will suddenly become redundant. Dad or the teenage son might want to watch it for the visual spectacles of sports or action movies in 3D, but it costs a lot of dosh for something that will be used only occasionally.