Remember that scene in the Wallace and Gromit cartoon The Wrong Trousers where Wallace wakes up in the morning to a machine that does everything: makes his breakfast, feeds the dog, even prepares his cloths for the day? It's the cartoon equivalent of the kind of machine now being promised to consumers by hardware manufacturers and service providers worldwide: telephones that are MP3 players and personal organisers that double as entertainment systems. "Media convergence" is the phrase used to describe this technical crossover, and it's coming soon to a device near you.
Escape is next to impossible. Most people make telephone calls, watch television, and surf the Internet. Even if you only do the first two and are fanatically anti-Internet, you may soon be thrust on-line, as your television set will be delivering both telephone and Internet services in the very near future.
The main players in the market are familiar names: Eircom, NTL (formerly Cablelink) and Irish Multichannel. "Where the convergence is really happening," says Ian Jeffers, managing director of NTL in Ireland, "is in the fact that you can integrate the television and the Internet together. That will mean that you're watching something on the Discovery channel, and a little icon will appear at the bottom of the screen for more information - you can press that and you're straight into a specially designed web page."
In essence this is enhanced television. Viewers will be able to mine down deep into any topic that interests them. They will go from television to web page, and all on one set or monitor that will deliver a myriad of television channels, as well as Internet access, e-mail, personal organiser features, video and music on demand, all from the one box.
"It's really bringing together the television, the telephone and the Internet," says Jeffers. "What we're doing is investing considerably in the network . . . to squeeze a lot more down it. We'll be creating a broadband network - a big fat pipe into consumers' homes, so that then they can get whatever services they want at a suitable speed."While NTL is busy digging up and upgrading the network in its own franchise areas of Dublin, Waterford and Galway, a process which is due to be completed within three years, Eircom is preparing to employ quite a different technology for a similar purpose. DSL (digital subscriber line) technology enables an old copper telephone network to be bumped up into a high-speed, broadband network. The advantage is that it allows the existing network to carry a lot more at a speed about four times faster than an ISDN line.
As Michael Murphy, director of digital television at Eircom multimedia, says the bumped up network will allow consumers to use any of the combined services in the home at the same time. While Ian Jeffers sees the inevitable physical convergence of services into one box somewhere down the line, for the moment Michael Murphy at Eircom reckons the physical furniture of our households will not change that much.
"You'll have a splitter within your home which splits the line into three. One line will go into your telephone, one line into your PC, and one line into your television." The TV, fitted with a set-top box, also comes with a handset, which allows you to navigate by using a cursor. If you want to compose a very long email, you'll have cordless keyboard, but all services will be designed for use with the handset.
"What we're going to do is make the Internet televisual. It will feel like television, but actually you will have the opportunity to go down into great depth. The services will be presented in a familiar way. What you're not doing is facing someone with having to put in a URL address to access something. It's a televisual experience. The interface is designed specifically for television, although what's behind it is the Internet.
"If you call up any amount of websites and put them up on the TV, they don't look good. They haven't been structured for TV; they've been structured for sitting very close, with a lot of detail and a lot of text. There's often very bad colour usage - put that on a TV and it looks dreadful. Sites will have to look televisual. It broadens out the opportunity to use Internet services for people that wouldn't normally use them."
But the familiarity of the television experience aside, it is clear that this will be a new experience. A box that can monitor your viewing pattern and interests and that suggests viewing from countless digital channels; shopping and banking through your television; surfing the web with your remote control; sending and receiving e-mails from your couch; downloading music on a pay-per-listen basis; ordering films or games through your TV on (or almost on) demand; the end of video libraries and returning video cassettes - all this will be a new experience. All this should begin to happen within the next 12 months, according to Eircom.
Yet, says Ian Jeffers, what may prove most welcome to the Irish consumer is the competition, and what that will mean for costs. "There is at last competition. By introducing competition into the residential telephony market, that will ensure that those services stay competitive. Competition will drive prices down to a realistic level," he says.
Other welcome news for the consumer is that there will be no serious cash outlay for these new services. Any reasonably modern television can accommodate a set-top box, which will come with the handset, enabling the user to navigate the menu of new services available on their television. And this box may come free, if the British market is anything to go by - in the UK, Skydigital wasn't shifting enough set-top boxes and ended up giving them away.
How the changes will affect the already tumbling price of phonecalls is unclear. As it becomes possible to make international calls on the Internet for the price of a local call, it is clear that the telly has to strike back. While the PC foretold the demise of the old-fashioned box in the corner, it seems with digital that the game isn't up yet. The result may be the kind of do-it-all wonder box that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of.