2006 Looks to be the Year of Web + TV II

PaidContent has an exclusive interview with Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo!. With the recent media storm over content and online video (stepped up even further by last week's CES conference and this week's Macworld expo), an important question is: When will the moving parts come together to make online video become a pervasive medium? In other words, when will the hype turn into mainstream adoption reality. (In this discussion, it's important to make the distinction between online video and IPTV.)

Boerries is emphatic that online video will reach a tipping point in '06:

I think we're going to see the first critical mass in '06. I think with Intel's Viiv, we're going to see that. We're going to start seeing it happening; it's going to need some ramp-up time. That was the reason we partnered with Intel—see what they've done with Centrino, right? Five years ago, less than five percent of the notebooks had WiFi in them and it was not always working … Now, 99 percent of the notebooks have WiFi and it works most of the time. That's the leadership that Intel can provide to the industry … in terms of technology, standardization and investment dollars in marketing and getting the digital home opened up … We don't have a million users today in the U.S who connect the TV and the PC. This is to me always a critical threshold (one million) and we're going to pass this threshold this year.

Read the rest here.

A good comparison chart of the current video offerings of the four main portals (and Apple) is here.