Why can't anyone bring television and the internet together in a meaningful way? Underscore Marketing's president gets to the heart of the issue.

Whenever someone starts talking about convergence, I duck and cover.

So far, the internet has survived all attempts to transform it into a lean-back, passive entertainment medium, despite the best efforts of convergence companies, entertainment conglomerates and venture capitalists with too much money.

We've seen the rise and fall of TV tuner cards, PC-based entertainment centers (Windows XP Media Center Edition, anyone?), kludgy convergence devices and countless other attempts to turn the internet into television.

While the first wave of internet/TV hybrids sought mainly to turn an interactive medium into a passive one, the next wave is trying to bring television together with internet-based community features. After all, people like television and people like talking to one another on the internet. Simply bringing the two together in one offering will attract people in droves, right?

Wrong. That same logic brought us things like the Foam Dome and peanut butter and jelly in the same jar. It also brought us such colossal blunders as the Cue Cat.

One of the best pieces of business advice I ever received was from a consultant friend who helped me evaluate business plans during the first dot-com boom. Sometimes, I would latch on to what I thought was a good idea and he would warn me to "watch out for the guy who can jump into the market and compete in the space overnight with a better offering." 

I'm often curious as to how some of these newer companies in the convergence space can fail to see existing competitive threats.

Take Joost, for example. When I first signed up for the Joost beta, the website bragged about Joost's blend of the best features of television and of the internet. Now it boasts more than 15,000 shows and a built-in interface that helps people blog about things they see on Joost.

There's just one problem. Most people already have plenty of ways to get to a lot of the content on Joost. There's a box in their living room that doesn't require time to boot up. They can download a lot of the stuff from iTunes or from a content provider's website. Or maybe grab it from the peer-to-peer networks.

These options also give the end user some flexibility with respect to what device they use to play back the content. For instance, I can download an episode of my favorite TV show from iTunes and watch it on a portable device like an iPod. I can take my iPod home and plug it into my TV. I can also have my DVR cable box save episodes of that TV show for me. I have a lot more flexibility with respect to the device I use and the environment in which I watch it than I would if I used Joost to watch content on my computer.

Moreover, what help do I need from Joost if I want to post something to my blog about a TV show I watched? I can get the content elsewhere more easily and with more flexibility, and I can post something to my blog from my computer, BlackBerry or Sony PSP. Why be tied to Joost's interface?

It's not that one company is directly competing with Joost and providing a better offering. The problem is that Joost faces indirect competition from a lot of different angles. Peer-to-peer networks are a great conduit for content delivery, but Joost gets competition in that regard from ad hoc P2P networks and torrent sites. A computer isn't a passive device, so Joost and companies like it face indirect competition from Apple, cable companies, mobile networks and any other company that can deliver video content in a more easily and readily consumed package.

Don't even get me started on the community aspect of its business -- that competition comes from all over.

At the core of the issue is that convergence companies persist in trying to deliver something contrary to expectations -- something that can easily be found elsewhere. Computers deliver an interactive experience in the original sense of the word. Yet convergence companies are exploring every avenue to move computers toward delivering a more passive experience. It won't work. History has taught us that.

Convergence will come into its own when companies in the space realize that things like P2P technologies are great distribution mechanisms for content, but that computers themselves are not the greatest environments for passive consumption.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.