Reading a bunch about marrying Internet and traditional TV today, trying, among other things, to suss out how the ecosystem is going to develop.

One insight I had today: people will not prefer smart TVs, if they end up preferring them at all, because they’ve got one fewer box. The history of phones, smartphones, and now tablets shows that people pick their boxes because of functionality, not box count. People cheerfully carried around blackberries and dumb phones together for years, one for email, one for voice. Today people have a phone and a tablet and a laptop, all for slightly different use cases, each picked for excellence of function.

My guess would be people will do the same for TVs. We will cheerfully combine legacy set top box, new box, and maybe even smart TV, if each excels at some purpose we want.