2-  In any event, the two media are converging rapidly in a trend that will accelerate when digital broadcasting replaces the dominant analog television system around the world, they said at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davis.. 

3-  "We recently completed a survey of our customers, who told us in the consumer segment that they preferred to be on the Internet than to watch TV at home," said Michael Dell, the 31-year-old chairman of computer maker Dell Computer Corporation.

4- Raymond Lane, president of Redwood City, California, software company Oracle Corporation, predicted the distinction between television and the Internet - the global network of computer networks - would soon start to blur.

5- "There will be a convergence in the next couple of years, may be sooner than that," he told a panel discussion.  

6- This will lead to customized newspapers and video called up at the touch of a button as a powerful rival to television.

7- "This is a slowly adapting marketplace, but I think broadcast television, as alternatives for profiling and customization are offered, will diminish," Lane said.

8- Computer workstation maker Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s chief technology officer Eric Schmidt, said the breakthrough will come when digital broadcasting puts television on the same technological footing as computers. 

9-  "At the point when the television signal that the average person gets is digital, there is tremendous leverage to browsing the Internet model and the digital; bits that you see on your screen," he said.  

10-  "What I worry about is that we will hit a limit in our industry in the number of people to whom it makes sense to be online," he added.

11-  "To get to the 70, 80, 90 percent kind of market that television has, we are going to have to have a model that looks a lot more like television and a lot more like entertainment than any of us has seen so far."

12-  Lane was a bit more skeptical of forecasts that the Internet could crowd out television in the battle for consumers.

13- "The consumer is slow to adapt, always.  You can push the cost down and simplify things, but consumer behavior is very, very difficult to change," he said. "This is going to be a very predictable and relatively slow growth rate for our industry."

14-  On the hardware frond, Lane said the trend was toward affordable computers rather than high-powered machines. 

15-  "I am much more optimistic you will start to see very simple, low-cost devices.  You don't need the complexity if you just have a limited set of tasks, if you do e-mail all day or are connected to a local area (computer)  network," he said.