JUST as it started to make its way out of the living room and on to the internet, television seems to be having a change of heart. In the next few weeks there could be a series of announcements that hand control of the digital revolution back to the couch potatoes.

This weekend sees the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The world’s biggest trade fair of its kind is a key barometer for technology trends, and early leaks indicate the marriage of internet, television and movies is going to be big news this year.

Netflix, the American DVD rentals group founded by Reed Hastings, has confirmed it is in talks with the electronics firm LG to produce a machine that allows customers to download films from the net and watch them on their television sets.

Later this month Apple is expected to announce a deal with Fox, the movie studio owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times. The speculation is that Fox movies and television shows will be available for rent through iTunes, Apple’s online store.

Apple has so far dominated online music, but this time things are different and it faces competition from Amazon, Blockbuster, cable firms and newcomers like Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and News Corp.

And while Apple has redefined the way people listen to music, it has so far failed to do the same for television and movies. In part Apple’s slow progress has been down to fears among the main media firms that Apple could do for their lucrative DVD sales what it has done for the music industry’s CD sales. But consumers, too, have so far fought shy of internet television.

“The average adult watches four hours of television a day,” said James McQuivey, a research analyst at Forrester. “They have designed their living areas round the TV.” And computers, in the main, are still in another room.

Apple has Apple TV, which moves movies from the computer to the TV set, but sales have been slow. Rivals Vudu and Tivo offer similar services and Microsoft and Sony have plans for movie and television downloads through the latest generation of their video-games consoles. But no winner has yet emerged, and how many more boxes can people put under their television sets?

Internet-based television services have worked for short clips of video but, for most people, watching a television show or a movie on their computer is just not as comfortable an experience, said McQuivey.

It seems some of the world’s biggest companies agree. Google pulled out of longer-form video last year, axing its Google Video site in favour of concentrating on YouTube and its shorter video clips. And last month Wal-Mart axed its movie download business with a short message on its website that went largely unnoticed for a week.

“What we are seeing is not only the appearance of new approaches but also the disappearance of old ones,” said McQuivey.

Companies, including Apple and Wal-Mart, had tried to sell films and television shows online in the same way that iTunes had sold music. But the way people buy and enjoy music is fundamentally different to the way they buy and watch DVDs or television, he said.

People want to be able to play their music over and over and to be able to play it in different places. But people are happy to rent a DVD and watch it once. Nor is the experience of watching a video online as comfortable or convenient as watching a DVD on a television set.

If Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest DVD vendor, isn’t up for downloads neither are its consumers. Jupiter Research estimates that by 2012 the market for video purchased on the internet will be barely $500m. The revenues for video supported by ads will be five times that. “Rentals will help but it won’t triple the market,” said analyst Bobby Tulsiani.

But while the market may be small initially, big media firms are betting that eventually the DVD will go the way of the CD.

Steve Swasey, Netflix spokesman, said: “We are in a three-act play and right now we are in the early stages of the second act.”

In the first act, Netflix convinced customers to rent their DVDs through a website that makes it possible to search a huge database and recommends films on the basis of their previous picks. The DVDs are sent and returned in the mail.

The second act has seen the firm start to offer movies and television shows online that can be watched on a PC. The internet offers choice and the ability to search that a television set cannot. The marriage of the television set and the internet is key, said Swasey.

The third act will be mean the end of the DVD. Nobody knows when that will happen, but “the typical consumer cycle lasts 10 to 20 years and the DVD is about 10 years old”, said Swasey. “Nobody has a crystal ball.”

Maybe not, but there are a lot of people gazing.

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