Even in the wasteland that is cable television, the most surprising things can happen to you while you're channel surfing.

The other night my clicker landed on MTV, where the video of U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday was playing. The fact that a tune from my college days is still hip enough to elbow its way onto MTV's playlist certainly was a pleasant surprise for an aging psyche.

More startling though was not the music playing but the way the video was showcased on the tube. U2's video was crammed into the top half of the screen while an Internet-style chat apparently being simulcast from MTV's Web site was scrolling on the bottom half of the screen.

The late-night broadcast marked an epiphany of sorts for me. It made me realize that combining the Internet with television is not a crazy, half-baked idea after all.

For the better part of the year, I've dismissed WebTV and its fledgling competitors as sort of a cyberhula hoop -- a fad with the long-term staying power of a 3DO game player.

The Christmas season did little to dissuade me from that opinion. Depending on which industry whispers you choose to believe, anywhere between 30,000 and 70,000 WebTV units wound up in the hands of consumers by Christmas. Not bad for a newcomer, but downright horrible for a product with more than $50 million in marketing behind it.

The sad reality is that the Net is too boring to be its own TV channel. But the MTV broadcast shows the Net and the TV hold the promise for making a tasty mix, after all.

They work only in tandem, though -- only if the Web is relegated to a corner of a picture-within-a-picture. The small frame can be transformed into a window through which programmers could push personalized information (and advertising) related to the show being watched.

A fan watching a baseball game might want to use the Web window to post detailed reports from other games. A voter tuned into a political talk show could scroll political headlines in the window. And when a commercial starts, a shopper could use that Web site to display special offers that encourage response to the ads being shown on the TV.

Some big names -- most notably Microsoft Corp. with its Simply Interactive PC initiative -- are taking steps to better integrate the Web with TV. But in a consumer market that never truly bought into the notion of high-priced "home theaters," the idea of plugging an expensive computer into the back of a TV may be doomed.

Rather, the solution is in tweaking the lower-priced Web TV box. Give America a machine that transforms a picture-within-a-picture TV into one that allows me to watch TV and the Web at the same time.

With a remote control, viewers should be able to click to make the Web window appear or disappear. But the phone connection should remain intact, letting viewers tap into the Net at the touch of a button.

Finally, make it possible to broadcast Web addresses directly to my browser from the TV.

Lucent Technologies Inc., for instance, is trying to commercialize a relatively inexpensive technology, dubbed MediaLink, that can weave short strings of data, such as Web addresses, into video programming.

Once again, it seems the ever elusive answer for delivering interactive TV is right around the corner. The question is: When that day does come, will I still be able to catch U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday on MTV or will I have to tune into the Golden Oldies Channel on www.MTV.com?

Steven Vonder Haar is a Senior Writer for Inter@ctive Week. He can be reached at svonderh@zd.com on the Internet.

Source: Inter@ctive Week