Well, depends on who you ask. The New York Times seems to think it has a shot at drawing eyeballs away from traditional television. But, I am not so sure. So, in service to all you readers of the Catalyst Code Blog, I took time out of my busy afternoon to check out nextnewnetwork.

I got a cup of coffee and cozied up to my computer to watch several of their many channels. I have to admit, it’s a neat site. There are a bunch of “channels” like BarelyPolitical.com which brought you the Obama Girl, VOD Cars which they say is the #1 Broadband Car Network, and Pulp Secret which is the “first network dedicated to comic book news and culture.” I checked the car channel naturally and amused myself with an Elliot Spitzer video on Barelypolitical.

I think the site raises some interesting questions on the future of IPTV. One possible direction is that people—especially as those who grew up with traditional television go to the great yuppie ranch in the sky—will drift towards consuming videos like they do now on YouTube and on the likes of nextnewnetwork: they will browse around, watch a few minutes here, a few minutes there. If that’s the case, then there’s a real future for aggregators of interesting content like nextnewnetwork.

The other possible direction is that the coach potato culture will live on and people will continue to sack out on their sofas and watch a few hours of television with as little physical exertion as possible. Now that’s a world in which the frenetic pace of these new kinds of shows don’t really work. If people really want to vegetate for an hour we’re back to something more like the usual stuff on television.

My guess is that people will continue to sack out in front of the television. But the television will have an internet connection. That internet connection will bring the online advertising technology to the traditional television set, and maybe it will give people some choice to see some of the sorts of stuff that’s on nextnewnetwork.

I’m hardly a representative member of the public though. Better ask your teenager what they’ll want to do a decade from now.