1 Television Internet Strategies Gustavo Cardoso and Rita Espanha Television and Internet: managing uncertainty by doing When we speak about Internet and Mass Media we usually focus our attention in trying to answer a very common question: what is the impact of the internet on the mass media? That is a question that must be answered in different ways depending on which media are we referring to. Another issue we must address, previous to the discussion on television internet strategies, is that we always tend to focus on the ways in which content is being, or is forecast to be, distributed through the World Wide Web using IP protocols. But distribution of moving image content, contrary to text in the newspaper or sound in the radio, doesn’t seem to be the primary driving force in what concerns the presence of television on the internet. We can argue that such a phenomena is due to the lack of existence of critical mass of broadband users up into very recently - and we are probably right - but we can also argue that the choice not to boost the diffusion of television over IP - something that nowadays is technologically feasible and that can achieve high image quality – is not yet happening due to strategic choices made by TV companies or due to perceived difficulties in developing revenue models or managing content copyright (Tadayoni 2004, Taplin 2005). In this analysis we argue that initial technological difficulty faced by TV’s on providing broadcast on broadband to internet users was a major driving force on defining the evolution of television strategies on the internet, that is, how television channels interact with internet users on the web and what are their objectives in that relationship. We also suggest that this built identity of television presence on the Web, based on low quality of image broadcasting, favoured the evolution of several different strategies that can be recognise on a content analysis of the TV’s webpage’s on the internet. Finally, we would like emphasise that, given that the main impact of the internet on television viewing has occurred, at a global scale, not on television content formats or delivery of content but at the level of audience viewing, it is reasonable to expect that broadcasters strategies on both TV and World Wide Web, are trying to deal with that occurrence. A significant number of researchers around the world have observed empirically that television audiences are sharing their time increasingly between TV viewing and Internet use. Fewer minutes seem to be spent in front of TV and the time allocated to the use of the internet seems to be increasing (Cardoso 2004, 2005; Cole 2005). TV broadcasters are concerned with the evolution of these phenomena and they seem to be experimenting new kinds of linking between television viewing