THE BIGGEST THING SINCE COLOR?

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He was America's quintessential media consumer: a hardworking breadwinner who settles down after dinner with his feet up and his thumb on the remote. So Tim Bajarin, an analyst at the research firm Creative Strategies, was curious about how the man would react to a focus-group presentation of Silicon Valley's latest hot idea: using a TV receiver to cruise the Internet. As Bajarin watched, the subject waited patiently a full 30 seconds for a sports-related Web page to fill the screen. He studied it for a minute, then looked up and asked, "When do the movies start?"

That may be the question of the year. The man represents the Internet industry's most coveted market: the estimated 85% to 90% of American homes that aren't yet connected. For this Passive Majority, most of whom don't even own a computer, let alone a modem, "Net TV" would seem to make perfect sense. After all, nearly everybody in America has a TV and a telephone, and many are presumably curious to learn what the World Wide Web is all about. If they could use their existing sets to access the Infobahn from the comfort of their La-Z-Boys, the Web might finally become the mass medium its promoters have been promising all along.

To that end, some half a dozen companies plan to begin selling a Net TV of one sort or another between the end of summer and the beginning of next year. Rick Doherty, a director of the Envisioneering Group, estimates that 1 million Net TV devices will be sold in the first year, and that a third of American homes will have one by 2002.

These devices, in their simplest form, consist of a television with two ports in the back: one for cable, the other for an Internet connection (usually a phone line). Once their link to the Net is established, viewers will, in theory, be able to navigate Websites with their trusty remotes as easily as they now surf TV channels.

There are, however, as many variations on this latest get-rich-on-the-Internet scheme as there are firms that want to cash in on it. Companies like Zenith and Curtis Mathes are building new TVs that come out of the packing crate Net ready; others, like ViewCall America, are designing set-top boxes that plug into ordinary TVs and make them Web capable. Sony and Philips, for example, are licensing set-top technology from WebTV Networks, a company partly financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Sega and Nintendo, meanwhile, are adding Internet capability to their video-game machines, and this fall Apple is expected to market its long-delayed Pippin computer as a $600 Web-browsing set-top box that also plays Macintosh CD-ROMs.

The TV-PC hybrid idea is attractive to computer makers, although most would prefer to add TV reception to their PC lines than get into the TV business. Direct-mail giant Gateway 2000 is already selling Destination, a $3,500-to-$4,500 hybrid TV-PC. NetTV, Inc. introduced its competing WorldVision in March, and Compaq and RCA are expected to follow suit early next year.