“The future of the TV is online, and your television’s going to get connected,” says the Daily Telegraph’s consumer technology editor Matt Warman. Main Street press like the Telegraph and The New York Times have been reporting on smart TVs and the move by the TV networks to get on the Net. It’s a sure sign the concept has moved from someone’s crazy notion to an event that’s happening in millions of homes and all the TV networks.
Warman reported that for broadcast TV luminaries at the Media Convention in Oxford, the talk was about “the importance of the Web in the UK’s creative industries, and how content, watched in new and traditional ways, will continue to be king.”
A visit to any consumer retailer will show that virtually every TV set is a smart TV, with an Internet connection and lots of widgets to access online sites for content and services. The license to make Blu-ray players requires that every unit have an Internet connection. (It’s ironic that Internet connection may ultimately lead to a decline in sales of Blu-ray movies and TV shows, isn’t it?)
Samsung UK recently said that owners of its newer televisions have downloaded more than two million TV applications that give access via the Net to such services as GoogleBBC iPlayer, Twitter and movie rental service LoveFilm, according to Warman. Maps, the
He points out that it’s a sign of the times that a major media executive, the BBC’s head of future media, Erik Huggers, is leaving the BBC to run Intel’s digital home division. Intel showed a lot of oomph in connected-TV technology at CES with a booth near the front entrance of the main hall and a smattering in its booth of devices from several hardware makers for connecting TVs to online content and video services plus in some cases to pay-TV channels and over-the-air broadcasts.
From their very beginning, Intel has been involved in the two most ambitious connected TV efforts, Google TV and Yahoo Connected TV.
But, Are the Home’s Network & Broadband Ready
The seemingly sudden move to dominance by smart TVs and Internet-connected Blu-ray players raises two points:
1. The current state of Wi-Fi technology means that most purchasers will get home and find they need a wireline connection to the Net to obtain the best streaming performance. Will they run an Ethernet cable, or will they buy HomePlug or MoCA network adapters? HomePlug has the lead in the retail stores now but the MoCA crowd introduced some snazzy retail products such as adapters for Ethernet to/from coax at CES.
2. Is the wireline broadband infrastructure ready for the smart TV era? It’s said that Netflix, which is on every smart TV and Blu-ray player and will soon have its own red one-click button on remotes, already accounts for half or more of all traffic on the Net. TV sets with Netflix’ streaming service only started selling in volume about a year ago. We saw what the Apple iPhone did to an un-prepared AT&T wireless network. The cablecos and telcos are working to increase the speeds over their network to handle even the very-demanding 3D video but will they have the bandwidth for the volume soon enough?
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