CES 2012: Smart TVs make a splash
As the Consumer Electronics Show continued in Las Vegas, at least one theme became clear: The next big technology war is for your living room. Hayley Tsukayama reports:
Hawking their wares at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, the world’s top television manufacturers are bent on making a splash: They’re trying to sell a whole new approach to television.
In a world where the latest gadgets are automatically expected to be hooked up to technology “ecosystems” — apps, Internet connectivity and access to social networks -- television makers are banking on the fact that couch potatoes will want to see their friendly living-room TV get in on the act.
We’ve heard this all before. The idea of a “smart” television has been around for a few years, and Google introduced its Google TV platform in May 2010, promising to put all the convenience of the Web onto the largest screen in your home. But a little over a year later, the idea has yet to take off, hampered by low adoption and a lack of hardware partners.
All that’s changing this year for Samsung, LG, Sony and Lenovo, to name a few. Microsoft has proven with the Kinect — which chief executive Steve Ballmer announced had sold 16 million units to date — that there’s a market for quality apps on your television. Even Google has the chance at a second wind, having partnered with several of the major television manufacturers, each offering its own take on putting the TV back to the center of home entertainment.
Samsung is working on integrating voice and motion control into its new sets, enabling users to speak commands to their TVs or change channels and other settings with just a wave. Vizio is joining with the cloud-service company OnLive to put streaming games on its Google televisions. The company has added the OnLive Viewer, which lets users manage their accounts and watch others play games, to its app ecosystem with the promise that gameplay will be close behind. Sharp is augmenting its huge television lineup with access to apps from Netflix, Hulu and Facebook.
To compete, the companies will have to offer carefully curated, high-quality applications and be open to supporting mobile devices such as tablets. Other media companies have already started: Comcast, for example, announced that it’s going to allow OnDemand streaming not only to Samsung Smart TV’s but also to the iPad.
These new Smart TVs are aimed at giving shoppers a reason to buy a new TV, as Bloomberg News reports:
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas opening today, LG and Lenovo will show TVs that allow users to search for shows and Web applications with natural-sounding voice commands. Samsung introduced three high-end models with so- called Smart Interaction technology, which builds in motion- sensing and voice-command software similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 video-game console.
“You now can turn on your TV simply by saying, ‘Hi TV,’ and you can change channels simply by talking or gesturing,” Ethan Rasiel, a spokesman for Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung, said in an interview.
Getting consumers to pay up will be tough. Last year, most buyers shunned sets bringing “Avatar”-like 3-D theater experiences into the living room. Since 2009, the average price of an LED TV, the most common type sold in the U.S., dropped 35 percent to $817 from $1,254, according to researcher NPD, which projects a 16 percent decline this year. Three-dimensional sets made up 9 percent of sales in 2011 through November, from 2 percent a year earlier.
Your living room isn’t the only place tech firms are hoping to transform. Internet radio company Pandora is hoping to find its way into your car, as Cecilia Kang reports:
Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren doesn't drive much. "I'm a public transport guy," he said. But he does know that half of all radio listening is in cars and that's made the auto market the Internet radio company's major focus over the past year.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, Westergren announced deals with 16 car makers— from the first partner, Ford, to latest partner Kia— to incorporate Pandora into car dashboards or allow users to stream the service through their smartphones into car audio systems.
It's part of the firm's strategy to get its 125 million users to bring the service with them wherever they go and get them to listen even longer. The free service is so far supported by advertising, but ad revenues need to grow to to keep that model going, analysts say. Only 10 percent of customers use its premium paid service.
"It's one of those things where you have to build a big audience first and then advertising catches up," Westergren said in an interview at the company's suite at the Wynn Hotel here.
But he said many partners see Pandora as an essential brand for their products. The app was among the top downloaded on tablets like the iPad last year. Roku, an Internet television service, features Pandora as one of three buttons on its remote control for highly demanded apps.
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