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.

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 The annual CES exhibition allows companies to showcase their new and innovative consumer electronics. It is being held from Jan. 10 to 13 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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 Last year at CES, it was all about tablets. This year, the super-thin ultrabooks might be the star of the show.

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.