I don’t believe smart TVs that are not easily upgradeable, hackable will catch the imagination of the consumer. What will is saving $70 per month on cable. The first company or partnership of companies that allows the average non hacker to cut the cord on cable, effectively and legally will win this battle for smart tv. That means live news and sports available at a reasonable alacarte cost or advertiser supported. The rest of the content available in a netflix like fashion.

I don’t see anything in the article that resolves the balkinazation found among TV manufacturers, developers and Big Content.

One other thing, I suspect that it wasn’t just the HD content that spurred large set purchases. I’m sure the cutoff of analog broadcasts had more to do with it. Take a look at all the places that have a HDTV that either had the aspect ratio off or were simply displaying SD content. If HDTV alone was a driver of those sales, one would think that more than half of the HDTVs I saw in 2009/2010 would have been properly displaying HD content. Finally let’s look at one of the articles linked above.

“And as time goes on, there might be another reason for consumers to begin replacing their TV sets — or at least, the TV sets in their living rooms: They might soon become obsolete. As more and more “smart” TVs enter the market, the applications and app development frameworks available on the first generation of Internet-ready televisions will find themselves eclipsed by more powerful and attractive options.”

This is actually a reason for me to not believe the hype of a shortened upgrade cycle. I bought a TV in 2008 that the manufacturer said would be upgradeable. The ethernet and USB ports convinced me that was true. How many updates did I get? One. Did it make any of the apps better? No. This experience has convinced me it is much better for my expenses and the environment to buy a smaller, much cheaper box that can more easily be updated and moved around to any TV/monitor I own now or in the future (assuming HDMI remains the main digital input standard). I don’t want to see large numbers of perfectly fine TVs sitting in land fills.