GigaOM » Smart TV

Take that, Apple TV: Smart TVs twice as popular as dedicated streaming boxes

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:12:00 +0000

14 percent of all broadband households owned an Apple TV, a Roku box or another kind of dedicated streaming device in 2012, but 25 percent owned a smart TV with an embedded app platform, according to the Diffusion Group’s latest Defining the In-Home CE and Network Ecosystem 2013 report.

The ownership of Smart TVs has roughly doubled over the last year, with 25 percent of broadband households owning at least one Smart TV, compared to 12 percent in 2011. Dedicated streaming devices on the other hand grew slower, inching up from 12 percent in 2011 to 14 percent in 2012.

Of course, one should note that owning a device isn’t the same as using it. Only 69 percent of Smart TVs are connected to the internet, according to the report, whereas one should assume that most streaming boxes are connected (safe for the ones used as paperweights).

The most popular device for internet video remains the game console, with 62 percent of broadband households now owning a next-generation game console such as the Sony PS3 or the Microsoft Xbox 360. Almost a fourth of the time spent with these consoles is spent on online video viewing.

Altogether, 56 percent of broadband households now have at least one TV connected to the Internet.

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Opera’s TV SDK starts powering Samsung Blu-ray players

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:00:45 +0000

Opera is continuing to make inroads in the connected device space: Samsung is going to start shipping Blu-ray players powered by the Opera Devices SDK soon, the company announced Monday night. Opera didn’t go into details about which of Samsung’s 2013 Blu-ray players are going to be powered by its SDK, but the company said that the devices will ship globally.

One interesting thing about this partnership is that Samsung has its own Smart TV platform, which it has been promoting aggressively to app developers. So why get a third party to power your devices? One likely answer: Samsung’s platform has been evolving from an all-purpose app platform towards a more TV-centric approach for high-end TV sets.

At CES in January, Samsung unveiled a new UI for its 2013 Smart TVs that comes with voice control, a live TV guide and a remote control with an integrated touch pad. The company is offering owners of select 2012 TVs to upgrade to the new experience for $300 with the help of its Smart TV evolution kit; but that kind of premium pricing doesn’t really work for a $130 Blu-ray player.

In light of that disparity, Samsung has to make a choice: Either fork its Smart TV platform to work on both high-end and low-end devices, or use a different solution for lower-priced devices. It looks like the company may be ready to go for the latter — and Opera seems to be the company to benefit.

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Quietly, Opera is working on becoming a Smart TV powerhouse

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:27:49 +0000

Quick: What’s the first thing that pops in your head when you think of Opera? If you’re anything like me, it’s probably the company’s desktop browser. But there’s more to Opera: The company has been hugely successful in mobile, bringing in more than $400 million in ad revenue in 2012 alone, and it’s now getting ready to repeat that success story on the TV.

Opera has been active in TV for some time. The company’s browser software-development kit has been powering TVs and connected devices from Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp and Philips as well as the new Boxee TV, just to name a few. Frode Hernes, VP of products and connected devices at Opera told me during a phone conversation last week that consumers already use an estimated 30 to 50 million TVs and connected devices that are powered by Opera.

But Opera’s role on your TV may get a lot bigger soon. Last year, it launched the Opera TV Store, a HTML-based app store that is now shipping with Sony’s Bravia TVs and coming to other vendors soon. And Hernes told me that it plans to launch advertising for TV apps before the end of the year.

These ads will include offers to try and install certain apps within other apps, much in the same way advertising is working on mobile phones. “We have done the technical integration,” Hernes told me, but the inventory just isn’t there yet. “It’s a little bit early,” he said. “We hope to have significant income next year” from TV ads, he added.

The company has also been adding additional features to its app store, including the capability to display apps side-by-side next to live TV and other content, and it is getting ready to switch its rendering engine from Opera’s own browser engine to Chromium to keep up with the latest in HTML5 development.

However, some of these changes might not find their way onto TV sets until 2014, simply because consumer electronics manufacturers take their time with integrating new software. “This is not like the mobile market,” Hernes said.

Consumers have often been on the flip side of those long release cycles, getting products that are already outdated as soon as they’re getting on the shelves of retailers, often with no chances for any product updates.

However, this could change once ads add additional monetization opportunities to smart TVs: Instead of operating on razor-thin margins and simply moving from one generation to the next, companies could actually be incentivized to add features and services to existing devices already in consumer’s homes, Hernes predicted. “This is one way of keeping the device relevant after it is sold,” he said.

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What LG’s webOS buy means for Google TV

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:11:53 +0000

LG is buying HP’s troubled mobile operating system webOS, according to reports from CNET and the Verge. However, the company doesn’t want to put the system to use in any of its phones: Instead, LG plans to use webOS to power its smart TVs. That could be bad news for Google, which has been cooperating with LG on getting Google TV into the hands of consumers.

The deal between LG and HP includes the webOS source code, documentation, websites and what’s remaining of the webOS team. Cloud components such as the webOS app store technology as well as all of the patents will remain with HP, but are going to be licensed to LG. There’s no word on the purchase price.

Most of LG’s smart TVs have been powered by the company’s own app platform, which was originally called NetCast and has been ripe for a refresh for some time. The company also has an ongoing partnership with Google to sell Google TV devices, and in fact has been expanding this partnership in recent months.

LG started to sell two high-end Google TV sets in 2012. In 2013, it will come out with a total of seven models. But consider how LG CTO Skott Ahn announced these models at the company’s 2013 press conference:

“We will continue to serve our Android fans with an extended lineup of Google TV.”

In other words: LG’s Google TVs are, at least for now, niche products for enthusiasts, and LG apparently doesn’t think that will change anytime soon. That’s why the company is looking to replace its own smart TV operating system with webOS, instead of relying 100 percent on Google TV.

That’s bad news for Google TV, but it also shows how Google’s living room play has been changing over recent months. Google originally courted a number of big TV manufacturers for Google TV, with the idea of having the system embedded in a wide variety of TV sets. Sony was one of the first to make Google TVs, LG came on board for the second generation, and Samsung seemed to be ready to go Google as well by early 2012.

A year later, things look very different: Samsung’s Google TV never materialized. Sony stopped selling Google TV sets and instead opted for a companion box. And now, LG is buying its own smart TV operating system.

Does that mean Google TV is doomed? Hardly. The platform has seen some significant adoption in recent months: Asus, Netgear, Hisense and TCL all showed off new Google TV devices at CES, and WD is apparently working on its own Google TV box as well. Earlier this month, a total of 20 hardware partners came together in Seoul to collaborate on the future of Google TV.

But it looks like Google TV settling into a role as a companion box solution, as opposed to a default smart TV choice for the big manufacturers.

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GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:01:14 +0000

Every January CES sets the stage for the next year in tech, showing off all the latest in consumer electronics as well as smart-home technology, digital health, connected cars, virtual reality, and mobile platforms. Given how CES is now a barometer for such a wide array of technology segments, we at GigaOM Research decided to ask our readers which way the tech winds will blow over the next year based on what they saw in Las Vegas. Our readers responded with the technologies they thought were the most disruptive and least disruptive, as well as the companies they were most impressed with, from categories as diverse as TV technology, smart home, connected car, internet of things, virtual or augmented reality, 3D printing, interfaces, digital health, mobility, and robotics.

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Up to $500 to upgrade your TV? Samsung, are you kidding me?

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:00:09 +0000

Samsung officially unveiled its new Smart TV experience at CES Monday, along with a way for users of existing Samsung TVs to upgrade: Samsung’s Evolution Kit will allow anyone who bought higher-end 2012 TVs from the company to basically swap the smarts — CPU, memory etc. — by attaching a black box on the back of their TV.

Sounds like a really good idea, save for one detail: Samsung hasn’t officially released any pricing for the Evolution Kit, but I was told by representatives at a press preview event Sunday night that the company is aiming for “sub $500” pricing, which means that the suggested retail price is likely something like $499.99. And here’s the kicker: Samsung wants you to buy one of these every year.

Samsung’s new Smart TV UI looks neat

Now, don’t get me wrong. The new Samsung Smart TV experience is a huge improvement over the cluttered UI that has been shipping with existing models. Not only did the company clean up the UI, introducing five separate screens with fluid transitions as opposed to trying to cram everything onto a single home screen, but there’s also a lot to like about some of the built-in discovery elements.

For example, your TV is now keeping track of what you like to watch, and will recommend new content based on those viewing habits. Samsung also added smarts to its voice control, including natural language processing, so you won’t have to learn robotic voice commands to interact with your television anymore. Or so goes the theory anyway: the company didn’t actually demo this part Sunday night because of concerns over the noise levels at the preview event.

Check out a few photos of the new UI, then continue reading below:

Do you really need a quad-core processor for this?

All of this, plus a new remote control with touch D-Pad, will be included with Samsung’s new high-end TV sets. Consumers who bought a higher-end 2012 TV will be able to buy the Evolution Kit, which will also come with the new remote control. So what makes this black box so darn expensive?

The Evolution kit contains a 1.2 Ghz quad-core Samsung processor as well as 4GB of RAM. A Samsung spokesperson told me that the processor in particular drives the price, and the speed shows: transitions from screen to screen are extremely fluid. But is that kind of eye candy worth the extra money?

Most of these features described above should work just fine without a hugely expensive CPU. A number of LG’s new 2013 TVs, which the company showed off at CES Monday morning, also offer natural language processing — but are powered by dual-core processors. And Google TV devices have been doing pretty solid voice recognition with a cheap ARM processor, simply by outsourcing the task to the cloud.

New year, new Evolution kit

But for me, the biggest deal-breaker is that Samsung is apparently already working on a next-generation Evolution kit that will be ready to replace this year’s kit in 2014. That way, you’ll always have the latest Smart TV experience — but you’ll also always have to pay through the nose for it.

Of course, paying $500 for a smart TV upgrader may not seem as much when you’ve paid a few thousand dollars for your TV; but I suspect that most people spent that much money on their TV set because they really value picture quality, and not because of its smarts.

Most consumers still only use one or two apps, if at all, and they don’t really need a very complex UI to do so. And there are plenty of second-screen apps recommending things to watch. Some of these apps, like Dish’s new second-screen remote, can even change channels and know what you’re currently watching. Chances are, consumers will go for a combination of iPad and Apple TV, Roku or even Google TV instead of spending heavily on a converter that promises to be outdated in a mere 12 months.

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The state of cross-platform media measurement

lydialoizides — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:30:17 +0000

Today brand advertisers must go to great lengths to find their audiences. Thus, brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. But the ecosystem, which this report examines from a broad perspective, struggles to solve the correlation between the two media-viewing behemoths, TV and online. Within the next 36 months, the measurement of cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars from TV to online viewing, the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, and another political and Olympic cycle. In the meantime, new types of measurement of online behavior and ad performance will come to market.

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Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 06:55:44 +0000

Tablets featured prominently in the connected consumer space during the second quarter of 2012, both as a product category in their own right and as a component of broader platform strategies by the major OS providers. Meanwhile Apple added AirPlay streaming to Mac OS, and Microsoft made an aggressive bid to dominate the second screen by introducing SmartGlass apps. The period also saw important moves by Facebook to broaden its monetization strategy and an investigation by federal antitrust authorities into pay-TV licensing practices and their impact on the emerging online-video business. This quarterly wrap-up discusses these developments as well as offers trends and topics to watch in the second half of 2012 and beyond.

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New video: Ikea TV comes with slide-out remote control

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:19:31 +0000

Ikea just published a new YouTube video on Thursday that reveals a few more details about the Uppleva TV set it is going to start selling in select European stores next month. The video was shot at the Milan Furniture Fair, where Ikea showed the device to the public for the first time.

The clip concentrates mostly on the TV’s integration into Ikea’s furniture and the company’s design choices, but also offers a few more technical details. The biggest revelation for anyone wondering how Ikea is going to merge its simple design with the device’s Blu-ray player and Smart TV functionality: The remote control will feature a slide-out keyboard, hiding some of the advanced features in a second layer. Check out the entire video below:

The video also features extensive comments from Uppleva designer Francis Cayouette, who said that he has been very involved in making the Smart TV UI as well. As a side note, Ikea is probably the only company in the world that would include a guy admitting that a product just doesn’t work for him in official promotional footage. Odd, but charming.

Ikea’s Uppleva TV sets are slated to go on sale in select stores in Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden in a few days, and then become more widely available throughout Europe this fall. Uppleva won’t be available in the United States until 2013. We reported earlier this month that the Ikea TV will feature apps for YouTube, Dailymotion and TuneIn Radio, amongst others.

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Samsung’s saucy Smart TV ad: “Look, don’t touch”

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:32:58 +0000

Samsung has a recent history of mocking others in its ads — some poked fun at iPhone users — but now Samsung is using humor to tout its gesture controlled line of Smart TV sets. Thanks to an integrated web cam atop the display, consumers can control video playback, volume and other functions without touching the set.

To show how — dare I say it — sexy this is, the company’s latest ad shows what happens when you put a female model wearing a camisole top and shorts that are two sizes too small in front of a Smart TV. Of course this is in front of a window where everyone can see her. Hilarity and racy themes ensue. See for yourself how Samsung smartly makes good us of it’s “Look, don’t touch” tagline. Oh and be on the lookout for a previous comedic ad star: It looks like the Old Spice guy is in the mix!

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