For almost 55 years, television has lived in our homes as the centerpiece of our living rooms. Today there are more than 2 billion TVs worldwide. People around the globe spend an average of 3-4 hours per day watching television.
Our favorite domestic appliance is deeply embedded into the fabric of who we are and what we do. It’s simple, easily understood and we do not want it to go away.
But that doesn’t mean TV isn’t changing. Over the years, color TVs replaced black and white screens. Then came Atari games on TV, cable, video cassette recorders, digital video recorders, high-definition screens, video-on-demand, 3-D—all have been part of TV’s evolution.
Today TV is at another big inflection point, with the advent of “smart TV,” but exactly what is “smart TV”?
What is smart TV?
Smart TV is much more than just Internet-connected TV, it’s a new TV experience, that lets users:
- Search online and personal content as well as broadcast programming all from their TV
- Access downloadable applications
- Connect to social networks while watching favorite programs or movies
- Control their TV with either their smartphone or unique remote controls with voice commands
The term, “smart TV” is an Intel-generated term, says Brian David Johnson, Intel Labs futurist and author of Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love. It’s based on consumer research, our marketing push and a new breed of a consumer electronics device.
Johnson says that smart TV is not a product but rather a whole new category of TV.
High-profile partners in smart TV
Intel is off to a grand start in this brave new world, with recent high-profile announcements with partners Google, Sony, and Logitech. Logitech last month became the first company to unveil a device that uses Google TV, which is powered by the Intel Atom CE4100 processor . The Google TV platform allows users to surf the Internet and watch TV at the same time. Sony unveiled a few weeks ago its HDTV and Blu-Ray player, both equipped with Google TV and Intel’s CE4100.
Google TV melds the hundreds of channels available on pay television with the virtually unlimited content—video, games, and otherwise—available on the Internet. It runs on Google’s Android operating system and utilizes Google’s Chrome web browser. It uses picture-in-picture technology to display your search results on top of live TV, so you never need to switch between experiences.
Analyst Rob Enderle commented on Google TV to ComputerWorld, "In the right format and with the right usage model and customer experience, people could adopt this.” He added, "Folks probably won't be doing much browsing on their TV. But consuming Internet media? Certainly. Up until now it has been too difficult for most to do that.”
What smart TV is not (or shouldn’t be)
The message from analysts, reporters, and tech gurus could not be clearer: Do not make TVs into PCs.
"Do you want to live in a world where your Tivo says, ‘I'm terribly sorry, before you can see this next show, I have to defrag myself?’” asked Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell at a recent consumer press event.
“People don't want their televisions to turn into a computer. People actually love their televisions because it turns out they're nothing like computers.”
Bell, leader of Intel Labs’ Interaction and Experience Research group, is adamant that Intel’s smart TV push will work. This go around, she says, Intel really “gets it” because smart TV is really about the TV experience and not the Internet.
“If you just have the TV emulate the PC experience, then I think that approach will fail,” says Tim Bajarin, a research analyst and president of Creative Strategies, in PCMag. “On the other hand, if you turn the various Internet sites that might work on a big screen into channels, with viewing at the heart of the experience, and deliver an experience that consumers are used to on a big screen, then the chance of success is better.”
The concept of bringing the Internet to the TV set has been a hot topic for over a decade, adds Bajarin, but only now are we “starting to see products that deliver the promise in a way that consumers may actually find interesting.”
Learning what works, and doesn’t, is one of the hard-won lessons from our experience with Viiv, which was Intel’s platform initiative similar to Centrino and vPro that provided a collection of computer technologies with a combination of Intel ingredients to support a "media PC" concept.
What did we learn from Viiv?
“We failed with Viiv,” says Johnson. “We learned a lot of things, but the most important being we tried to turn the television into a computer.”
Gary Palangian, Google TV program manager in DHG, agrees that the Viiv approach was about putting a PC in the living room, while smart TV is about putting your Internet on the TV.
He points out, for example, that Viiv was powered by PC chips, while the CE4100 was designed specifically for consumer electronics, offering home theatre quality audio/video performance, signal processing, surround sound, and 3-D graphics.
Another key factor in our better grasp of what users want from smart TV came from an Intel research project led by Bell’s user experience group in DHG called “The Social Lives of Television.”
Intel Labs anthropologist Dr. Alex Zafiroglu, Johnson, and other anthropologists and ethnographers visited hundreds of people in their homes in India, the U.K., the U.S. and China to learn how they engaged with their TVs so that Intel could better understand what consumers actually wanted.
“When we started working on the concept four years ago, we figured the number-one thing people would want in the future is movies-on-demand,” explains Johnson.
“But our focus groups revealed that what people really wanted on their TVs was Internet access. People saw the Internet as a way they could get whatever they wanted on demand. Watching what they wanted, when they wanted it, and where they wanted was a profound and liberating experience.”
These findings were invaluable when Google approached Intel looking for hardware to run Google TV.
Why smart TV is a must-win for Intel
The consumer electronics market is “an essential part of Intel’s strategy to expand beyond the traditional computer segments and it represents a growth opportunity for our company and shareholders,” explains DHG leader Brad Daniels.
Whilst Intel CEO Paul Otellini points out that the smart TV segment is just getting started, he told an external audience in October, he’s bullish on its prospects. “TV is about to change more in the next year than it has in the last 50 through the seamless integration of the microprocessor and the Internet into our viewing experience,” Paul predicted.
And success in smart TV will help us in other adjacent markets. “Smart TV represents a great new category to grow our business,” says Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Conrad. “But it’s also a fantastic opportunity to extend our brand and associate Intel with exciting, innovative devices and services.”
What’s ahead for smart TV?
In addition to Google TV, our CE4100 is also in D-Link’s new Boxee Box. We’re also beginning work with several other smart TV players for product releases in the coming months in the U.S and in EMEA later in 2011.
“People are used to seeing Intel in the PC space and not the CE space,” says Kevin Patterson, ASMO campaign manager for smart TV in SMG. “It’s a big opportunity for Intel.”
Intel enjoys a competitive advantage in terms of hardware over the next few years, says Wilfred Martis, manager of retail consumer electronics in the Digital Home Group (DHG), and we have a “whole lot” of OEMs lined up to bring Google TV to the market early next year. But the competition isn’t standing still. As in the smartphone world, ARM-based SOCs will gain traction, and companies like Samsung are busy designing CE chips.
“In this smart TV space, we are ahead, the first to come to market,” points out Martis, “It’s ours to lose.”
“I don’t sleep anymore, that’s how exciting this is,” he adds. “It’s been a long time coming. We can now walk into stores and say, ‘We made that happen.’”
