The Interactive TV Promise

Has largely been a broken promise.  While the TV vendors and cable companies pondered how to make TV interactive, two very interactive devices found a way to get near the TV.  These devices are your handset and laptop. Broadband and wifi brought the laptop near the TV and even brought TV into the laptop.  Color screens, EDGE and 3G made the handset more like a TV.

This is what I was thinking of when I read Om Malik's article on the Slingcather.  The one step that's missing for the laptop to take over the TV is a connection from it to the TV.  I used to do this wih powerline home networking coupled with a $50 media player software on my Playstation.  Now large LCD TV's have VGA inputs that do the same, and I believe that is the way to make the TV truly interactive.  Plug your laptop to it and have your TV become your laptop.  One better may be a "internet-ready" TV with WiFi and a browser though the cumbersome remote (a poor man's keyboard) may kill it.  Innovation is needed there.

So this is what I will be looking for at the CES show next week.  Here are the questions on my mind:
- How many TV's are sold with VGA inputs?
- When are Internet ready TV's coming out, when will they hit volume?
- When will we see innovation (a la Hillcrest) in remote controls?

If there are good and credible answer to these questions, then we have the answer to how IPTV will come to our living rooms.  No need for carriers, no need for Set Top Boxes, no need for DSL lines coming to the living room, no need for specialized boxes of any sort.  Empowering the consumer is a key theme of the web 2.0.  It will certainly be a theme for the Living Room 2.0. 

Comments

[baris]

Forgot to mention one big thing. I should not be forgotten that the PS3 and the XBox 360 are another phenomenal way to make the TV experience interactive.

[Baris Aksoy]

UWB (wireless hdmi?) supposed to be the ultimate video connector among tv, dvd player, gaminc console, laptop etc. I don't think people would look for vga, s-video, etc. once UWB products hit the market.

I have doubts on attrativeness of internet ready TVs:

- Simple remote is a big challenge as you mentioned. Logitech, i.e. have some interesting universal remotes. Still not as easy as browsing on your laptop.

- Quality of videos you watch on internet are still very low, and will probably stay like that due to storage and bandwidth constraints. Content providers such as HDnet will probably push their content through Comcast's, AT$T's network, rather than internet.

- Young population increasingly multi-task i.e. listen music, chat and check out the latest cool video on PiknikTube.com. Hence, they'll prefer PC as the digital media platform, rather than TV.

I think that AOL made a good move with its acquisition of Truveo and AOL Video is the closest (any others ones out there?) to an online media portal.

Cheers.

[cem sertoglu]

I wonder if there will be a Sonos-like dedicated manager for all digital content managing different screens around the home?

[baris]

Baris,
I never thought wireless HDMI would be so needed until I got some consumer electronic goods that have HDMI jacks. It will be necessary, but is UWB fast enough for it?

I agree with your comment on the youth. Their TV is their laptop. Period.

Nice to have a domain expert like you comment on the blog :-)

[mark]

Baris,

If you found the answers to the questions you were looking for at CES, specifically:

- How many TV's are sold with VGA inputs?
- When are Internet ready TV's coming out, when will they hit volume?

Please let us know.

I spoke with most of the major TV manufacturers there and only a few of them would admit they either were selling Internet TVs today or were even developing them.

Maybe I was speaking to the wrong people (product managers). Some of the major manufacturers claimed they had no such product being developed - and that seemed a bit odd to me, especially since Toshiba announced early last year that they were going to start selling them 2Q06 in Japan.

In any case, we are working on the problem you outlined above.

-Mark

[baris]

Mark,
I didn't end up going to CES, went to macworld to see steve jobs instead.

I am looking for those numbers as well, when I know I will post it.

In the meantime, all the more power to you and wherever.tv

Check out my last post on this matter titles "Why Do You Want Interactive TV?