Monday November 7, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin
Most high-end TVs have an Ethernet port for access to online content. But does that make them “smart?” As I see it, there are five components for TV manufacturers to cover to successfully conquer the evolving digital TV business:
• Hardware
• Software
• Content
• Search
Let’s use the rumored Apple television that could go on sale as soon as the 2012 holiday season or, according to a flurry of more recent reports, 2013 as our example.
Hardware-wise, guessing what an Apple television would look and act like physically and technically is as difficult as predicting who's going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2012 – it'd be a giant iMac with all the appropriate media slot and external connections.
On the software side, any well-designed smart TV will have a stable operating system, easy access to storage (be it in hardware or in the cloud) a way to distribute content to other devices inside and outside the home, and a way for consumers to use a QWERTY keyboard (be it hard or soft or touch) to interact with the TV.
And, a programming guide will need a major makeover which will include search abilities presented in a unique way. Apple will presumably have a new EPG co-developed with Rovi (Apple signed a deal with about a year ago). This is what Google TV tried but failed (so far) to do.
And for the final interface trick – since we’re basically writing a wish list here – let’s have a voice activation application. Well, a bug free voice activation application.
That leaves content.
How do we watch?
The way in which viewers consume content has been evolving over the past dozen years as viewers time shift with DVRs, and watch TV shows and movies on their computers and through their streaming devices.
Now that we viewers have more freedom to cherry pick the programming we want to watch when and where we please, there is more pressure on pay TV and broadcast networks to provide more flexibility for viewers. There’s also more pressure for them to make it easier for us to source programming from multiple places. To do that we’ll need an intuitive and well-designed program guide so that current channel-centric TV search capabilities, which are like looking for a person's name in a phone book arranged only by address, are a thing of the past.
In order to keep customers, pay TV providers will have to accommodate new ways of viewing, sourcing and displaying content. That will probably mean a little less content bundling and a little more à la carte action.
The iPad Effect
And content providers (and some pay TV providers) seem willing to give a little more à la carte a try.
The red-hot tablet market (mostly iPad) has every content provider rushing to create an app filled with its programs. And, of course, there are already a variety of programming sources that deliver à la carte programs from the Internet -- Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes. Perhaps traditional distributors of programming finally realize the à la carte programming future is tailgating them.
The combination of a thoroughly well designed smart TV (we’re not there yet), seamless programming guides across multiple programming sources, and wireless access of programming by multiple devices could usher in new business models and a whole new definition of what it means to “watch TV.”
