Smarter TV: Living Room as Digital Hub From Samsung and Microsoft to Apple and Google

By Tim Carmody

NEW YORK — Just forget about its giant screen for a moment.

Yes, that new plasma TV is gorgeous, that LED backlight efficient, and that refresh rate ridiculous. But in truth, just like smartphones and tablets, smart TVs are about platforms as much as pictures.

Today in New York, Samsung presented its updated line of smart TVs and related electronics, almost all of them available for sale now. The Korean electronics giant has too many new individual devices — from cameras that sync with your TV over Wi-Fi and smartphone speaker docks with honest-to-goodness vacuum tube amplifiers to tricked-out, touchpad-and-microphone-equipped remotes that are 85 to 90 percent of everything you want a smart TV remote to be — to give more than passing consideration here to each and every one of them. If you want to get started with that, Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston has a great rundown of what’s good and bad in all the new interface technologies for Samsung’s smart TVs here.

Instead, here’s my big takeaway from Samsung’s event — at least as I see it now, with an eye toward Apple’s definitely-an-iPad, most-probably-an-Apple-TV event on Wednesday.

In the future, the living room will replace the home office as most households’ home for the stationary personal computer. Instead of printers and mice and other corded accessories, networked appliances and post-PC machines share data with one another and with the cloud. Play and productivity both become decentered; gaming and entertainment might be on a tablet or a television, with recipes at the refrigerator, a shopping list for the smartphone, and an instructional video on the television set.

All of these experiences will be coherent, continuous and contextual. And like the personal computer at the height of Pax Wintel, the living room will be a platform characterized by triumphant pluralism.

“The thing about the living room is that it’s universal; everyone in the household uses it,” Samsung VP Eric Anderson told me at today’s event. “We know that we’re not going to capture every single member of the household. In my family, my wife and my daughter are Apple, me and my sons are Android,” he noted, pointing out that the majority of devices introduced today can interact with either mobile platform.

“The big question for us is what is the core of your household,” Anderson added. “What is the device of origin? Where do you start, and to where do you return? That’s why we look at the living room, the kitchen along with some mobile devices.” Here, no company can be a platform purist: “Every consumer electronics company is looking for a differentiator; maybe the differentiator here is the devices’ ability to work with anything.”

A short history of smart TVs

Samsung’s been manufacturing and selling smart TVs since 2008. Its sets have carried Yahoo’s widgets, Google TV, and now Samsung’s own app-driven “Smart Hub” software. In those four short years, the technology powering the TV, customers’ expectations, and entertainment companies’ willingness to embrace cloud-delivered, app-based over-the-top content have all changed.

Smartphones, tablets and media players all helped pave the way. Now, almost everyone can at least grok the concept of a smart TV. “You go to a typical family and explain to them that there are apps they can download and content they can purchase over the internet through their television, and they say: ‘I get it’,” Anderson says — even as many people, though, still buy TVs, even internet-capable smart TVs, for the screen — that is, to show TV, movie and gaming content through tried-and-true delivery methods.

But Anderson says that this is changing, even as the audience for smart TVs is growing. “In the last three months, our activation rate for the connected features on our smart TVs has gone from 55 to 63 percent,” he says. “For us, ‘activation’ means they get it home, connect it to Wi-Fi, estabish an account and pick some digital-only content.

“It takes a little doing — it’s a lot more difficult to activate a smart TV than a smartphone,” he adds. “But they are doing it, and they’re doing it because they know there’s valuable, familiar content waiting at the end, whether it’s Netflix, Hulu, the MLB network, or anything else.”

From early adopters to the early majority

At Tuesday’s event, Samsung President Tim Baxter pointed out that in 2008, the typical consumer took six months to decide which TV to buy; in 2012, the same typical consumer makes the same decision in just three months, even as she consults twice as many different retailers.

And 60 percent of all television shoppers now consider themselves early adopters. “We know that’s not the case,” Baxter says, “but it’s a mindset; it shows how open they are to new technology to solve problems.”

In 2010 or 2011, Anderson says, the main audience for smart TVs were true early adopters. Even then, the activation rate for the net-connected “smart TV” features was still only about 50 percent.

“Now we’re moving from the early adopters to the early majority,” Anderson says, a much bigger group with very different skill sets, “and adoption rates are still picking up. And our customers are increasingly telling us, and our analytics show, that they don’t just want to connect to the internet; they want to connect more of their devices to the TV, too.”

Entertainment catches up (and looks ahead)

Samsung’s smart TVs boast an exclusive partnership with HBO GO, the premium cable channel’s over-the-top (i.e., accessible separately from the cable box) digital play. Its new DVD and Blu-ray players also support Ultraviolet, the studio-backed partnership with Flixster that lets optical media owners access cloud-based digital versions of the same TV and movies on multiple platforms.

Both services an accommodation to the simple fact that audiences want digital content on multiple devices, Anderson says, preserving current revenue streams while keeping an eye on their future.

“HBO is building up a distribution platform for authenticated access that they can take beyond their relationships with the cable companies,” says Anderson. “In the next couple of years, HBO can turn around and say to the cable companies, 50 percent to 75 percent of our access is coming everywhere but a television set. That gives them a very powerful negotiating position, because those carriage contracts that are so vital to them right now won’t necessarily be essential in the future.”

The movie studios’ position, he says, is different, and offers much less leverage. Studios need the income from disc sales to finance new movies, so they have to keep that revenue stream as strong as long as possible.

What about other broadcast and cable TV networks? “I always tell people, ‘I’m not in the advertising business,’” Anderson says. “I make my money from selling these TVs. Google’s a great partner of ours, but some networks don’t want an intermediary selling ads or asking for a cut of the revenue. So we offer TV networks a way to go directly to consumers with an app. And that’s a very powerful model.”

The smarter TV: Tomorrow and beyond

The real trick for smart TVs today and tomorrow is editing down, whether it’s software or new experiments in interface and revenue. TVs don’t need tens of thousands of apps like smartphones or desktop computers might. And they have to accommodate the fact that even if people are buying and replacing their televisions faster than ever, their assumptions about watching television are still rooted in long familiarity.

After Anderson praises Microsoft’s approach with Xbox 360, opting for quality over quantity, and integrating features from gaming and chat to cinema and sports, I ask him where Samsung’s approach fits in with Apple’s, no matter what they may announce on Wednesday.

He pulled out a pen and a piece of paper. “There’s a continuum,” he said, drawing a line segment. “Over here [on the left], you have a set-top box, with a traditional UI and remote. And then over here [on the right], you have something that’s really radically different.

“Google, with the first attempt at Google TV, was probably too far over in that radical direction,” Anderson said. “Even the remotes they used — some people loved them — but they were probably too far away from most people’s comfort zone to really capture a big part of the marketplace.

“What we have to do is find a way to move back and forth between these two poles of experience, without breaking the connection between them. So our approach is more like a step function or staircase,” he said, drawing stairsteps from the left to the right. “We need to move between security and possibility. Because we want both. We need these people over here [on the right], to push the possibilities, to help us figure out where things are going, to create our next-generation platforms and beyond. But we also need to understand that we have to accomodate everyone’s expectations about how these devices work and where they can find their content. Both of these help move the market forward.”

Moving back and forth between comfort and the novel, the familiar and the future: That sounds like smarter TV to me — in no small part because it sounds like what TV has always been.

‘Dr. Doom’ Sees Iran-Israel Clash, Says Buy Precious Metals

Political risk in the Middle East has increased significantly with war between Iran and Israel almost inevitable, and precious metals and equities investments offer some safety, Swiss money manager and long-term bear Marc Faber said on Tuesday.

"Political risk was high six months ago and is higher now. I think sooner or later, the U.S. or Israel will strike Iran—it's almost inevitable," Faber, who publishes the widely read Gloom Boom and Doom Report, told Reuters on the sidelines of an investment conference.

Brent crude traded near $123 per barrel in volatile trade on Tuesday on fears of a disruption in Iranian supplies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed no signs of backing away from possible military action against Iran following a Monday meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama.

"Say war breaks out in the Middle East or anywhere else, (U.S. Federal Reserve chairman) Mr. Bernanke will just print even more money—they have no option... they haven't got the money to finance a war," said Faber.

"You have to be in precious metals and equities... most wars and most social unrest haven't destroyed corporations—they usually survive," he said.

He said that Middle East markets had largely bottomed out, though regime changes from the Arab Spring revolutions were unlikely to be investor-friendly.

Faber said that in uncertain times, investors had to reconcile themselves to volatility.

"If you can't live with volatility, stay in bed," he said, pointing out that even cash.

The 66 year-old, who has earned the moniker "Dr Doom", earlier told the conference that the likelihood of war in the Middle East was boosted by Western powers' imperatives of keeping China in check, given its dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

"The Americans and the western powers know very well they cannot contain China economically... but one way to contain China is to switch on and switch off the oil tap from the Middle East," he said.

"I happen to think the Middle East will go up in flames," he said.

Could Iran send oil to $440 a barrel?

by Business Insider

The scariest Iran scenario yet comes from Bob Bandos, CEO of marine logistics and services company GAC North America.

Bandos tells Pierre Bertrand of the International Business Times:

Tankers can haul 1.8 million barrels of oil a day through the strait. If that supply is choked off, the effect would be similar to the fuel shortages of the 1970s – but more extreme, Bandos said.

“That would be nothing compared to this,” Bandos said, who added the shortage would be global.

If the 1973 embargo experience repeats itself, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to $440 a barrel.

This scenario is more bearish than we’ve heard from most banks. Societe Generale, for instance, said oil could rise to $200 were the Strait closed.

Of course the $440 figure was picked up by the pro-Iranian Tehran Times (via @DougKass).

Cities blacked out for up to a year, $2 TRILLION of damage - with a 1 in 8 chance of solar 'megastorm' by 2014, experts explore the worst that could happen

* If earth is hit by the same force as the worst recorded solar storm in history, 1859's Carrington Event, it would be devastating

* Magnetic force could disrupt global communications and take out power sources, with huge financial consequences

* The sun is entering a two-year period of increased activity, with a peak due before 2014

By Martin Robinson and Rob Waugh

There is a one in eight chance of a solar 'megastorm' before 2014, according to a Californian scientist - and other space weather experts agree that Earth is facing a burst of violent activity that will peak within two years.

It's unknown what effects this could have on our planet - but scientists have analysed the worst recorded solar event in history, 1859's Carrington Event, and worked out what effects a similar event would have now.

In our connected, satellite-reliant electronic age, the effects would be devastating, they say, as it would disrupt global communications and take out power sources, and could cause up to $2 trillion of damage.

They fear the sun could now be entering a two year 'hurricane season' of solar storms, and the star flared violently on Valentine's Day this year.

'We live in a cyber cocoon enveloping the Earth. Imagine what the consequences might be,' Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics told National Geographic when asked about a potential 'megastorm'.

'Every time you purchase a gallon of gas with your credit card, that's a satellite transaction.

'Imagine large cities without power for a week, a month, or a year. The losses could be $1 to $2 trillion, and the effects could be felt for years.'

The sun has a storm cycle of around 12 years, known as a solar maximum, and as this period draws to a close it generally peaks with a series of intense storms.

The sun's last solar maximum was in 2000 so it should happen in the next year or two.

It could be these storms rival the infamous Carrington Event of more than 150 years ago, when telegraph stations caught fire and their networks suffered massive black-outs.

'The sun has an activity cycle, much like hurricane season. It's been hibernating for four or five years, not doing much of anything,' said Tom Bogdan, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

'Now the sun is waking up. The individual events could be very powerful.'

During the Carrington Event the northern lights were seen as far south as the Caribbean, while in America you could read a newspaper just from the light of the aurora.

Highly charged: Sun storms can have beautiful results, such as this aurora over Norway, but a gigantic flare could wreak havoc with our electrical systems

Pete Riley, a senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, California, says there 12 per cent chance of being struck by a solar megaflare.

'Even if it's off by a factor of two, that's a much larger number than I thought,' he told Gizmodo after publishing his estimate in Space Weather on February 23.

Low-intensity solar flares are quite common and can be readily seen in the form of auroras, light displays caused by the collision of charged particles with the Earth's atmosphere.

But the cost of a Carrington Event-type storm striking the planet could range anywhere from $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

'A longer-term outage would likely include, for example, disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services,' the NRC report said, it was reported on Gizmodo.

'It could also cause the breakdown of the distribution of water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration.'

Japan invents speech-jamming gun that silences people mid-sentence

TOKYO – Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people into silence.

Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer" gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away.

The device works by recording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a 0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes speakers to stutter before silencing them completely.

Describing the device in a research paper published Feb. 28 at arXiv.org, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."

They found that the device works better on people who were reading aloud than engaged in "spontaneous speech" and it cannot stop people making meaningless sounds, such as "ahhh," that are uttered over a long time period.

Kurihara and Tsukada suggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in public libraries or to silence people in group discussions who interrupt other people's speeches.

"There are still many cases in which the negative aspects of speech become a barrier to the peaceful resolution of conflicts," the authors said.