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.