HDTV Almanac

Okay, I think that this finally is my last CES 2012 post, at least for now. Today, I want to tell you about a product that won an an International CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Award: TelyHD.

This is essentially a dedicated network media player that only has one application: Skype. It runs on Android, and connects to any display with an HDMI port. It accesses the Internet through your home network and high-speed broadband connection. (The higher your broadband speed, the better image you’ll get.) It has a number of features that set it apart from your run of the mill webcam, aside from the fact that you don’t need to hook it up to a computer.

It will alert you of an incoming call when you’re watching TV, so that you can switch to its input. It has a four-microphone array that should provide “beam steering” and better noise cancellation than a regular webcam, which is important in a living room setting. It also has a handy physical shutter that you can pull down over the lens so that you are sure that nobody can take a peek at you when you don’t want.

I haven’t tested the product, so I can’t speak to its performance, but it makes a lot of sense. Several of the major manufacturers have built Skype support into some of their Smart TVs, but I feel that they’ve missed a trick by not marketing this feature heavily to seniors. The TelyHD looks to be simple enough to operate (and fairly easy set up initially) that you don’t need to be very technical to make it work. I believe that one of the biggest undermarketed attractions for Skype is that it is a great way for grandparents to visit with grandchildren (and their parents). I don’t know if you’ve tried to hold a telephone conversation with a two- or three-year old lately, but it’s not a very productive medium for communication at that stage. With a video call, however, you get to see them playing even if their focus is not on your conversation. On a big screen TV, it can almost be like they’re in the room with you.

I think that the TelyHD is on the right track, making this a component feature rather than built-in. (The sets that have Skype “built-in” still require that you purchase extra-cost options to make it work.) That way you can move it to another set without having to buy it again. And I suspect that if they were to make a concerted effort to market the product to seniors, they could see a lot of them.

Let’s review the trends. Televisions are becoming more “connected” to all sorts of content. Subscription television services such as cable and satellite are being battered by “over-the-top” streaming video on the Internet. Everything is going wireless now that we’ve had a taste of untethered computing and communications thanks to our smartphones and tablets. And these smart screens are becoming the second and third windows onto our video entertainment environment.

And here comes an unlikely source of technological “glue” to pull all of this together: DLNA. That acronym that nobody can remember what it means (Digital Living Network Alliance) or exactly what it does may turn out to be a significant factor in home entertainment going forward. Up until now, DLNA technology has been a solution in search of a problem. Yes, it lets you access the photos and music that you have stored on one computer, and view them or listen to it on a different computer or device on your home network, using either a wired or wireless connection. It also lets you send a photo from your smartphone to your printer, but I don’t know anyone who actually does that.

But at CES 2012, the DLNA Premium Video platform was announced with the support of some heavy hitters in the industry: Comcast and Intel. The breakthrough here is that instead of making your content available to other devices on your network, this new technology lets any DLNA device on the network access outside content. Comcast demo’d a set-top box that can stream the cable company’s content to any supported screen in the house.

That’s huge. If DLNA can deliver on this promise, it means that the content provider (cable or satellite) does not have to learn how to support a variety of devices. If a device supports DLNA, then you will be able to access the content on it (or so we hope). It does not help the subscription services deliver their programming to subscribers away from their home (the goal of the TV Everywhere initiatives), but it does solve the need for consumers to be able to move throughout their home and take their entertainment with them. This could turn out to be a major factor in home entertainment in the future.

After last year’s disappearing act at CES 2011, Google TV came back strong at CES 2012. Google announced partnerships with major players including Sony, LG, VIZIO, and newcomer to the Smart TV market, Lenovo. (Logitech was conspicuously absent from the list.) Consumer demand for “over-the-top” streaming video over the Internet is growing by leaps and bounds, and Google is certainly in a position to manage and deliver the oceans of information required to track and access all the online video content that is available. Having the largest search engine and YouTube certainly helps their position.

It also helps to have some top tier brands in your corner. One of the most interesting announcements came from Sony. The company announced two new products with Google TV. The NSZ-GP9 Blu-ray player provides unprecedented connectivity. More surprising for me, however, was the NSZ-GS7 which is a network media player powered by Google TV. Now you can get a Sony that makes your existing dumb TV a Smart TV. (Or if you already have a Smart TV, it can make it smarter.) I take it as a strong sign that Sony feels that there is a market for a retrofit device such as this.

Now here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly: it’s still all about the remote. The press and analysts piled on when the original Google TV products came out, harping on the clunky QWERTY keyboards that were built into the remote. This generation is better, in that the remote has a touchpad to make mouse-like cursor control easier. The bad is that when you flip the remote over, there is the backlit QWERTY keyboard staring back at you. And the ugly is that no matter how you slice it, any remote that is large enough to hold a full keyboard is going to awkwardly large. I am reconciled to the fact that accessing streaming video on the Internet inevitably requires some text entry at some point, but I’m not convinced that having the keyboard with you at all times is necessarily the right answer.

I don’t know what the right answer is; it probably involves some combination of speech recognition, gesture or motion control, a keyboard, and a lot of intelligence the device to make good judgments about what I’m trying to find. But I’m encouraged that Google TV has lived to see another revision, and I expect that consumer interest in the platform will grow when these Sony products ship this summer.

No, I wasn’t at CES this year, but I followed the event closely and since a lot of companies thought I was going to attend, I got the usual flood of press releases and invitations. As a result, I’ve got sort of a 30,000 foot perspective on the show this year. While there was a lot of coverage about 3DTV and OLED technology and motion remote control in the television market, I’d say that the most significant advances were in the area of Smart TVs. More devices are getting more content from more sources, all so that you can watch more of what you want on your large screen television.

But buried deep within all the coverage of the sparkly, shiny things at CES this year was a story that I did not see get much attention. Here’s a quick video from Technicolor about their new M-GO technology that is due out later this year.

Why is this so important? Currently, video entertainment content is Balkanized. You have to go here to see the programming grid to find out what’s available on your subscription TV service, then go there to search through the available Hulu offerings. You then have to open a separate website or application to find out what you can watch on Netflix. I am convinced that the company that can provide a unified interface that makes it easier to find what you want to watch — and make good recommendations for choices when you don’t know what you want to watch — will become an enormous and powerful success in the home entertainment industry. It will have the power to make or break any content source as the traditional network broadcast distribution model continues to crumble.

I won’t go into all the details here, but Technicolor is uniquely positioned to be that company. And this new M-GO system could be a game-changing force in the industry. The significance is that some major players are already buying into the concept. Intel will include M-GO in its Ultrabook devices. Samsung will pre-load M-GO on Smart TVs and Blu-ray players, and it will be available on Galaxy tablets. VIZIO will preload M-GO on the connected televisions, tablets, Blu-ray players and network media players that use VIZIO Internet Apps.

Whether you are watching on your television, your tablet, or your smartphone, you will be able to use M-GO to find what you want to watch. I haven’t seen the product yet so I don’t know how well it will deliver on this promise, but I will be watching closely for its release later this year. This could change everything.

At CES 2012, Westinghouse Digital joined the ranks of manufacturers offering passive 3DTV technology, along with LG, Vizio, Panasonic, and Toshiba. The company announced that it plans to ship the 47″ W47S2TCD later this spring with a list price of $899, including four pairs of glasses. This means that this technology will now be available from one of the lower-priced brands on the market.

I don’t see this as the end of active 3D models, but I clearly expect consumers to move to passive 3D models. They now have a choice across a range of brands, features, and prices, and they are going to favor the less expensive (and no-maintenance) passive glasses over the shutter-glasses models. I don’t expect active 3DTV technology to disappear overnight, but I do expect the market share to trend rapidly in the passive 3DTV direction.

It should also be noted that this is not the first time that Westinghouse has announced this model, but I expect that it is much more likely to ship this time.

Jan 20, 2012: Correction — changed “Western Digital” to “Westinghouse Digital” in first line. Oops.

One of the most curious developments to come out of CES 2012 for the television industry was the announcement from DIRECTV and Samsung. The two companies are going to partner by building set-top box functionality into a line of Samsung Smart TVs. This becomes curiouser when you add the fact that Verizon and LG made a similar announcement.

The Samsung sets will connect to a DIRECTV DVR set-top box, so that they can access recordings and live programming directly without the need for a separate box. The LG sets will be able to access live programming on 26 channels, as well as a library of more than 10,000 video on demand titles.

So what’s the real benefit here? By adding some extra features to a smart television, LG and Samsung give you limited access to your subscription-TV service. In return, you get to eliminate the clutter of a set-top box and the extra monthly rental fee. But if that extra cost is just $6 a month, then you can probably save several times the $72 annual cost by getting an HDTV that isn’t as smart as these new ones (such as the set you may already have, which costs you nothing more if you don’t have to replace it). And you get full access to all the programming and all the interactive content that you’re paying for with your subscription.

Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great to make smarter sets that give me access to more content more easily (and sometimes at a lower cost). But I don’t understand paying more for a set that delivers less than I could get otherwise.

Okay, your wishes have been heard and the display gods are going to give you what you asked for. Just remember that when you get it, I told you so.

One of the big splashes at CES 2012 was the unveiling of Toshiba’s monster 55″ 3D HDTV, and to the breathless adoration of the technology press, it doesn’t require that you wear glasses to see the 3D images! But wait, it gets even better! This display has 4K by 2K resolution, which means that it is the equivalent of four 1080p panels tiled together. Amazing! And while the details were not announced, the expectation is that it may ship in the U.S. as soon as the second quarter of this year. If all this sounds like what you’ve been hoping for, then do us both a favor and stop reading right here.

I mean it. Don’t read the rest of this. I’m only going to break your heart.

Okay, here’s the rest of the story. The panel uses the same sort of nine-position lenticular technology that we’ve seen for a long time. Philips sold a commercial version of a 9-view no-glasses 3D high definition display nearly six years ago, which won a Gold Award from the Society for Information Display in 2006. The biggest technological news is that Toshiba has been able to use a 4K panel in the system, which is a good thing. The way the multi-view works, the image gets divided up among the viewers so this Toshiba HDTV delivers only a 720p image to each viewer when watching 3D. (You do get the full 4K resolution when viewing 2D content, but that’s just scaled up 1080p images because there is no source for 4K content yet.) Yes, the Toshiba set does have head-tracking for the center position, which means you can move around a little and the “sweet spot” will follow you, but the company recommends that you turn this off when watching with others present.

And here’s the big problem. When watching with others, you’ve got to sit in one of those nine sweet spots. That means that you have to adjust to the TV, instead of the other way around. Are you ready to rearrange your living room furniture so that everyone can see the 3D image? And don’t try to sit too close together, because it won’t work.

Now, the technology problems alone are probably enough to kill this product, but there’s one other factor that guarantees that it will flop in the marketplace. The set is selling in Japan now for $10,000. As Toshiba’s own VP Scott Ramirez has said repeatedly, there is no market for televisions above $2,5000. This new set may sell to rich enthusiasts and technology collectors, but it doesn’t stand a chance of becoming a mass market success when you can buy five or more sets that uses inexpensive passive glasses for the same price, and you may even get a Blu-ray player for each one in the bargain.

Toshiba gave people something to talk about at CES, but we’re still years away from a practical no-glasses 3DTV for the average living room. And I’m not yet convinced that we’ll every get there.

Brace yourself. According to a new report by Accenture, the number of consumers watching broadcast or cable TV in 2011 in an average week was just 48%. That number is down from 71% just two years earlier in 2009. (The survey includes an international sample, drawing data from the United States, France, Japan, China, and India.) What is driving the change? According to the same study, one third of the consumers watch video content on their personal computers, and one out of ten watch video content on smartphones.

Clearly, streaming video is one of the primary forces behind this change, but it also appears to signal a shift that I’ve been talking about for years. It seems that the traditional group activity of watching television is transforming into a solo activity done on a personal device. We’ve already seen this shift dominate the music business; how much time do you spend listening to music with other people, compared with the amount of time you spend listening through earphones?

This has some serious implications for the television industry. Are people going to stop putting a large screen in their living room or other central location? Accenture’s report indicates that this may be the trend. Only 20% of consumers indicated that they intend to buy an HDTV (of any size) in 2012, which is down from 25% last year. Yes, it’s likely that the market is fairly saturated at this point and the economy has people budgeting a bit tighter, but this is still a large drop.

We’ve already seen other research indicating that people are looking at their laptops, tablets, and smartphones at the same time that they are “watching” a large screen television. It remains to be seen whether this is just an infatuation with our connected gadgets or a true signal that we are privatizing our entertainment experiences, but it could be that these changes could have a profound effect on the consumer electronics market.

I write about lots of different technology stuff that I find interesting; please consider following me on Twitter: @AlfredPoor.

One of the most interesting stories to come out of CES 2012 is about a pair of technology demonstration displays that were tucked away in the Sony booth. Labeled “CrystalLED”, these 55″ HDTV panels were quite different from any other display that has been marketed as an “LED HDTV” in recent years. These panels actually were LED displays, using discrete, individual LED components for each sub-pixel in the 1080p display. That adds up to more than six million LEDs.

Reports from the show were that the image quality was excellent, and why shouldn’t it be? LEDs are emissive, so viewing angle should not be an issue, and they are mind-numbingly fast, so there should be no problem with image blur. LEDs have an extremely long lifetime (when was the last time you had an LED power indicator “burn out” on a piece of equipment?), so they should last forever, or at least well beyond the time when you’d want to replace it. The only problems that I can foresee are the challenge of “binning” the parts so that you get consistent color output from all two million LEDs of the same color, and the fact that some LEDs show color shift with changing temperatures.

Oh, and then there’s the problem of how do you actually build these suckers? A tip of the hat goes to my friend and colleague, Ken Werner, did some old-fashioned journalistic legwork for his “Display Daily” column for Insight Media. He cites a “reliable source” who indicated that each of the six million LED chips were individually wire-bonded to the electrodes. It is not immediately obvious how this sort of assembly could be automated at a speed and yield that would be economically feasible. In fact, the display industry is moving toward production processes that let you spray or print the display materials onto the substrates; a move to discrete LED components would seem to be a big step in the wrong direction.

So my best guess is that you should not bank your HDTV budget in hopes that Sony will be selling one of these LED displays any time soon (if ever).

Okay, before I get to my point, I have to stage a little hissy fit that is related to the topic. The topic is the news that Nuance has announced “Dragon TV” which will let future televisions understand your spoken command. And an enormous number of my colleagues in the technical press have written about this as a great advance in”voice recognition.” And it’s not. “Voice recognition” is the recognition of a specific voice, as in biometric security applications. When you try to dictate to a machine, the application is “speech recognition.” There’s a big difference, folks. Getting it wrong is just sloppy. Okay, I feel a little better now; let’s move on.

So Nuance announced “Dragon TV” which is a new interface platform that HDTV manufacturers can incorporate in their future television designs. The system recognizes spoken commands (not VOICES! — oops, sorry about that). The cool thing about this is not just that you can say channel numbers or channel names to switch, but it also becomes part of the search interface. You can speak the name of an actor, and it will seek out programming options where that actor appears.

From where I stand, this is far more important than any of the gesture interface announcements that came out of CES 2012. (Who wants to do aerobics just to change channels?) The key to the future of television programming is the ability to access the content that you want to watch, when you want to watch it. The rapid growth of “over the top” Internet streaming demonstrates how much American viewers want to break out of the confines of the traditional channel grid, but the big problem is how to access all that content. (This is something I know a little about, as I wrote a major industry overview report for GigaOM Pro on the subject.) The traditional remote control is not the answer, and as Logitech discovered the hard way, a QWERTY keyboard doesn’t go over too well in most living rooms these days. And trying to spell out T-O-M C-R-U-I-S-E by waving at the screen is probably a non-starter.

Speech recognition could be the answer. If it is going to work, nobody is in a better position to deliver on the promise than Nuance. The company’s history starts with Visioneer, a scanning company; it turns out that the same algorithms that help with optical character recognition (OCR) also work with speech recognition. It later acquired ScanSoft (which was a descendant of the famous Kurzweil Computer Products), which in turn goobled up many of the OCR and speech recognition companies of the day including Caere, Lernout & Hauspie, Philips, SpeechWorks, and Locus Dialog. After merging with Nuance in 2005, the company has continued to grow through acquisition, buying Dictaphone, Tegic, and more than a dozen other companies. As a result, Nuance is the repository of perhaps the most extensive collection of speech recognition technology.

I also suspect that lurking in some of those IP collections are some algorithms that can help identify meaning. This will be an essential component to success of any new television interface that tries to sort through the metadata for the universe of movies and TV shows and YouTube clips in order to find matches to recommend in response to a user query.

There are no Dragon TVs on the market yet, but this still could be one of the most significant developments for the HDTV market this year.