[opendtv] TVs getting smarter, with help of PC gang
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:05:50 -0400
I think this is an excellent article. Free of the
hype that usually that normally plagues this subject
matter.
Bert
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TVs getting smarter, with help of PC gang
=20
Mike Clendenin
(10/10/2005 9:00 AM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=3D171204087
Taipei, Taiwan - Taiwan's Acer Inc. is known for a lot of
things, but TV isn't one of them. The same could be said
of Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Yet these aspiring TV makers
are rolling out their vision of television's future - and
it doesn't include the dumb boxes sitting in most living
rooms today.
These are next-generation, "smart" sets, with enough
embedded intelligence to surf the Internet and wirelessly
tap into digital family albums and home movies stored on
the home PC. Some come preloaded with games and are able
to record TV shows. Clever stuff, indeed. But faster than
you can change the channel, people are already asking just
how smart the TV should be - and what higher-level
functions consumers will be willing to pay for.
As flat-panel TVs gain in popularity, and new entrants to
the market like HP, Dell and Acer vie for sales, it's
natural that TVs would start to look a little more like
PCs - a flip-flop of the trend toward adding more TV
functionality into the personal computer. PC makers hope
to use their IT expertise to ride the slowly building
momentum of the networked home, a place where nearly
every electronic device is connected and able to swap
photos, music, video and data.
In the era of TiVo, the possibilities of what the TV can
do have dramatically expanded. Now, system makers and IC
designers are trying to ride that thin line between what
can be done and what should be done to spruce up TVs while
not disturbing the laid-back experience of the average
couch potato.
"We feel strongly that the television can serve as the
center of a really elaborate home network in the future,"
said Tony Favia, senior product manager for LCD TVs at
Sharp Electronics Corp. "However, we also feel strongly
that if it is going to do so, it needs to have very
television-friendly features rather then PC-friendly
features."
Several months ago, Sharp, the leading LCD-TV maker,
rolled out the first smart sets, called Open Aquos.
Featuring dual PC Card slots to enable Wi-Fi
functionality, the 20-inch and 15-inch models can handle
photos, music and video, and record up to four hours of
TV programs. They also have a microphone for leaving
short messages.
But the two TVs have already been discontinued. Favia
said they were intended only as a trial balloon, and
hinted that Sharp will soon bring similar functionality
to some of its large-screen sizes, so users can surf
the Net for related information on sports, news and
movies.
"The people who are passionate about those types of
programs, generally speaking, would like to have as much
information as possible to augment the viewing of that
program, so we're keeping that in mind as we try to
figure out ways to deliver real-time information without
getting in the way of the program itself," Favia said.
"We don't want big windows popping up in front of the
picture."
A handful of IC companies say they are in talks with
customers about the future of smarter TVs. The early
feedback is that they shouldn't be too clever, just a
little less dumb. "They should never really be a full
PC. They have to fall short of that and remain in the
appliance area," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at
the Enderle Group. "If it gets a hard drive, or you are
loading applications or have to deal with patches, then
you have crossed the line."
With all the buzz about digital homes, it was logical to
integrate digital-media adapters into the TV, but not
much more may be needed. Samsung, for instance,
introduced a CRT with a 40-Gbyte hard drive in 2003, but
it hasn't really caught on. Yet some IC vendors are
getting a fair amount of requests about building in disk
drives. "I think it's risky," said Steve Tirado,
president of Silicon Image. "But some people are buying
into it."
Peter Rost, director of Hi-line TV at Micronas, said that
for the next couple of years, he doesn't see high-end
processors, wireless LANs and graphics ICs becoming part
of standard TVs because of the cost. "On the other hand,
what people do want to see is TV inside the PC," he said.
"That is a trend that is much more real."
Acer and Hewlett-Packard Co. declined to talk about the
future prospects of their smart TVs. Both platforms offer
wireless functionality, and the HP model will connect
users to video Web sites for direct downloads, a move
that would challenge the content-access monopolies of
cable and satellite operators.
The computer makers' entrance into the market is a hint
that the more-simplified system designs of the flat-panel
TV will push manufacturers to add nontraditional features
as a way to stand out.
"In the CRT world, a lot of them differentiated on design.
Some of those designs were pretty complex, made up of lots
of components," said Brad Zenger, vice president and
general manager of advanced media processors at
Pixelworks. "But in the flat-panel world, the number of
those components is dramatically reduced, and so their
ability to differentiate on that element of the TV is
reduced."
In addition to high-definition programming, the transition
to two-way cable cards is another factor that may fuel
further smarts in TVs. Currently, set-top boxes handle
signal decryption for conditional-access systems. But
during the next few years, plug-and-play PCMCIA cards will
take on that role - assuming Federal Communications
Commission mandates are met - and that could open the door
to porting more set-top-box functionality into the
television.
"To run some of these applications that cable operators
will be providing over the next few years - including
their interactive program guides and applications written
in Java - they need to have more horsepower in the TV,"
said Stephen Goldstein, senior business development
manager at Samsung Electronics America. "But it's going
to be an incremental approach. If anything, what cell
phones taught us is that sometimes very simple
applications that aren't very CPU-intensive can be very
popular."
Samsung recently introduced a two-way cable-card-ready
rear-projection TV that supports the OpenCable
Application Platform. Like Europe's Multimedia Home
Platform, Ocap is a standardized middleware development
platform that enables those building interactive TV
services and applications to design products that run
successfully on any cable system in North America,
according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
Ocap could bring a host of new applications to the TV.
Yet TV makers are being cautious, in part because the
Multimedia Home Platform never really caught on with
European consumers. "Consumers need to be convinced
about why they should invest in premium TVs compatible
with future applications, and neither MHP nor Ocap has
been extremely successful yet," said Micronas' Rost.
Samsung doesn't see significant numbers of Ocap-enabled
TVs, and cable operator services tailored for them,
until 2007. That's also the time when the FCC is likely
to mandate two-way, Ocap-enabled cable cards - a key
differentiator between Ocap and MHP. Goldstein of
Samsung said it's difficult to predict what kind of
applications could make smarter, Ocap-enabled TVs a
success, but added that at least the TV platform will
have the inherent intelligence to run more-complex
applications if a robust developer community emerges
around the standard.
"There is considerably more memory and in excess of 400
Mips of processing power, so this is not your everyday
TV," Goldstein said of Samsung's recent release. "I'm
not saying that all of a sudden we are going to have
thousands of new applications or developers, but this
is a step in the right direction. People have
traditionally sat out of cable industry application
development because it is very time-consuming to
develop a number of iterations of the software for each
of the different headend architectures that are deployed
around the U.S."
Micronas' Rost said to look for more test balloons of
smarter TVs in the near future as digital TV and
Internet-based video become more popular. "We are in
talks with customers about next year's models and even
models that are five years out," he said. "So we are
definitely including all these features - like Ethernet
on the chip, or higher CPU performance and graphics
capabilities - to support all these browsing and
interactive things." Still, he predicted that these
features will be slow to hit the mainstream.
"TVs are going to get incredibly smart, and some of
them already are," said Jon Peddie, principal analyst at
Jon Peddie Research. "As Moore Law's marches along,
you'll see the first wave of them at the high end this
year, and then next year you will see a whole bunch of
them as the prices come down."
All material on this site Copyright 2005 CMP Media LLC.
All rights reserved.
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