Submitted by Panasonic Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS are optimized for HTML5 to provide strong performance of Web apps and come with a new intuitive and customizable user interface which allows quick access to favorite channels, apps, websites and content on other devices. Through Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs, developers can leverage the flexibility of the Web to create customized and innovative apps and experiences across connected devices.
Great news for Mozilla, of course, but I honestly wonder about the longevity of the smart TV. Much like the smartwatch, it feels like whole lot of forced hype with little to show for itself.
Well, I think smartwatches will eventually be useful – it’ll just take time until the tech is good enough, and until the UI conventions are figured out. That will happen eventually, however, these things really only happen through an iterative process that starts with not-so-useful models.
Smart TVs on the other hand, I think will go the way of the dodo. There’s no practical reason why it is better to integrate rapidly moving software and hardware tech into a TV, when it is just way more practical to have a powered HDMI port that you plug a tiny computer into.
I agree and disagree with you. The problem I see with the current crop of Smart TVs is that you cannot upgrade the individual applications (at least, my roommate’s LG SmartTV wasn’t upgradable). Once the manufacturers figure out that all you really need to do is allow for apps to be installed/removed/upgraded they’ll be more successful. Something like Android/iOS/Windows(?) for your TV, you install what you want from a market and call it a day. TVs have always been shipped with built-in tuners, and those are very convenient, no reason to think that a built-in “internet tuner” won’t be either.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that hardware manufacturers are either clueless or do not care about the software. I see Smart TVs as one of those markets lacking a well funded and marketed OS vendor.
But it’s not just the apps that need to be upgradeable. Any OS will need to be patched for security, etc., and should be upgraded as new features become available. If the smartphone market is any indicator, this will not go well.
And that doesn’t even address the issues of 1) choice of OS, and 2) hardware upgrades. The display panel should outlast the “smart” parts of the system by a long way. As Drumhellar said above: “There’s no practical reason why it is better to integrate rapidly moving software and hardware tech into a TV, when it is just way more practical to have a powered HDMI port that you plug a tiny computer into.”
There’s just something hilarious to me about somebody’s TV being hacked and used to send fake penis enlargement spam emails
It’s simpler than that. Why allow you to upgrade your apps and/or os when they want you to buy a new tv? Same problem we have with a lot of Android OEMs.
darknexus,
Alas this is the problem, I can see tons of merit with *open* smart TV’s, it would spur tons of innovation. But as long as they remain closed and dependent on the manufacturer to decide what you’re allowed to do with it, then that’s just lousy for consumers.
I can’t speak to the other smart TVs but Samsung’s do allow downloading from their catalog of apps. I currently run Netflix, Viki and Crunchyroll through there. Updates for the apps do get pushed out occasionally as well, though I suspect that they are back burner projects for these companies.
Well, as time passes, hardware requirements of software increase. TVs generally last quite a number of years – far longer than the embedded hardware remains current enough for new apps. Samsung has a SmartTV that is upgradable, but the hardware you get costs quite a premium.
With the HDMI plug-in, you can upgrade any TV – it will become a question of, why buy a non-upgradable SmartTV, or a SmartTV that only allows proprietary upgrades, when the competitor is selling a regular TV, and including a $100-off coupon for an Android-based HDMI stick?
Well, those external sticks aren’t exactly integrated with the TVs themselves; you can’t power up or down the TV with them, you can’t control which input the TV uses, unless the stick has its own tuners you can’t watch live TV and so on and so forth. It’s just a small computer plugged to the TV, with all the limitations of one and that makes it clunky.
Now, it’d be a wholly different matter if the manufacturers instead came up with a proper standard for replaceable “smarts” that actually had access to the TV’s internals and could power it up and down and change inputs and control the tuners, including getting the raw signal for recording – needs (though you’d need a higher-bandwidth, bi-directional bus to connect through then)
My cinema display does not have a power button, it goes on and off when I connect my laptop. There is no reason why a TV/display could not be like that, right? No ‘smarts’ are really needed here, it just needs to turn and and off in response a signal on an HDMI port.
I would also argue that, in an ideal world, the display would be totally ‘dumb’, without a tuner or other technology and an external ( upgradable, replaceable ) box would be used for anything else.
Edited 2015-05-16 13:35 UTC
Then the box would have to be the one with all the HDMI-connectors, antenna/cable-connectors and everything else, meaning it’d suddenly be a lot bigger than just a stick you plug into a free HDMI-port. And a lot more expensive to replace, too.
WereCatf,
Exactly! Simply put, smart TV’s allow us to look beyond the extremely basic level of integration offered by HDMI ports. Opponents will claim that the smarts can just be added outside the TV, which is true but this still fails to address the fundamental lack of integration between devices so long as we limit them to being dumb HDMI peripherals.
I’ve gone into lots of detail about the benefits that open smart TVs could bring in other posts. Hint: it’s more about opportunities for better integration than than bleeding edge graphics. Even our high end external boxes are being held back and could benefit from open smart tv standards, we just need to be open minded.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?595321
http://www.osnews.com/thread?580314
While a new spec would be great, there’s a lot of stuff in the spec for HDMI that allows most of those features – changing inputs, powering on, etc. Those are contained within the CEC part of the spec.
The only real feature missing is being able to integrate streams from other sources into whatever the SmartTV is doing. Necessary features to allow this could probably be added to HDMI in the future.
Actually, Thunderbolt would be really useful for this as well.
For whatever reason, when I cast a video or webpage, my Chromecast does indeed power up the Magnavox TV (if it’s off), and switch to the Chromecast’s HDMI input. The first time it did this, I did a double-take, but it’s perfectly repeatable. I’ve never investigated how this works.
Sadly, the Roku 3 and Firestick do NOT do this – just the Chromecast.
In any event, I might consider a smart TV if it could run the huge catalog of Roku apps. Virtually all of our TV use, including the Tablo DVR, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime Video, is via Roku apps now. Very nice product IMHO.
HDMI CEC commands.
There is nothing special about your TV’s infrared sensor (=where the infrared beams of your remote control go to). The same “turn on” signal the infrared sensor fires can also be fired by the HDMI port (and theoretically by every other port). It’s just that the HDMI dudes were the first ones to think of actually standardizing this (and even they didn’t put it in the 1.0 version of HDMI).
Edited 2015-05-17 23:48 UTC
The problem is the typical TV is kept for 5+ years…look at what Android was like 5 years ago and the hardware it was running on…yuck, 1.6 running on some 400Mhz with 256MB of RAM? That’s just nasty. Now imagine trying to run modern apps on that.
The problem with integrating smartphone style apps into TVs is that the tech hasn’t stopped evolving yet they are trying to treat it like the old days when they integrated DVD players into TV. That just isn’t gonna work until both the hardware and software mature to the point that a unit released today will have enough horsepower to run apps released 3-5 years from now.
bassbeast,
Well, it depends entirely on the intention/scope of smarttv apps, which of course is a discussion onto itself. But in my own opinion a smart TV would not face this “horsepower problem” if it’s used to complement rather than replace cutting edge equipment. So for example, it should be exceptionally good at integrating with & streaming content from external sources (like cameras/computers/NAS/gaming consoles/teleconfrencing/internet/etc).
Maybe HDMI partly gets us there, but it falls short because some inherent limitations:
With a dumb HDMI protocol, you have the ability to select between full screen input sources, but that’s it. Standard HDMI devices can’t meaningfully work together. Having ubiquitous smart standards would go a long way in improving device integration and making the user experience less jarring. Perhaps I’m being too optimistic, but you have no idea how many times my parents have fought with their entertainment system because all the components have no less than 3 independent volume controls on different devices, all of which are designed to be master with no regards to other devices in the system – the lack of integration is an impediment to a better user experience.
Another problem with HDMI is that it is non-routable. We’re stuck with a physically fixed topology instead of a virtual network topology, and that’s rather quaint for the upcoming era for the internet of things. We frequently find that modern homes have multiple TVs, but realistically many of them are forced to limit certain use cases to specific TVs because it’s unpleasant to physically move HDMI devices around the house and it’s too expensive to buy duplicate ones for every TV. It would be much more ideal for consumers to place the systems wherever they please and then connect to them using any smart TV in the house.
Can this smart functionality be pushed back into an external smart HDMI adapter like a chromecast? Yes of course it can, people will do this and there’s no reason to deny them this choice. However so long as the standard path for delivering content from sources remains stuck with dumb old HDMI, then those smart HDMI adapters will only ever be able to provide a seamless experience for content that originates through them. When you play your xbox or watch cable TV using separate HDMI port on your dumb tv, you end up switching away from your smart adapter and reverting to a dumb state of affairs without even the ability to do basic event notifications. Maybe this is acceptable for early adapters in the short term, but in the long term I really am hoping for open smarttv standards to allow for something better.
Edited 2015-05-17 07:55 UTC
I do think smart ‘displays’ in general have a future, but I don’t think they’ll always be called ‘TVs’. Computer-level components are getting dirt-cheap now, and I think we’ll just see the TVs morph into massive touch computers bundled with bluetooth remotes. Just like the Xbox One, even though they’ll be full computers onto themselves – they’ll just handle external inputs, too. Or serve as thin-clients over the network to your more powerful computer – wherever it is.
It’ll be just like the crop of all-in-ones only thinner, more easily wall-mounted, VESA compatible, and having HDMI inputs. Heck, even some Chrome all-in-ones have HDMI input. It makes sense that eventually it’ll all be in one section at your local electronics store, just like tablets and phones are now. The only question will be ‘dumb display’ vs ‘smart display’.
I doubt we’ll even notice the day when you buy what would have been called a ‘TV’ and put it on your office desk, especially with OSs beginning to converge the way they are.
I did see LG has released at least one TV with WebOS on it, didn’t get much of a chance to play with it, but it looked sweet. This is where the ‘Smart TV’ should go.
With respect, I think you’ve missed the point with smart TV’s. They for the most part aren’t useful to us and certainly aren’t going away. SmartTV’s are a mechanism to poke more product under our noses by manufacturers who want them to continue to generate revenue.
Take my Samsung Series-6 TV as an example. There’s been 4 major O/S upgrades since we bought it. Now.. every time we turn it on, it’s at the “buy this movie!” advert. You have to navigate across their advertising when ever I want to browse files on usb key or an app to get to iView or SBS on demand. They’re not silly.
It’s a revenue generation scheme.
Now I’m looking into solutions to turn it into a dumb display device and ignore the ‘smarts’.
These things are definitely not going away, they’re too useful to companies. We’re irrelevant on that topic.
Smart tvs are a gimmick thats nothing more than another way for companies to intrude on your privacy and monitor what you say/do. So far they scan your lan & usb devices, log filenames, record what you say and upload those recordings to servers, log what you watch, bla bla..
NO THANKS.
A TV should just be a big dumb monitor with a completely seperate tuner.
I’d like to go the opposite route and have a “dumb” TV i.e. more like a monitor, but 50″+ and not stupidly priced like monitors of that size (if they even exist) would be. So this would mean:
Loads of HDMI ports (4 or 5 would be nice).
No built-in TV tuner.
No built-in sound.
Not curved 🙂
This way, the set itself won’t become obsolete – if I want to change the tech, I just plug another external HDMI device in or a different external sound system. I have a couple of smart TVs and after 2 weeks of playing with the smart features, I found they were very controlled/limited compared to what I could do with external devices.
Also remember that smart TV manufacturers tend to bring out new models at least annually and then dump support for models more than 2 years old. You’d want to keep a big TV for at least 5 years (which is why buying from John Lewis in the UK is a good idea – all their sets have a 5 year warranty), so you’re left with a tech dodo for 3 of those 5 years…
And this is exactly what no manufacturer actually wants, they want you to buy a new tv _more_ often, not less often
rklrkl,
I agree with you, being locked in to the manufacturer’s whim’s sucks. I’d even say that 5 years isn’t enough, it should be usable and upgradable until *I* decide to replace it. This is why it’s so important the technology be open and unrestricted by manufacturers. Promoting a healthy DIY community with open hardware leads to better long term support, allows older hardware to support more newer features, give consumers more choices, etc.
Just look at what the third party community has done with DD-WRT for example. They are able to offer extremely sophisticated features on very modest hardware, well beyond what the manufacturers provide themselves. The same could be true of smart tvs – as long as they’re not locked down!
Alas, I am forced to concede this is the primary obstacle to my vision of smart tvs. Many manufactures will want to restrict consumer freedoms by locking down the TVs to their stores, much like roku, which is probably the most locked down smart TV platform on the market today. If this is the ultimate destiny of smart TVs, then I side with naysayers who say “keep this junk out of my tv”. However to the extent that I believe that smart tvs are inevitably going to happen one way or another due to dropping marginal costs and the need to better support streaming services, then I’d rather strongly advocate for open smart tvs today than none at all and ultimately getting stuck with closed proprietary platforms.
So many “Smart TVs”, none of them can record from free-to-air DTV (digital TV).
My DTV receiver is a plain box built around the Mstar chip (motto: “the world’s dumbest DVB-T chip”) and can record from DVB-T to USB disks just fine. And can also play MP4, MOV and MKV (with AC3 downmix) as well as MP3 and AAC.
Current Smart TV OSes is a typical case of a Americans designing a product for Americans only, and then wondering why it sells well only in the USA (Smart TVs will sell in the USA). See, in the rest of the world, people get a significant part of their content from FTA, so your TV isn’t so “smart” if it can’t record from it. Instead, Americans get most of their content from cable (and record with a proprietary box), so none of the dudes responsible for Android TV or Firefox OS bothered to build a record from DTV function.
Edited 2015-05-17 19:26 UTC