Vizio, the successful American TV maker, has created a very interesting solution to the smart TV problem. Instead of building yet another smart TV platform or using Android TV, the company has worked very closely with Google these past two years to integrate Chromecast – renamed today to just Google Cast – right into the TV. Vizio then ships a pretty good Android tablet alongside their TV, with all the Google Cast stuff you already know from Chromecast built right in.
The company’s solution is the Vizio Tablet Remote, which isn’t a remote at all: it’s a six-inch tablet running stock Android Lollipop on an eight-core Snapdragon processor with a very nice 1080p screen, a soft-touch back, dual speakers, and a wireless charging cradle. It lacks any dedicated buttons to control the TV – it only turns into a “remote” when you open Vizio’s new SmartCast app or kick off a streaming session from another app that supports Cast, like Hulu or Netflix.
But you don’t have to cast anything to the TV at all – after all, it’s just an Android tablet. You can go ahead and watch Netflix on the Smart Remote if you want. You can download apps from the Play Store. You can cast Netflix to the TV and use the tablet to check Twitter. You can let a kid play games on the tablet and control the entire TV with the SmartCast app on your iPhone. The tablet is basically another small TV.
This is exactly what a smart TV should be. I have a Chromecast – the current hockey puck model – and it’s probably one of the best technology products I’ve ever owned. It’s so simple and elegant, and it just works. Now that I have it, I can’t imagine ever having gone without it. Instead of shoving yet another ugly box underneath my TV or learning and installing apps on yet another platform, I can just use the damn phone in my pocket. Why would I want it any other way?
Vizio and Google have been smart about this whole thing too. The Google Cast portion of the TV is isolated from everything else, and updates comes straight from Google, so it’s always up to date and in line with any other Google Cast device.
The big upsaide for both Vizio and consumers? They don’t have to worry at all about getting deals with content creators and owners.
But by dropping any desire to put apps on the TV itself, Vizio completely sidesteps the platform war entirely. Every app in the Android and the iOS app stores that supports Google Cast is a P-Series app. And iOS and Android apps are the apps developers care about most, so they’re often the best apps from a given service.
That means when Netflix and Hulu update their Android and iOS apps, they’re also updating the P-Series experience. Vizio doesn’t need to beg HBO and ESPN to support its TVs anymore, because they already support Google Cast – and thus the P-Series. There’s no NFL Sunday Ticket app for the Apple TV, but the iOS and Android apps support Cast, so P-Series owners can pay to stream football.
Brilliant, and the future of smart TVs. These silly anachronistic glorified settop boxes like Android TV and the Apple TV? They are relics, old-world thinking. A TV should be a dumb screen ready to receive input from my phone or tablet, and Vizio built just that.
All they need to do now is ship to Europe.
Maybe I’m a bit too nerdy, but why a TV at all?
Since I dumped my TV and for a PC with a big monitor I never looked back.
My only investment besides this setup was a bluray drive and a DVDfab-license.
Agreed!
Just give us monitors 48″+ and we are all happy…
Cause I can sit down with friends or family and watch something, be it TV, netflix, or a DVD. I can also play a couple of games on an Xbox or PS. I can also be doing another activity in my house, like ironing my clothes for the next week, and still be able to watch something at a decent size. All the computer monitors that allow me to do that last one I find are too big for day to day use. Alos, My parents aren’t that old yet but even now they don’t use the computer outside of doing some work. If they’re watching anything it’s on a TV which is at the centre of their living room and with it’s atached chromecast allows them to consume almost all forms of media.
What I am trying to say is that as TV’s and the room they sit in are often a common area for multi-occupant houses. As such they are often larger than computer screens, sometimes to the point of being cheaper per square inch, and have more input ports. Additionally, computers tend to be more personal and individual these days, thus both not being the common point of social interaction that a TV would be and also generating a preference for a screen that is decent sized but not huge. 13-15 inches diagonal is the sweet spot for laptops and 20-26 inches the sweet spot for desktop monitors. This compares to an average of 38 inches for TV’s.
The company’s solution is the Vizio Tablet Remote, which isn’t a remote at all: it’s a six-inch tablet running stock Android Lollipop on an eight-core Snapdragon processor with a very nice 1080p screen, a soft-touch back, dual speakers, and a wireless charging cradle.
Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but the remote for my TV is about 5 inch long, 2 and half inch wide and functions very well.
WTF is this monstrosity? What’s next, a light bulb that has 12 core CPU’s and a thousand GB of DDR4 to give you one candle power output?
The world has gone nuts!
Me, I find the whole idea of using a small touchscreen display to browse what I want to watch, or to control playback or whatever, rather clunky and stupid and definitely not as awesome as Thom does — the back-and-forth between the big and small display is one thing that annoys me, the second is that you can’t just grab the touchscreen with one hand and pause/unpause/adjust volume/whatever without looking at it.
Me, if I were going to watch something on the big screen I’d want to do the browsing on it too, not fiddle with a fucking phone or tablet to do the browsing.
We recently entered the 21st century as it applies to televisions, and upgraded from a 4:3 CRT TV to a 4K Vizio screen. To complement it, we replaced our Roku with a Nvidia Shield TV. At first I wasn’t happy about the lack of a hardware keyboard on the remotes (we opted for the basic remote and the game pad), but then I discovered how powerful and precise the voice control was. It’s a huge leap over Google Now, Siri, and Cortana as far as intelligent voice recognition goes. In fact, I’m wondering why my phone can’t understand me as accurately as my set top box does. So far it hasn’t missed a single word from me or my wife, while our phones are so frustrating that we stopped using their voice recognition long ago.
Beyond that, the Shield is everything we could want from a set top box, and is certainly better than the built in “smart” features of the TV itself. Chromecast works, of course, but beyond that it supports every device we own that has some sort of “casting” service. Most regular Android apps can be sideloaded and generally work great, especially console emulators. The price of the device is the only real down side, and even that is acceptable when you consider that it’s Android TV, Chromecast, and a gaming console all in one.
And to Thom: I’m not sure why you consider this new TV to be a “dumb screen” if it has a Chromecast receiver built in. That is the very definition of a smart TV (it runs software on a specialized processor that allows you to view content without attaching a set top box). What happens when the built in Chromecast dies, or when it simply becomes obsolete from a hardware standpoint? Hopefully it will still allow you to use standard inputs to attach a new box, otherwise it will suffer the same fate as the old TV/VCR/DVD combos of last century, and become worthless once the built in box dies.
It’s great as a Kodi-box, too. Or for using Plex with, if one likes that more. And it being a separate device instead of being built-in to the TV is a big bonus.
Agreed. I’ll take boxes over built-in features any day, especially for something that’ll likely never receive any security updates whatsoever. We’ll see how Visio does.
Please read the article before commenting. It specifically states that the Google Cast software will be directly updated by Google, and thus, it will receive the same updates as any other external Cast device (such as the Chromecast).
What the article states, and what actually happens, is another matter. Take the Google Play Edition devices, other than Nexus as an example. The same things were stated there. Talk is cheap. I want to know about results before I believe a word coming out of Google these days.
That does not apply here. Do you have a Chromecast dongle? I do. Whenever there is an update from Google, it silently downloads the update and then apply it upon the next “boot” (as in, next time you turn on the TV as mine is charged by the TV USB port). No middle man, no OEM manufacturer, nothing gets in the way here.
And the Chromecast is an unbelievably useful device! It completely changed the way we consume online media here in this household. People keep telling about the content providers that have native support for Chromecast but keep forgetting that as a Miracast device, it can stream anything that can be streamed on a web browser such as those, erm, websites with “bootleg” copies of anime, TV shows and what not.
Also it should be mentioned that popular streaming software such as Popcorn Time CE also has the ability to stream to Chromecast.
And using the Videostream extension, we can even stream local/offline content from our fileserver here such as torrents of movies and TV shows, downloaded anime that is not available to stream anywhere, our own personal family footage among other things.
Frankly, it surprises me that it took this long for a TV manufacturer to arrive to the conclusion that a built-in Chromecast was such a good idea!
Edited 2016-03-23 15:44 UTC
My worry is more along the lines of hardware failure and forward compatibility. What do you do if the built-in Chromecast CPU fries? Or when Google decides they no longer support their software on that platform, or the SoC vendor drops support for that chip? Regarding the latter, before you say “that will never happen”, look up TI’s OMAP platform and Android. TI pulled the plug, forcing Google to cease development for that product line long before they planned to.
We decided on a 4K TV at nearly 180% the cost of the same size 1080p unit, so we’d have forward compatibility with the future of 4K set top boxes (which the Shield pulls off beautifully today). When the day comes that there’s a better box, we can spend ~$200 to replace the box, rather than another ~$900 to replace the whole damn TV.
Morgan,
The way I see it, you’d always have the option to add an external box, you haven’t lost anything.
IMHO the smart tv just needs to be fast enough to handle streams from other sources (like an xbox, netflex, laptop, NAS server, home automation, etc), there isn’t much need for it to be rendering streams itself other than for it’s own UI. To me “smart tv” means “smart integration”, not power hungry gaming/graphics. Being able to render streams from the network opens up the door to tons of innovation potential that isn’t practical with physical HDMI connections. Obviously it needs to work as a standalone unit without asking google for permission to connect to it yourself!
If I had my way, I’d love a hacker friendly unit that lets users boot a community supported firmware off of an SD card. With routers, it’s remarkable how far ahead of the manufactures that 3rd party communities can be in terms of features and support. I have no doubt the same would be true here, innovation would flourish if it weren’t for device restrictions against owners. I’ll keep dreaming…
Edited 2016-03-25 11:39 UTC
This is true, however if the price difference between a TV with built in Chromecast and a TV without it is significantly more than the cost of an external box, it makes even less sense to buy the former.
And I get that for some people, having as few external devices as possible is a blessing. But it’s inevitable that you’ll have to connect something to the TV at some point, so why spend even more for a non-upgradeable module in the first place?
Morgan,
For now early adopters pay higher prices, but it will drop to no price differential at all (the “smart tv” components will be no more expensive than the “dumb tv” components) and they’ll stop making dumb tvs. The big question is what standards they’ll converge on.
As much as I want open vendor agnostic standards for interoperability and to make consumer lives easier, I’m not counting on it. Instead we’ll probably end up with a couple proprietary smart tv providers like google/roku.
I don’t know how the Vizio tablet experience works, but I have been using my 5.5″ smartphone as a remote control on my Roku for ages. There is convenience with being able to search for content directly using the Android keyboard as opposed to scrolling through a clunky on-screen keyboard using the arrow keys on a remote. Because it connects over Wifi, I don’t even have to be in the same room to control my TV, which is great if I walk away for a 30 second errand which ends up taking 15 minutes of my time, and I want to pause the television.
I’m not sure how the other TV devices work (Apple TV, Google/Android TV/Slingbox, etc), but it is pretty awesome to have this capability.
Also, while we’re on this subject, why can’t cars get rid of the cheap in-dash displays with crappy screens and interfaces and just have a place to connect any Android/iOS tablet?
Edited 2016-03-23 04:27 UTC
It’s a bit different, as you are likely to have your phone on you and in your pocket/case/whatever. How likely are you to happen to be carrying a 6-inch tablet around in your pocket when you feel like pausing a movie? Having the app option makes sense. Shipping a tablet though just doesn’t, especially when you consider that your remote is now going to need a lot of charging.
You don’t NEED the tablet Vizio ships with it. Any Android or iOS device will do.
Thom, I know this. What I’m saying is that using an app does make sense, but shipping a tablet as a remote control really doesn’t. It’ll need to be charged a good deal more than any standard remote, and having to move from one screen to the other just to browse for something isn’t necessarily what everyone wants even if they do want a smart tv. I guess I don’t see the point in shipping a tablet when it’s a poor substitute for a standard included remote, and anyone can get the app on their own devices anyway.
It also comes with a more traditional remote
.
They also include a separate, small remote for power, volume, and channel changing. If you just want to use it as a TV, you can.
Good luck. Sunday Ticket support for Chromecast was laughable.
Not able to get it to work at all. It completely studders on both my Nexus Player and Chromecast.
Meanwhile on the same network it would play directly on our phones, tablets or computers… so it wasn’t our network.
DirectTV’s Sunday Ticket streaming has been terrible for the past 2 years. We usually wind up streaming from some Kodi plugin. Embarrassing how the pirates are better at streaming live events than DirectTV.
Edited 2016-03-23 00:52 UTC
Are you saying that sunday tv in general sucks streaming, or the the google casting part sucks? It would seem to me that if it sucks in general, then its really unknown how good or bad the chrome caset part is.
I have a Chromecast and I love it. Still I have second thoughts. Let’s face it: Google decides what I can cast on it through their app store. I would rather not want them to control my TV.
Ideally I would want some WiFi enabled standard hardware that allows whatever firmware the owner chooses to install.
ThomasFuhringer,
I so want technology to be open and free (as in freedom), that’s my tech utopia. Pretty soon this whole concept of open technology will seem irrational to a generation who will never have experienced it for themselves. “Of course it’s connected to google, how else do I get to my files?”
We all know that Google (sorry Alphabet soup) comes up with lots of good ideas. some stick around for a long time but others have a very limited shelf life.
Hardly a week goes by without some news of a Google service being discontinued.
I’d have a lot of doubts about the longevity of Google cast. The TV Makers and Broadcasters would like nothing more than to make this (and others like Apple TV) a thing of the past.
Just my 2p worth(less) on the subject.
I find this very interesting because google may have found a way around the smart-tv phobia, all while managing to sneak their smart TV platform into the home!
I don’t see how anyone can condone this product in it’s current form. It can’t be used without phoning home to google. In a thread spanning a couple years, it appears plenty of people don’t realize that even the local screencasting features stop working without an internet connection to google.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chromecast/XRktmNTk0Q…
What they probably expected was Miracast or WiDi for displaying HDMI content from a device to the TV. This way if you’re at a hotel/camping/doing business presentations behind a corporate firewall, google isn’t going to block you at the most inopportune time.
I’m rather annoyed with google’s strategy of pushing hardware that ostensibly should work locally but forces you connect to them anyways. Another example is cloud print, designed to ship off your documents to google, unencrypted, and then sent back down to your computer to get printed. They say they don’t look at user data, but even if that’s true it’s just inexcusable that google’s software doesn’t let you print directly on your network to begin with. Even if there were no issue of trust, these points of failure are just bad engineering. I think the engineers at google are being instructed to deliberately add unnecessary dependencies to google’s servers whenever they can.
So no, this is exactly the sort of thing I don’t want built into a smart TV; I’ve strongly criticized vendor locked smart tv in the past. I think there are some cool features that smart tvs can offer, including screen casting, but between google, amazon, apple, microsoft, roku, etc I really don’t want any company to have this much control.
http://www.osnews.com/comments/28560
Edited 2016-03-23 08:32 UTC
Is there any open source firmware project for these things? Akin to rockbox on the ipod?