Steely Eye Digital Media

What is the hot new technology for 2012? Without any doubt, it is Web TV. AKA Connected TV, Apps TV or Smart TVs. It’s nothing really new, and it may take more than a year to truly take hold, but for sure this year if you’re in the market for a TV, it’ll be hard to NOT buy a web and apps enabled TV set.

How do we know this? There are multiple reasons. The first, is the failure of 3DTV. After getting everyone to upgrade to flat screen HDTVs in the past 5 years, the TV industry needed something to sustain this huge growth spurt and it turns out, 3DTV wasn’t it. Remember when we used to change TV sets every 8 years or so? Now the industry wants us to change every 2 years, and needs to keep innovating to persuade us to do so, but are throttled by broadcast standards that take years to agree. Remember, the Japanese have had 1080i TV since 1994 (based on a standard defined in… 1979).

The second, is that in the UK and in other countries, Video On Demand (VOD) and TV catchup services like iPlayer and Hulu are increasingly becoming people’s preferred way of watching TV, not to mention YouTube, Vimeo et al. This will explode in the UK later this year when YouView launches, which will consist both of apps for existing apps TV platforms, and initially, a set top box cheaply available to turn any existing TV into a web-enabled TV. Much like the FreeView boxes we had to use in the UK when DVB-T broadcasts were rolled out. Of course, eventually all TVs sold in the UK will have YouView built in.

The third reason is simply the greater flexibility offered by having a connected PC. The PC is no longer the centre of our digital worlds. People’s content is in the cloud, and technologies that are widely supported now, such as DLNA/UPnP, make it possible to stream content from any storage device to any screen anywhere in the home. And while a computer is optimised for content creation and a phone is optimised for being with you at all times, a TV is optimised for content consumption, especially, video content. Already apps for Netflix and Lovefilm are available on all major TV app and set top box platforms.

Each TV manufacturer is looking for apps and experiences that will differentiate them from the competition. Surely Samsung will seek to integrate their TV and mobile phone experiences, and we’ll bet our grandmothers that the next range of Bravia TVs from Sony will have a PlayStation Certified download store offering PS1 and PS2 and PSP games without the need for a separate console, built-in.

At the same time, the proliferation of competing platforms, Samsung Smart TV (using Adobe AIR and Flash), Google TV (based on Android), YouView (in turn based on Adobe AIR and Flash), and others from Panasonic, LG and Sony, leads to a similar situation that we’ve had in mobile in the past that really constrained the growth potential. Different, competing apps platforms, and web browsers with different support for standards, different bugs and different performance characteristics.

Looking at the situation through Steely Eyes, one might guess that a newcomer like Apple will see an opportunity to shake things up. But in the meantime, the challenge, and corresponding solution is very similar to that faced when bringing legacy content and services such as ecommerce to mobile phones.

It’s where we come in. At Steely Eye, we build future proof multichannel web solutions that leverage your legacy sites, unlocking access to growing market channels including mobile web, mobile apps, tablets and web TV, without changing your authoring and catalogue management workflows and without resetting the clock on your hard earned SEO.

Stay tuned for more on web TV phenomenon from Steely Eye Digital Media, coming soon.