CES 2011: Buzz Surrounds Smart TVs
By: Adam Balkin
Bringing the Internet to your television set was front and center at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. NY1's Tech reporter Adam Balkin explains in the following report.
Google TV, Yahoo TV, Connected TV, Smart TV may have different names but they’re all basically trying to do the same thing: bring more of the Internet to the television in your living room in order to combine your program watching and web surfing into one nicely bundled new method for time killing on your couch.
The devices allow for watching TV while messaging with friends, finding content for your big TV through the Internet, and even buying stuff or getting more information based on something you're watching.
"Smart TV is all the buzz at CES this year," says John Taylor of LG. “Our goal is to make smart TV intuitive, fun to use, and provide a very rich array of content.”
Even more traditional content providers are taking advantage of TVs being online. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, NY1’s parent company, will team up with Samsung that later this year to allow, without a cable box, entire channel lineups and program guides to be accessed on the TV and also on certain tablets and smart phones.
“You should be able to watch TV on whatever screen you want to watch it on,” says Glenn Britt, chief executive officer of Time Warner Cable. “You should be able to navigate to your programming easily, you should be able to watch programming when you want, as opposed to when someone else decides for you to watch it, and all this technology makes that possible.”
Finally, with this big push to allow your TV to do more, there's also a big push to make it easier to do. As a result, a lot of manufacturers are taking a cue from the video game industry, with some offering motion-sensing remotes while others are offering no remotes at all and, instead, making you the remote.
Just like Microsoft offers with its new Kinect system, a small company called Omek is using a camera on top of the set for gesture-based control of the TV.
“It's kinda cool not to have to use a remote control,” says Omek’s Rebecca Rachmany. “You just go, ‘Oh, I’m just going to turn the channels [by using my body].’ That's kinda nice if you're one of these people with five remote controls.”
The other three options we're seeing are those like LG, which offers a button-like motion sensing wand, Sony Internet TV with Google TV with a remote with a full keyboard for easier content searching, and finally, manufacturers like Samsung, which plays off your comfort with a smart phone by making remotes that look so much like smart phones, you may grab this thing by mistake and throw it in your pocket instead of your phone on your way out the door in the morning.
