Panasonic is opting for Firefox OS. Samsung is going for Tizen. LG is bunkering down with web OS. Sharp is going with Android TV, and Philips has stated all of its TVs will use Android TV.
A few questions. One, do we actually want this? Two, where is Microsoft in all this (oh right they dropped the ball)? And three, do we actually want this?
No. All a TV needs to do is have HDMI inputs to plug in set top boxes.
It doesn’t need an OS, it’s own apps, it’s own internet connection, etc.
It especially doesn’t need all the added cost for that nonsense.
Edited 2015-01-05 23:01 UTC
Preach it brother!
Exactly. A screen is a screen is a screen is…
So what is *really* needed is
1) wireless HDMI to make things really easy. This is a few years away, but it solves everything (anything can stream out to it)
2) a standard for remote controlling, so wifi-HDMI better have a return channel
It exists, its called HDMI-CEC. And it works quite well, i can control my PS3 with the remote of my TV.
Why all TVs with HDMI don’t ship with this by default, i don’t know.
i was going to post the same thing, it’s a really good technology that slowly seems to be finding it’s way into both TV’s and now set top boxes / consoles, i love that i can switch the power on, on my sky box and it will switch on the TV, on the right channel.
No. My mother can (to a certain degree) use a computer, even one running Debian, but change the HDMI input on her TV from cable to DVD, and she’s hopelessly lost. The most frequently asked tech support question this Christmas was: ‘Help, $son! $daughter did something to the TV, and now the screen is blue. Help!’
Give her a ‘smart’ TV that lets her choose input in some sane visual manner, with just about any OS, but with just one remote, and I’m sure she’ll catch up.
I would mod this up, but then I can’t do shit for the rest of the thread.
I bet in 5 years time all these TVs will be collecting dust.
You know I was in the same “dumb” TV camp for a long time. When my last TV finally died, I bought a really big one. I found that you can’t really buy a TV >= 70″ without the “smart” features. Figured it was no big deal, I just wouldn’t use it.
Well, after having it for the last 6 months or so, I’ve now retired my Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC on it and use the built-in DLNA media player on the TV. It works just about as well, is easier for my wife to figure out, and works with the TV remote so I don’t need to use my Harmony remote anymore (especially with HDMI-CEC to control the HT equipment.) I actually like it very much and would probably go for another smart TV if I had the choice again.
I guess I changed my tune after living with a Smart TV for a while. Go figure…
Couldn’t the same thing be said of sound?
Isn’t some smarts okay in the same way some minimal sound is okay?
Well, the problem is sound is actually useful if you can’t be bothered with a home theater setup, while the smart features get in the way of my booting the console or the media player box and getting to my content.
“But the smart TV will play your video content”, you’ll say. Wake me up when one of those smart TVs can play MKVs off plain old samba shares… oh, and my blu rays.
Until then, I’ll still need the other boxes.
I have several Samsungs and they are useless. Too little RAM/flash to run current apps. Much more useful to plug in tiny HDMI sticks that can be upgraded as needed.
Chomecast is a good base but too limited. Would be better to have a full Android stick and run Chromecast as an app on it.
Now please let me get rid of $50/mth = $600/yr of pointless set top box rental fees. I canceled FIOS after they gratuitously raised my STB rental fees $20/mth and gave me nothing in return. Of course they announced record FIOS profits for that quarter.
I want my IPTV!
i agree with that, i love my Samsung TV, but the smart side of it i barely use, it’s woefully underpowered with like you say low memory and a very slow processor.
To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in a smart TV either until I finally gave in and got my first flatscreen which also happened to be a smart TV. And I’ve actually found it to be surprisingly useful. Being able to run Netflix, Viki or Crunchyroll without taking over my phone or laptop for streaming is quite handy, not to mention it cuts down on the dongles and cables that I need to keep around. And it is simple enough for the wife and friends to use without worrying about hooking up a separate device of some sort.
I like WebOS so I would potentially be very interested in an LG if it wasn’t for it being LG who I do not trust at all due to some of their earlier phones and TVs not being that great. At least it will be a great improvement over Samsung’s current interface which I find rather cumbersome.
Yes, that’s why we want something like the Chromecast stick but more general.
Just wait until you need to plug in one anyway because they’re not supporting the included OS anymore and you want newer apps.
FWIW it looks like ideal TV these days is just a huge 4K monitor or even video projector capable of receiving other devices’ output. My TV is currently a monitor for my home server (which is also a media player) and DVB-S reciever, and the TV part just gets in the way this setup. I doubt I would buy a smart TV.
“Where is Microsoft” ? Well, it was there 14 years ago building the TAK platform with Thomson Multimedia. Too early or too late, as usual…
Later, MS released Microsoft TV. In France, it was used by one ISP (ClubInternet) for its IPTV solution. It was very good looking for subscribers with animated backgrounds and fast zapping technology but i’ve been told that it required dozens of servers on the other side of the line to serve interface and fast zapping. Too expensive on a large-scale, it was abandonned a few years later.
I don’t want a smart TV – I want a dumb TV.
I’d love to have a device that accepts as inputs the output from my DVD player/PVR etc and re-broadcasts that output wirelessly to, say, an app running on my iPhone/iPad. Does anyone know what’s preventing this sort of thing? (bandwidth limitations? DRM?)
Complexity. UPnP was supposedly to solve this with the MediaRenderer component, so you could feed any screen or application with data streamed from another UPnP device with the MediaServer component.
But ironically, the MediaServer is the least implemented component of UPnP on devices, even through any decent TV with wireless do implement the MediaRenderer component.
So you have a device that can receive data from a UPnP server (your TV with wireless connection), but you don’t have devices (standalone cheap PVRs, blu-ray players, consoles…) that can work as a server.
Just tune into Fox News, and voila!
Like this?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airtame-wireless-hdmi-for-everyon…
I think you ‘ll find(tm) that Microsoft has this little franchise called “Xbox”.
Once again, Microsoft occupies the high-powered segment, Google will occupy the middle and low end, LG will try with webOS but will ultimately abandon effort and go with Google (there is no chance in hell they ‘ll be able to build the relevant games and movies ecosystem to compete with Google, even if they license the movies, games will still be an issue) and Mozilla’s Firefox OS will be a cute oddity, again because of ecosystem reasons.
Which leaves out Sony. During the Android TV presentation, Sony was mentioned as a partner, but nothing was heard since then.
Sony went all-in on Android TV. So it’s Philips, Sharp and Sony all going with Android TV.
Samsung is by far the biggest TV producer…
Don’t Sony have this little franchise called “Playstation”?
TVs are becoming obsolete. My TV is the most expensive piece of electronic I own and also the least used one. The entire business of switching on the screen and switching off the brain just doesn’t sell anymore. It is not interactive enough and there is no way to make it so while the TV is 10 feet away from my lazy ass.
Virtual reality has to be replacing the TV in the next five years. it just makes more sense. Totally immersive and entirely personal; lower cost but shorter upgrade cycles; and loads and loads of ad opportunities…
All these efforts of trying to come up with an interactive platform that’s perpetually 10 feet away from us is just wasted R&D money. They all sound to me like a dying industry gasping for one last breath.
Edited 2015-01-06 01:56 UTC
How do you watch a movie or a TV-show with other people when using VR-gear?
I suppose it would be difficult to see the faces of the other people next to you. But social functions built into the system should alleviate that. In fact it allows totally new ways of watching something together. I could watch sports with my buddies without having them over and mess up my apartment.
Hi WereCatf. I have used almost all of my hard disks on elastic suspension until they have to be jubilated by obsolescence. It is very important to do this since bought.
………………..
There is ecosystem resilience on diversity.
They just have to develop interacting protocols.
As for privacy, it is a user’s crying situation.
I’d prefer a TV to that, really..
I just want a TV. Keep all the extraneous crap, it adds to cost. I’ll use the Roku for that.
Yes, most people probably want it.
Just Android, Firefox OS, WebOS, or Tizen. Oh wait…
Microsoft blew it long ago with CE – during the era the Palm (pilot) was getting popular. The palm just worked. For a project we evaluated 4 CE devices and they were horrible. M$ put a four CD set into Embedded Systems Journal, and there were a dozen subscribers, and everyone threw them away (I was curious about something 6 months later, so that is how I know). In one case a group tried but noticed the interrupt (latency) jitter was so bad it couldn’t be used – but had to check since linux worked. No, it was CE.
But Windows was (and is) a “one size fits all”, so your business desktop will look and work like your smartphone.
4 different OS that hardly expose any kernel API (what is actually Linux) to developers.
Except for Tizen, no one would notice if the kernel gets replaced for something else.
Basically any digital TV you could buy in the store ran Linux already, it might not have been very visible, but it was Linux.
Here is an example:
https://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/source_tv.shtml
http://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2005/08/26/tvlicenses/
Now they are adding ‘apps’, so they’ll add a ‘platform’ or whatever it is called as well Android, Tizen, WebOS, FirefoxOS, whatever.
It wouldn’t make any sense to do something with Windows.
I don’t know, something like XBox or Windows Media Center….?
I mean: why would they take the time to move to a completely different platform. There has to be some pretty big incentive to do so.
It’s got two HDMI ports (one for a dumb blu-ray player, and one for a Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC), an antenna port, and some component inputs so I can plug in some retro gaming gear. I’ve had to provide support for my parents’ smart tv, and it’s not worth the hassle.
Any digital TV was already a computer, also see my other comment:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?602536
Calling them ‘dumb’ is kind of funny to me.
I don’t want a tv with a built-in piece of shit pc. I don’t want a tv that can spy on me, or my lan, or all the wifi in my area. I don’t want a tv that needs an internet connection for anything. Of all the people I’ve discussed “smart tvs” with, nearly all agree. Everyone simply wants a big screen with amazing color & picture quality. TV makers can keep all that extra bullshit and added cost that comes with it. People want a TV, not a mediocre-to-garbage computer that happens to have a tv inside the same housing.
In the old days we had Atari, Amiga along with IBM and Macs. Then came late 1990s and early 2000s with Wintel monoculture. I find it refreshing computing has become somewhat more diverse once again, this time with many form factors. Having many solutions is opportunity to exchange good ideas or try out bad ones. With SMART TVs and cars comes an issue of obsolescence. Typical life of those products far exceeds life of computing devices. Personally, I like the idea of Chromecast. A cheap dongle to be plugged into virtually any TV set (with HDMI -> SCART converter even CRT dinosaurs become “smart”) and easily replaced if needed.
Edited 2015-01-06 06:19 UTC
I’m not sure why one would say there are so many.
As far as I can tell, currently they’re mostly using unnamed, nondescript (Linux) stacks with vendor specific interfaces and APIs on top of that.
It would probably do the TV platform some good if vendors finally started using a specific platform with known feature-sets. As long as they commit to using a specific OS, they’ll probably end up using it across the entire set range, so you would have some generic API stack to target, and that gets updated much more easily. That will surely get more developers on board.
To me it feels like if the platform is developed separately from the hardware, you have a much better chance of getting older devices updated.
Sure, Android devices don’t get updated after a couple of versions, but it still beats no real updates that TVs get today.
I am not very excited about TV operating systems nor do I care what my operating systems runs on my TV, set top box, freezer, microwave oven.
In a few years even toilets may have an operating system. Should I care if it’s Android or some RTOS?
M$ will troll and threaten using FUD, patent litigation and collect royalty from android, tizen, webos … LOL !!!
Every manufacturer create a “Remote Controller App” right?
LG:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lge.tv.remoteapps
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lge.media.lgblueto…
Phillips:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=philips.oneremote
Sony(3rd part):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.discvision.remoteco…
Panasonic:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panasonic.pavc.vie…
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panasonic.pavc.vie…
Android TV:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.tv….
So, what is the point of bitching around about TV firmware options? Let them develop their TVs on whatever they want, and i just need a good Remote Controll APP to manage it. Its a TV damn it!
If it’s crap, they will have to migrate to a more “popular” choice of tv firmware like Android TV. (Except for Samsung. They are pretty cancerous with their integration and don’t want you to use a LG/Nexus smartphone to control a Samsung TV – somehow an Apple of the Android world…).
I have a home theater pc I built in 2008 started with vista and is now windows 7 . It has worked great. I use media center. I wish ms would update it some, hell I wish the metro system of 8.1 were more remote friendly , that is the perfect interface for HTPC. I do have win8.1 SSD waiting on the hard drive to fail in the HTPC its amazing the hard drive has lasted this long.
Mechanical drives generally last surprisingly long, I have several ones that are 10+ years old and still chucking along without a hitch. The few times I’ve encountered a media error that doesn’t go away with formatting I’ve issued ATA Secure Erase, which either fixes the broken sector or forcibly reallocates it from the space area, and all’s been well again.
is what happens when these Android TVs end up in the same situation as Android phones. You buy them, then they never update and before you know it, a tv that should’ve lasted you ten years lasts you two because the built-in apps stop functioning with the services they were hard-coded to use. Some of the OEMs are smart and use apps instead of hard-coded features but eventually these apps will stop working on older hardware.
At which point you have a dumb TV and can plug a set-top box into an HDMI port and everything works as it would have if you hadn’t bought the smart TV in the first place.
Aside from the initial price difference (if there still is any) there’s no real downside to having a smart TV. Nothing forces you to use the added functionality if you don’t want to.
I’d love to have a WebOS device to plug into my perfectly fine 5 year old plasma screen. Even those kinds of devices don’t have to be all the complex – mix in the remote display methods (so I can use iTunes, Steam and/or Google stuff on it), and other media sharing tech, then make it all easy to use, and I’d buy one for each TV in the house.
These things are all about the user experience – and I actually like what I’ve seen of WebOS on TV. There is already a defined minimum functionality though – and no, smart tv isn’t it. It’s ChromeCast, etc.
I have liked one feature on my smart-TV: frame-interpolation. Basically it generates extra frames to content that isn’t 60 FPS, making all the motion much smoother. I like it, I like getting smooth video. Haven’t had any use whatsoever for any other “smart” features, though.
I don’t believe that’s technically a smart-TV feature. It’s a necessity for progressive displays with a high frame rate, since there’s no content at such high frame rates. So, without interpolation, a 120Hz or 240Hz display wouldn’t really look any different than a 60Hz display. I’m pretty sure some dumb-TVs have the same setting.
Strangely, I absolutely hate that high-FPS interpolation stuff and prefer to watch content at its original frame rate. To each his own…
I have never seen a dumb-TV with that, so I’m still gonna assume it’s a smart-TV feature.
That is a feature I’ve liked as well, though there are a couple of games that I have to switch it off for due to the added latency. But most games it actually isn’t noticeable in.
Some hotels I’ve stayed at recently have started equipping rooms with Android-based television-centric entertainment systems. The televisions supply cable channels, internet (wi-fi or on-screen), games, hotel information, and pay movies.
Well it sucks butt. The the wireless controllers (battery-powered keyboards and remotes) seem to always be dead, or perhaps they don’t sync correctly. The TV has to be on for the internet to work, an annoyance and incredible waste. They’re designed, likely intentionally, to make the free programming difficult to find. And the system takes forever to boot up.
Hopefully it’s a short-lived fad. Kick it to the curb.
Edited 2015-01-06 21:53 UTC