The future of the television set

By Rogier Brussee on 20 May 2009

This post is an exercise in futurology. Anyone who has been in the CELL lab (especially the old lab) notices the large TV screen. Indeed the development of HD TV is one of the focus areas of the Cross media lectorate, see for example Harry’s convergence and the future is now posts.  Some of my colleagues at Novay  in particular Christian Hesselman, are also deeply involved in next generation TV through the iNEM4U project. And of course Harry and I have in long gone days both been involved in the Giga Port Next generation TV project, which came up with a model for TV that is not all that different from what I will propose here.

TV’s are computers

Over several of the lab talks I have been pushing the following idea which seems to be surprisingly controversial:

• Modern TV’s are computer screens with a build in TV tuner.
• Set-top boxes are computers (rather unpleasant computers mostly dedicated to converting a digital video stream to an input signal for the screen with non standard system software, and usually equipped with analogue scart connectors, that you will not often find on computers but computers none the less)

Set-top boxes are horrible from a usage perspective. For this I have unrefutable statistical evidence because I have one and I have been cursing it daily, giving a score of 365 loath and 0 love in last years experiment.  I need two remotes to operate my TV, I need to keep the remote over my head because the bloody thing is out of the line of sight as the floor was the only place I could put it, and I am not wild about image quality either. Therefore the market will eventually push TV’s in the direction of being computers themselves and simply be the largest computer screen in the house, even though the main use of this screen will be to simply watch TV.

While nobody with any knowledge in this area can object to the premises and “convergence” is a key area of investment in the TV business, there is some opposition to the idea that TV’s will become computers because television sets have a different usage model. TV-traditions now have developed for over half a century and have become part of everyday life for about four generations and are therefore very hard to get rid of. In particular people will not want to consider it as a computer. In particular people watch TV in groups and primarily use computers on their own. Here I will make a much more precise prediction which I think should make it clearer that the usage model of TV’s is not actually in the way at all, and what I mean by making a TV a computer.

Prediction

The future of the TV set is an oversized i-pod touch.

An i-pod is obviously a successful user device and is increasingly used for watching video and images. This is why I mention the touch version (also known as i-phone, which for our purposes is just an i-pod touch with a build in gsm/umts interface) because with their relatively big screen they are more suited to video. I-pod’s have nice easy to use user interfaces and the touch versions actually look a lot like TV-‘s, except of course, they are quite a bit smaller, and they are not connected to the cable, but to WIFI. 

Now what does it mean for a TV to be a oversized glorified I-pod:

• It has WIFI and Bluetooth, and likely an Ethernet connector. Therefore, it can be connected to the internet and to other devices such as phones and ordinary i-pods. In particular, internet connects the TV to online video stores.
• It can interface to all the other computers in the home.
• It has serious amounts of storage for making recordings and time shifting and storing people’s own video’s and pictures. Actually it may use network attached storage which has technical advantages, but it just should not matter from a usability perspective. 
• It has a browser a video player and some file managing capability
• It can read SD cards, and most likely Blue-ray’s and DVD’s (I know i-pod’s cannot read Blue-ray’s but hey that’s just an example where size matters)
• It has USB ports
• It makes sense to have a built in webcam
• Because of the requirements above it needs an operating system and a serious user interface
• It needs to deal with different video codecs in particular high resolution high compression but expensive to decode MPEG4/H264 at HD quality resolution and DVB.
• These requirements alone force the TV to have a non trivial processor although the core of its power is probably in the video decoding. In particular it should pay to have a processor with memory management. 
• It is open to running apps like instant messaging, skype, etc. and it can run games.
• It may well provide Dolby stereo surround.
• It takes a few seconds to boot, but generally just works.

What does it mean for an i-pod to be a TV

• It has a big screen.
• It is not portable and needs power to operate.
  It can make contact to cable TV and swallow DVB digital video streams. However being an i-pod it will also be able to get its signal through WIFI.  People do not like to have TV-cables throughout their house if they can avoid it. The requirement of an HD stream over WIFI forces the WIFI to be to be high performance IEEE 802.11n type. It may have an analogue video input, but a mildly radical design will lack even that: digital TV is there to stay and analogue video will die. More on this point in the “set-top strikes back” section. 
• It has a remote. For design, user interface and gaming reasons the remote may actually look like a cross between an i-pod wheel and a WII movement sensitive remote. 
• It does not have a touch screen.  People just sit to far away from the screen for that to be useful.
• It boots in a few seconds, and generally just works.

Now I really do not believe I am telling Apple anything new here, Therefore I am confident that they will start selling TV sets which will seamlessly integrate with both their i-pod range and their Macintosh computer range and even windows pc’s. This is because such a TV, like an I-pod, basically is a Macintosh computer running OS-X. Quite possibly the TV will not have an high performance Intel processor but a high powered version of an ARM processor like the i-pod, or the cell processor found in game consoles or a glorified graphics card. Having to bet I would put my money on a Intel processor with a build in GPU which apparently is in the make, and which will allow diversifying into TV’s that loose all pretence of not being Macs or in versions that double as heavy gaming computers. In any case the particular processor is just a detail. What matters is that a TV like this can run different applications can network and be used like a computer if that is convenient usage model.  Because lots of people have become used to using a computer for organizing and downloading music and communicating with others, just using these learned skills will be convenient.

Like all Apple gear, an Apple ipod-TV like that is probably not cheep. However Apple can afford this because people will buy their stuff for the usability value as much as the design and the status value (see my favorite economy book Obelix and Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelix_and_Co). In fact that design in a living room is important is a no-brainer.  However, like the i-pods, I don’t think they would be excessively and insanely expensive either: say in the 1500 – 2000 euro range. The reason is that Apple will have created yet another channel to attract people to i-tunes. Therefore they should be able to even afford loosing money on the actual hardware.  I-tunes more than anything else is what should make an internet oriented TV a good business proposition, and it is what gives Apple at least as much head start as it is design, and engineering prowess.

Other vendors

Other TV set producers are not quite as well positioned as Apple to make an i-pod TV, if only because they don’t control a good competitor for i-tunes.  However, they can most certainly do it and will once the concept catches on. TV’s already are computer screens driven by HDMI interfaces, they are already are running embedded versions of Linux on embedded processors, and newer TV sets are already having DVB tuners, and they are running dedicated web browsers.  It has also been pointed out to us by Robert de Snoo and Mark Haaksman from Ordina that TV’s are going to be equipped with WIFI.  Moreover Google Android (the smart phone platform aka i-pod platform for non Apple i-pods with build in GSM) should provide a similar platform to OS-X, and Google will be more than willing to point that fact out. And of course Microsoft will soon be pushing on the .NET/Windows 7.1 CE Media edition front. Therefore the technical barrier for other producers to make an i-pod TV is not very big, and all it needs is clear proof that the market is ready for it.

In fact Philips is already selling its Net-TV which is connected to the internet but above all to connect to the Philips portal with Philips branded content.

The set top box strikes back.

The cable and the network operators and as we have seen even the hardware producers are all frantically trying to keep consumers into their own profitable walled garden. Of these the only important case is the cable operators because cable TV is still an important source of TV content and unlike the internet, cable gets a broadcasted signal. Cable companies will therefore want to ensure that different subscription schemes can be implemented. However TV’s with restricted access protocol which just accept a sim-card are already on sale for a long time. There is therefore no reason why the i-pod TV can just use the same technology and we can get rid of the set top box.  Alternatively if streaming the signal through WIFI turns out to be the way to go, that may need a modem/set-top box and it may be more convenient to put access control there. However Since that box can be put out of the way and can be remote controlled by the TV this will not change the i-pod experience.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Harry van Vliet for explaining me the situation with the restricted access protocol.

tagged with: itv, apple, prediction, future, television

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