What is the "Killer App" for Smart TV

Introduction

When IBM fist introduced its PC, Apple placed a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal saying that they were glad that this happened and how it would be great for the PC market. Of course it was great; but after having the market virtually to itself, Apple's own share of the PC market shrank well below 5% before rebounding on Apple's strength in other products. As with any technology, radical change is needed to keep the technology fresh. But radical change is frequently a great hazard to the major incumbents.

The first computers were behemoths. They were physically large and had very large, in many cases water cooled, specialized processors. Later, came both smaller computers (mini's and PCs) as well as even larger supercomputers. The supercomputers initially had specialized central processing units (CPUs) as well but eventually the high performance computing (HPC) world figured out that they could make very effective supercomputers using arrays of generalized processors, such as what was found in PCs, acting in parallel. Indeed, many of the more interesting problems that supercomputers were destined to work on were more appropriately addressed by parallel processing than by one large, supercharged, CPU. This contributed to the decline of companies like Cray and the rise of Intel in the HPC world.

Eventually the idea of parallel process was carried a step further. The generalized PC CPUs in supercomputers began to be replaced by Graphics processing units (GPU's) that are themselves inherently parallel. Most supercomputers being built today are being powered by GPUs rather than CPUs and the world's fastest is being created with GPUs. As the use of GPUs beyond the basic application of image rendering has grown, so too has the population of programmers familiar with GPU programing.

And how does this relate to television??? With the arrival of LCDs and digital images came digital image processing. There is a significant amount of computing going on in the background of your LCD in order to deliver the image that you see. In addition, TVs have gotten "Smart" with the introduction of such features as voice, facial, and gesture recognition requiring modern TVs to significantly boost their computing power. Although TVs remain as one of the most price constrained of any consumer electronics platform, they are also one of the most given to being sold based on specs. TV brands have done battle based on brightness, color fidelity, contrast, thinness, etc. What would happen if the industry borrowed a page from the computer world and started competing based on processor speed. Probably not much unless there were some application to drive it.

The Killer App
MiniTel was recently switched off. For those of you that are unaware of MiniTel, it was the first internet-like service. It was the brainchild of France Telecom and was up and running in the mid 1980's before there was an internet. I saw MiniTel and thought it was a useful but fairly limited service, which it was. However, what I failed to see was how such a service could blossom going from a limited and centralized service to the inherently decentralized internet of today. So, given my admitted limited abilities to comprehend technological advancement, here are some applications that I think will drive smart TV sales in the future.

Social Interaction
As TVs became cheap and the nation went from one TV per household to one TV per room, watching television went from a family affair to a solitary activity. Indeed, the whole social media revolution has bypassed TV for the time being. As sets gain in computing power and input devices are added (cameras and microphones) TV sets could adopt some of the same applications as in the mobile phone market. Also, similar to what is going on in social media in general, user generated content could become a significant part of what gets viewed.

2D to 3D Upconversion
At some point 3D will become common and even usual. At that point, most content will still be in 2D and with the market for 3D content growing, there will be, or is now, a market to convert 2D content to 3D. As with colorization of black and white films, the initial results may be less than spectacular, but as an audience grows up with an expectation of 3D availability someone will satisfy that need.

Home Automation
Some years ago I was involved in fundraising for a start-up called Toprover. I was able to get Mr. Jobs to look at it (he apparently visited their web site several times) but he apparently did not bite. What Toprover had was a comprehensive home automation program and device. It actually made use of large HDTV screens with a comprehensive control panel and had enough embedded computing power to do all sorts of useful things around the home. Like 3D, I consider home automation to be an inevitability. I think that control modules, device intelligence and communications are cheap and easy enough that now could be the time.

Voice and Gesture Control
Another inevitable technology, however, it can be more than an improvement to the remote control. As with Pandora, increased feedback from the user could tailor suggested content, switch the image to different perspectives, maybe even customize general content in some way. This could include changing the visual perspective on image content, customizing the news to skip uninteresting matters or provide more detail on others, or customized weather reports for the particular micro-climate in your neighborhood. As with most things involved with display technology, the innovations are not as likely to be involved with an improved display as with improved human interaction.

Conclusion
This article began with a longish introduction, mostly about the development of computing power, particularly the development of parallel processors useful in image processing and now other applications. What followed was some speculation about what sort of applications this computing power could be put to use on, most of which I consider inevitable. However, this is coming from an observe that did not see the seeds to the internet in Minitel. I have, however, had my share of prognostications including the rapid increase in pixel count for mobile devices. ("The case for a flexible touch panel keyboard", in Touch Panel, Sep 20, 2009) No doubt at some point the rise in available processing power will enable holographic 3D; but no time soon. However, there undoubtedly will be other apps that are completely new that few can envision now.

From the movie "The Meaning of Life"
Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: "The Meaning of Life" Now uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive...
... However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Exec #3: What was that about hats again?

The image above is from the movie "The Ring" about a videotape that will kill you if you watch it.

A Projection Avatar Lands at La Guadia

At La Guardia, a Smiling Helper Materializes, Digitally

" Marie is an avatar, a life-size image of a woman digitally broadcast from a projector onto an inch-thick glass screen coated with a special film, said Luis Vega, 39, the vice president of Parabit Systems, the company that built Marie. The device uses motion sensors to prompt Marie’s 90-second script whenever anyone comes within 30 feet of her. Marie stopped many travelers in their tracks on Wednesday morning, and some walked a circle around her to see how she worked. Others took photos. “I thought it was really a person at first glance,” said Alex Reiss, 21...."

Of course, the image is flat, and it is restricted to whatever shape the glass cut-out is (so the person filmed for the content must remain still) but it does look quite a bit like the holographic images from the "Star Wars" movies. Being able to see behind the image gives the illusion of 3D. One was on display at Digital Signage Expo and attracted a lot of attention.

Airports were early users of public electronic information displays, even before the flat panel era. It is not surprising that they would adopt this unique but somewhat expensive but striking technology. Projection type displays are increasingly "off the radar" in many markets. However, that may be due to not having quite the right product as projection can still provide great value and unique form factors.

The placing of this particular technology at the airports around New York give some indication of just how large the digital signage market can be. In-spite of the substantial price, the avatar does not replace a person as having a person there full time would be unaffordable. This bit of digital signage provides a new service at an affordable cost even at tens of thousands. Simpler signage can be envisioned at virtually every sort of commercial outlet even down to the smallest mom & pop.

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Digital Signage as a Retail product

From Today's DigitalSignageToday.com

"Is the future of digital signage for sale, retail?"

"LG Electronics USA recently announced that it had struck a deal with retailer Fry's Electronics Inc. to feature an LG digital signage solution at the chain's 34 nationwide locations and on the retailer's website."

In an earlier article "Unaccounted and Digital Signage" (High Resolution November 13, 2009, I argued that the LCD makers should produce a dual mode LCD platform, one that is capable of performing both as digital signage and as a consumer TV. LG actually has offered such a product and has now gone a step further, the important step, in offering digital signage displays through an electronics retailer. This solves several important problems both for the LCD maker, for brick and mortar retailers, and for the consumer.

With TV volumes stagnant and with increasing sales through on-line retailers, digital signage sales offer a new category and new volume to the retailer. Digital signage LCDs, with all of their unique features such as extra brightness for outdoors, offer a new up-sell opportunity for the retailer to home TV set consumers. For the digital signage purchaser, availability of digital signage displays through local retail outlets offer immediate availability of both displays for new installations, spares availability, and lower overall distribution costs. For the TV Set consumer, digital signage in retail offers the opportunity to take advantage of some of the digital signage features, some of which may not be so obvious.

I have previously argued on one of the digital signage LinkedIN blogs that since most large TVs are delivered (either by purchase on-line or by brick and mortar store delivery) to the home, Individual packaging for TVs was somewhat wasteful. With retail availability of digital signage, presumably, some of the signage will come in multi-packs and I would expect 55" and larger TVs to be available in multi-packs as well.

Beyond that, as I have related elsewhere, At Digital Signage Expo, I asked one of the display industry luminaries if digital signage could ever be as big for the display industry as TV. He gave me a blank stare and could not answer. With US growth rates (in number of screens deployed per year) exceeding 30% through the recession, certainly going forward the volumes could be substantial. Channeling much of this volume through retail will re-energize the entire TV category and lead to increased innovation as new features that are first introduced in commercial product, find their way into the home. In the end, the decision to offer signage through retail may be the biggest innovation in TV since the introduction of flat panels.

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Solar Radiation on Digital Signage

I attended an outstanding webinar on digital signage given by Peter Kaszycki of MRI. In the webinar he mentioned that the morning or evening sun in winter can be as bad for an LCD as the noon day sun in summer. I found some interesting data to back that up.

The chart comes from Research Needs: Glass Solar Reflectance and Vinyl Siding by R. Hart, C. Curcija, D. Arasteh, H. Goudey, C. Kohler, S. Selkowitz in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkely Labs. Solar radiation can be a much larger contributor to the display temperature than than the ambient temperature. In fact data from the study shows that for black vinyl siding, solar radiation can raise surface temperatures to 70 degrees F higher than the ambient. Further, if the display is near a window and gets surface reflections from that window, it can get a double dose, or more, of solar radiation.

This picture shows the side of a house on a winter day when the ambient air was 24 degrees. The light on the side of the house is a reflection from the windows of a neighboring house. The issue of solar radiation and reflections has been well studied in the vinyl siding industry as it is a common cause for product replacement. The LCD being new to outdoor environments will experience the same conditions.

An important additional point to consider... because solar radiation is delivered at the speed of light rather than being conveyed by air currents or thermal conduction, the surface of the vinyl siding or the LCD can equilibrate with the current level of solar radiation within 10 minutes. Unlike heat transfer from the ambient, there are no thermal conduction issues or boundary layer effects. So, if some other surface happens to reflect directly on your digital signage installation for only twenty minutes; but the wrong time of day 20 minutes; that can be enough to cook your installation. Further, as contact burns can be almost instantaneous above 145 degrees and everyone assumes that every large LCD within reach is a touch panel, there could be some consumer complaints as well.

"But all we've discovered is that the blaze was started from a great distance through the refraction and convergence of light." from "Limoney Snickets: A Series of Unfortunate Events"


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