The Education of the Idiot Box

The next big revolution in consumer technology will be televised

Over the past few years, a simple way to gauge the next big thing in technology has been to track rumours about the next big Apple device. Steve Jobs may no longer be at the helm, but his legacy ensures the company still holds the title of consumer technology’s innovator-in-chief.

After redefining the smartphone experience and re-creating a product category with tablet computers (not to mention revolutionising the music industry), one of Apple’s core areas of interest has been that humble screen in your living room. Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of the late Apple founder revealed a conversation in which Jobs himself speaks about television, saying he’d ‘cracked’ how to make a next-gen, easy-to-use TV. He was not the only one having a crack.

Time is ripe for television’s re-invention, one that will be fuelled by its fusion with that supreme tech catalyst: the internet. That’s the vision Apple (or at least the Apple fanboy) has for its rumoured next-gen television. The ‘iTV’ will likely be a web-integrated device that will not only let you watch what you want when you want to, but also let you download apps, play Angry Birds (yes, on yet another platform), edit photos, make Skype calls and access online video-sharing websites, with your iPhone or iPad acting as a tricked-out remote control. Phew!

But enough with the dreaming, because some of these features are already a reality, with companies as diverse as Samsung and Google launching products and making big bets on what they believe is the right model of what TV might come to be five, ten, 15 years down the line.

We might not even have to wait that long. At last month’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the consumer tech industry’s bellwether event, most of the buzz surrounded televisions and television-related enhancements.

In Vegas, televisions got thinner, bigger and started packing resolution four times as detailed as the current HD standard into stunning OLED (organic light emitting diode) screens. They also picked up software that lets them download apps and enhancements that make them controllable with gestures or voice commands. It was a tantalising glimpse at the future of television, both immediate and in the longer term.

Over the past decade, we saw a mainstream shift into new display types (LCD/Plasma) and sleeker form factors. It was an evolution in which the function of TVs in our life remained essentially the same—they were devices we watched pre-programmed content on.

But if the offerings last month in Vegas are anything to go by, the next decade will be positively revolutionary. Everything television related is currently up in the air. How we’ll interact with the device. What we’ll watch on it. Even the very meaning of the word.

The show-stealers at CES this year were two stunning televisions from Korean heavyweights LG and Samsung.  LG’s offering was a 4 mm thick 55-inch OLED TV, the 55EM9600. That’s right, 4 mm thick. That’s thinner than your cellphone, and we’re talking about a big, 50-inch-plus television here. But that’s just one of the many amazing things about LG’s flagship TV for 2012. Take, for example, the bezel or the border surrounding the screen, which is almost non-existent at an ultra-thin 1 mm. Or the gorgeous, colour-popping display, which uses a variant of the OLED technology seen recently on smartphones such as Samsung’s Galaxy S2. OLED’s big advantage is that it is thinner and more energy-efficient than the current LED standard, and importantly for

videophiles, capable of reproducing deep black levels, in a range comparable with the very best Plasma televisions. For a long time, prohibitive costs meant that the only commercial OLED TV was the 20-inch Sony XEL1. With the launch of this TV, that age is over.

LG has taken OLED displays and stretched them out for big-screen use. The results look frankly incredible, with colours vividly and accurately reproduced by the company’s proprietary Colour Refiner technology. For a long time, the best praise you could give a TV’s display was to call its picture ‘life-like’. Believe it or not, this TV looks better than real life.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, LG has decided to reinvent the remote control with its Kinect-like ‘Magic Motion’ remote, which lets you use movements and sound to give commands to the television. This being 2012, the TV is 3D capable, and also comes packed with a form of ‘smart’ functionality—in this case, the ability to stream video from the internet or connect to your social media accounts. Prices haven’t been disclosed yet, but expect all those bells and whistles to cost their weight in gold. If you can’t afford to make OLED your present (or near future), however, don’t lose heart, because it could be yours in the (not-so-distant) future. LG claims that by 2016, the technology will cost as much as LCDs do today. I can only hope they’re right.

LG’s Korean rivals Samsung have replied to the 55EM9600 with their own 55-inch ‘Super’ OLED TV, which will take a little longer (read: at least a year) to hit the shelves, especially in India. Though it uses a slightly different form of OLED technology, image quality on pre-production models is supposed to be similarly impressive, even though the TV is twice as thick as the LG model (but still only a third as thick as most current LEDs). Like LG, Samsung has developed an alternate command system to replace the remote control for many functions. Called ‘Smart Interaction’, the voice and gesture system will feature in the Super OLED model, as well as other top-end Samsung sets from the premium 8 series. Things you can expect: the ability to change channels and navigate menus with a ‘swipe’ gesture, and a voice-linked search function, so you’ll have to just call out the name of a TV show to find video results for it on the internet.

The Smart Interaction function is enabled via a little camera and microphone placed atop the television, tools which will also be usable by the TV’s in-built Skype app, saving you the need to purchase additional equipment to make video calls.

LG and Samsung’s integration of voice-and-gesture command merges features seen on gaming consoles and smartphones, and is representative of how television’s function is already expanding way beyond its traditional role as a simple transmitter of images.

Talking of images, they are also getting crisper and sharper than ever before, with some fairly mind-blowing resolutions now being brought to market. Wrap your mind around this: Japanese display specialists Sharp, known for making huge televisions, have built an 85-inch 8K LCD prototype that has a resolution of 7,680×4,320 pixels. I’ll spare you the math—that’s sixteen times the resolution of a normal 1080p HDTV display. Sharp is preparing smaller siblings of this hi-tech monster for retail, dubbing them Super High-Vision sets. Of course, it’ll be years before anyone is making content rich enough to make the most of the outrageous depth and detail such a screen could produce. Sharp’s own estimates are that we’ll have to wait till at least 2020 before we start watching life in Super High-Vision.

If you don’t want to wait eight more years for the 8K, then consider realigning your timetable for the mainstream availability of 4K content. Widely considered in the TV industry as the next high-end standard for HD content, 4K will have four times the resolution of current generation HDTVs. It’s not as impressive as Sharp’s monster screen, but 4K still means 4,000 horizontal lines of resolution. And as the demo displays at CES proved, that translates into seriously detailed images, which, viewed from the right distance and angle, almost create a 3D effect. There are already a few cameras in the market that allow filmmakers to shoot 4K-ready images, and LG’s aforementioned OLED TV is one among a growing number of TVs that support 4K content. But once again, expect to wait a few more years before you see normal television content in anything near that sort of detail.

Waiting is one of the more troublesome things about the future. But if search behemoth Google has its way, one thing you won’t ever need to wait for again is your favourite TV show to come on. Google is a frontrunner among a number of companies that see video-on-demand and web-integration as the future of TV, spelling the end of the current ‘appointment television’ model, where what you watch is largely determined by TV execs and when you watch it by advertisers. Google TV, when fully realised, will give you access to thousands of web-based channels and also to more traditional pay TV content, in addition to providing you with search capabilities and thousands of custom built-for-TV Android apps.

The service was originally launched in the US last year as a standalone box. Poor user interface and problems with the availability of content meant that it failed to live up to expectations as a TV game-changer. It also flopped commercially. This year, Google has returned for a second innings, and got some heavyweight support. LG recently unveiled the first TV that has Google software built in (as opposed to being beamed from a set-top box). That set is slated for global release in the second half of this year. Sony also showcased two devices (a network media player and a Blu-Ray player) that feature the service. Both Sony and LG have also launched special remote controls that will make it easier for users to navigate the internet on their devices, essentially transforming TVs into Cloud-linked tablets with big screens. And that is exactly what they are becoming.

In their new sleek, supercharged forms, televisions can finally leave ‘idiot box,’ that most tiresome of epithets, behind and embrace their new identity as do-it-all entertainment centres.

I remember when televisions used to live in wooden cabinets. Now, while walking into an electronics store and gawking at these thin-framed wonders, I can’t help feeling that I am the idiot.

If the next decade is going to be revolutionary, then the years after that should see television completely liberated from its current framework. That could mean no channels, no remote control and no fixed screen in your living room (maybe no living room either). According to a CISCO report that featured analysis and predictions from 50 leading TV industry experts, in the ‘future landscape of television… almost every aspect of television will be transformed’. Some factors that will lead to the changes— namely high-speed internet, development of new flexible, light and thin display technologies and a change in viewing patterns—exist already, and as they develop further, they’ll push TV in some very interesting directions.

Take the ‘no channels’ model, which all experts agree on as a distinct possibility in the future. This is based on the trend of users increasingly watching TV programmes at their own convenience, which is called ‘time-shift programming’. Mixed with increased digitisation of media content, embedded search capabilities in TVs and the growth in Cloud-based libraries, time-shift programming should see us telling, for example, Star World what TV show we want to watch, instead of it being the other way around.

And it might not even be a ‘TV show’ in the traditional sense of the term. Television content sources have already started changing, with an increasing amount of user-generated content replacing (or at least strongly influencing) expensive, professionally produced programming.

The temple of user-generated content, YouTube, is also on the move. The website is representative of the changes we’ll see in the future with regards to content. Initially known for grainy videos of cats playing the piano, YouTube is not only getting bigger (3 billion hours of videos are now watched on the site every month), it is now increasingly going pro. It recently launched a $100 million programme to fund more than a hundred professionally produced, speciality channels. But these channels in some way retain the spirit of user-generated content, and will cost a fraction of the budget needed to produce most of today’s pay TV content.

Egged on by parent company Google’s ambitions, YouTube is betting that by 2020, 75 per cent of all programming will either be streamed through or created for the internet. YouTube reckons the internet will lead to a much wider variety of programming, creating the possibility of smart, niche advertising. Google’s search expertise should see it well placed to benefit from these changes. Advertising, incidentally, is likely to become a lot more interactive, with most experts agreeing that it’ll eventually be possible to buy products from within adverts themselves. Imagine watching a particularly persuasive deodorant commercial, and then telling your TV you want the product. Your TV will automatically register an online purchase, and the product will be delivered to your doorstep the next day.

Other predicted changes are even more radical. We’ve already had a look at the incredibly detailed resolution of prototype TVs such as Sharp’s 85 inch LCD. A few years down the line, get ready for screens that are expandable, mobile and highly flexible. Most screens will likely be multi-purpose, and you probably won’t even buy a specific ‘TV set’. You might just buy a screen, put it up in a room, and then have it either display a favourite picture, use it to make a video phone call or stream TV, depending on your need or whim. There are even some technologies in development today that will let any plain surface act as a screen. Imagine getting dressed in front of the mirror, and watching a football game on it at the same time.

You’ll likely never again get dressed on time.

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