from The New York Times:
Now a movement is afoot by chip makers big and small to spur a new generation of TVs with full browser capability, like a personal computer. In October, Intel released its own TV-centric chip, and many other semiconductor designers and manufacturers are doing the same, industry analysts said.
But perhaps the most surprising thing is not how long it is taking to get the Internet on TV but that, to some degree, that slow pace is deliberate. Television manufacturers simply do not seem to want it.
“Sony’s stance is that consumers don’t want an Internet-like experience with their TVs, and we’re really not focused on bringing anything other than Internet video or widgets to our sets right now,” said Greg Belloni, a spokesman for Sony. Widgets is an industry term for narrow channels of Internet programming like YouTube. - read the full story on The New York Times web site.
Translation: We have separate boxes in the works for this. Why merge the two when we can have two separate money makers?
I don’t buy that 100%. if the market for those boxes is big enough, the market for integrating the box directly into some of the TVs and marking it up by the cost of the box is big enough too. there is benefit to the box strategy, but its primary benefit (both to manufacturer and consumer) is that you don’t HAVE to buy a new TV to use it.
Robert, it also allows them to test the public interest in the product in a less expensive gamble.
I’d love to see Sony’s market research on this subject. If I would have said 5 years ago that i’m going to have phones that have full internet capability people would have laughed and said who needs internet on your phone. Now you can’t get a phone without internet capability.
Jon, I’d love to see the research too. I’m not sure I’d want Internet on the TV anyway. I do like it for online gaming, but web surfing via gaming consoles is no great joy, I’m not sure I’d want to do it if it were built directly into the TV instead. Having the Internet on my phone and getting e-mails, being able to check sports scores, etc. very fast with it makes me care even less about being able to do it through the TV.
Tech convergence as been the holy grail for Sony ever since they started to push it with the abortive PSX. It’ll happen eventually.
The only reason I would want internet in my TV would be so I can watch Hulu and the like on my TV. Maybe if networks were able to come up with more interactive TV internet capability would be important, but I don’t think people would want just an internet TV and not have a separate computer as well.
Julia, I agree with you for the most part. I have no need for both “Internet TV” and computer. I think it’s already possible to use a good HDTV, with HDMI input, as a monitor? So long at that’s possible, I have no need for a browser-capable television.
True, clutz. I’m not clamoring for internet TV but I wouldn’t object to it at the right price. But I certainly wouldn’t use it as my main internet browser.
Didn’t Magnavox try this with Web TV – waaaaay back when? The technology is much better now
The big reason is actually cost. Most set-top boxes use low cost chipsets and have very little memory. Few of them have any kind of browser available on them, and porting is hard since browsers are primarily written for PCs with lots of memory and hard drives. Flash is even harder to port to these boxes (like with the iPhone), and that is what many people want when they tell you what websites they want on their TVs. Lastly, you need a pointer remote or the whole experience is painful. Although more will come, today’s example of this is Kodak’s Theatre HD Player which recently got a great review from Wired. It doesn’t have a browser, but let’s you navigate through 1,000s of photos, songs or YouTube videos using a precise pointer remote.
Jim, since the iPhone has pretty much a full version of the Apple OS on it, Flash support on it itself would be fairly easy to support, but Apple claims it’s too slow. Given almost 20 months experience with the iPhone, I think for the most part all of that has been posturing and that Apple didn’t want to support it somewhat deliberately, but not completely due to speed of Flash.
more negotiation posturing and because it wants you to get stuff via iTunes. With Flash support,I could stream everything off my computer (including DVR and live TV!) and watch Hulu. I don’t think Apple wanted that and there may also be issues now where realistically AT&T can’t support a lot of people doing that over 3G (though it would work great over WiFi).
That said, Adobe has been butt slow developing Flash for other mobile platforms outside the iPhone that truly do need a slimmed down version, but that will still likely make it into the world before Flash support for the iPhone comes.
As I said, the reason you don’t see browsers on set-top boxes is mostly cost. Flash is a side factor, but makes it worse still. The iPhone is issue is orthogonal. I wish I hadn’t raised it.
I know, but it is and has been my personal biggest issue with the iPhone
. lack of support for Flash is the only thing standing in the way of complete portable on-demand access to all my media that fits nicely in my pocket.
And that’s true as far as the cable and satellite boxes go, but the game console STBs do have built-in browsers and surfing the web that way is not anything I find myself wanting to do! In the last 30 days out of over 750K visits, we’ve had over 13,000 visits from iPhones and iPod touches, but only 321 visits via PS3, 171 visits via the WII and 79 via the PS
3P.Android phones sent 683 visits.
Currently, even when the technology *is* available the market for surfing the web via TV is much smaller than the market for surfing it via phones. I’m not sure that dynamic ever changes much. What I mean is I think the size of Internet connected TVs via game consoles is MUCH (much, much!) bigger than the number of Android phones in the wild but Android was still 2X the browsing of any of the game consoles.
A Hulu box is in the works.
it (Hulu) already works fine with Boxee (only for Apple computers, or AppleTV right now, though there is an alpha of a Windows version). But I don’t love it because I’m now a HD quality snob. I hate that not all the shows that are even available via Comcasts on-demand are available in HD (ex: BSG and Burn Notice are available, but only in standard def), my 5+ year old HD big screen does a great job with HD, but not so much the non-HD.
I think the Hulu boxes and their ilk will ultimately be usurped for the most part and that the cable companies, for bandwidth efficiency’s sake, will have to figure out how to cache all of that locally and offer it. The connection between me and Comcast is very fast, and there is a LOT of bandwidth; the connection between me and Hulu, not so much, especially if everyone is doing it…
I have a full browser with flash support on my PS3 and surfing the web on the TV is just not the most desirable experience. No keyboard makes typing a chore, and reading lots of text(which is what much browsing is) is more comfortable from a computer. Most online videos are short and of mediocre video quality so watching them on my TV is OK but its much quicker to load up my laptop for youtube.
PS3 online is great for online games, the online store, and would be great for web enabled apps. TV web browsing for the most part is inferior to computer web browsing and who doesn’t have a web enabled computer?
You can just install a TV tuner on your computer.
I have a TV Tuner on my computer and if you’re OK with the smaller screen it works great (and computers make very good DVRs!). But if you want more than just OTA HD (assuming you have good OTA coverage to begin with) it starts getting expensive fast if you want a better HD experience.
Yikes, Hulu hardware? I thought they were smarter than that. Maybe a novelty for a very few, or just an expensive lesson others have already learned.