UK Edition
CES 2019: 'Smart' TVs have become the new battleground for tech titans
Inside the vast, brightly-lit halls at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, crowds of people were gathered, phones at the ready, to watch a flurry of red Chinese lanterns rising towards the ceiling.
But this wasn’t a terribly misjudged PR stunt, and the crowds of people weren’t there to release lanterns. They were there to watch a TV.
For a trade show at which the latest technology is being showcased, it may seem a little strange for there to be so much interest in the humble TV.
It wasn’t long ago that experts were heralding their demise - and for good reason. Back in 2008, more than half of all Brits said the TV was the most essential item they owned, but last year, that figure had dropped to just 28pc.
“Younger and older people’s consumption habits are increasingly different,” explained Tony Hall, the BBC director general. “Younger people watch less television than older people. They listen to less radio. And where young audiences go now, older audiences will probably follow.”
He’s not wrong to say that it is younger people who have been the driving force behind this change. In fact, according to the 2018 Global Consumer Streaming Habit survey, around 73pc of millennials are streaming content at least once a week on a mobile device, and 65pc are streaming on a computer or a laptop.
But there are signs this shift away from the TV may not be permanent - or at least the tech giants don’t seem to think it is.
In Las Vegas this week, a whole series of tie-ups were announced which made it pretty clear that Silicon Valley titans were vying for a place on customer’s TVs.
Major TV players including Samsung, LG and Hisense all announced they would be opening up more of their devices to content from Amazon, Google and Apple, cementing partnerships which first started emerging in the past year.
As it stands, LG is one of the only companies that has technology from both Amazon and Google built in, with many others choosing one main assistant, and then having compatibility with the rest.
TVs have recently become a “very ripe area” for tech giants to compete for dominance as the idea of a smart home becomes more mainstream, says Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen.
“These areas didn’t exist before, the smart home space didn’t exist, and that’s why TVs have become more of a battleground recently.
“The tech companies want to be at all the touchpoints for their users and TV is a great one because still a lot of people spend a lot of time in front of these screens that they have at home,” he says.
Amazon’s George Tsipolitis agrees: “The TV is a large footprint in your home, primarily in your living room but then also in other areas, like bedrooms, it is possible to grow. It’s really where the family sits down.
“And as we noticed the landscape, as smart TVs became smarter, that’s when we started really investing in them.”
Competition is particularly heating up given the long ownership of TVs compared to, say, smartphones. Experts suggest, on average, people own their TVs for between five and seven years and so, if those tech companies cannot get their technology embedded in the TV now they could risk being shut out of the living room for many years.
It may seem strange that none of the major tech players have launched their own TVs then, but LG’s Darren Petersen says this is purely because “they probably haven’t quite managed to crack TV OS”.
“It’s a way of them still remaining part of that evolving and future smart TV experience,” he says.
This push to be available via the TV does not come as much of a surprise. In a recent survey by Accenture, the company found that, when it comes to connected TVs, around 96pc of consumers said they expected their choice of TV to be influenced by the ease of integration with their voice assistant.
“It’s clear that voice assistants are influencing the consumer technology and service ecosystem in a way no other device has,” says Greg Roberts, from Accenture.
For an idea of how much weight Google and Amazon are placing in this space, you only have to look at the focus of their stands at this year’s CES. Both were heavily showcasing new Assistant features, including an Alexa-enabled bike, and a tool on Google Assistant which almost instantaneously translates sentences.
But, more so than any other product in the home, Chinese company Hisense says the TV will become a focal point for integration.
“Probably in the future, it will not be this kind of appliance that’s so important,” he says, signalling to his smartphone.
“Coming home, people will say, ‘I can leave that for a little bit’, because yes we’d need a small phone when we’re commuting, but at home we would come to the biggest screen and that would be the TV.”
Not only this, but as homes become increasingly more connected, with more devices looped in to the Internet of Things, Hisense’s vice president of marketing Franjo Bobinac sees the TV as being the main control hub.
“The TV will become the centre-piece of the future connected home, where you control your other devices, and that’s why we will talk a lot in future about content.
“It’s not going to be enough to have the best picture for the TV or the fastest processor, but also who brings the best content on the TV. And that is content in regards to games, sports, music, cinema, art, education and those kind of things.”
The expansion to include a whole host of things under the content umbrella has already begun. Look at Apple, which this week agreed to bring its AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support to TV sets made by Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio. This technology could essentially be used to help people control their lights and TVs simultaneously, through Siri.
But even as technology companies appear to be jostling for a place on the TV, Amazon’s Tsipolitis says he sees a future in which there won’t be “one company to rule them all”.
“Amazon likes bringing value to customers at a price that we think makes sense so we’re going to continue to do that,” he says, pausing.
“And I’m sure there will be other companies that are successful as well,” he adds, quickly.