The Coming Tech Battle Over 'Smart TVs'

An anonymous reader writes "One persistent theme from this year's CES is that television manufacturers are racing to establish the concept of 'Smart TVs,' sets that integrate modern browsing features, control through voice or motion, application support, and even upgradability. This article suggests the living room will be the location of the newest tech war. Quoting: 'To compete, the companies will have to offer carefully curated, high-quality applications and be open to supporting mobile devices such as tablets. Other media companies have already started: Comcast, for example, announced that it's going to allow OnDemand streaming not only to Samsung Smart TV's but also to the iPad. The TV makers are hoping that the multitude of additional features will be enough to trigger turnover like the industry saw after the introduction of flat-panel screens, Bloomberg noted. It's a big market, if the television makers can figure out how to crack it.'"

Re:Finally

[Lumpy]

It's been that way forever.

Panasonic, Samsung and LG as well as NEC all run linux on their HDTV's and always have.

Cool part is some TV's have a bug that let you into the OS via the rs232 port (if you bought one that was not bottom of the line and is missing that port) I was rooting around in a NEC E322 just yesterday looking through /etc and /bin. Just wished the TV had xmodem software installed so I could pull files off of it.

Re:Completely wrong focus

[troutman]

The cable companies are not entirely to blame for the high prices and lack of viewing options.

The real reason CATV bills are too high is because of the content companies, studios, and the local TV stations. All of their contracts compel the cable operator to pick up not just one or two channels, but entire "packages" of channels, sometimes 10 or more, in order to get the channel you really want to carry. Often times, the cable operate MUST provide a channel to every single subscriber, or the studio won't let them have it at all. The contracts also have provisions about where the channels can be placed in the channel lineup. You also have channels that only a small number of customers are interested in (like certain premium sports channels or packages), but the CATV operator is contractually forced into providing to ALL customers, and into paying a hefty fee (above $3/month per customer) for a single channel.

I have seen small market TV stations asking for over a $1/month per subscriber for the privilege of the CATV operator carrying the exact same programming they broadcast over the air for free.

Lastly, the content providers usually want to lock the CATV companies into multiple year contacts, with price escalations. They are also putting language into the contracts specifically to forbid any sort of IP network based content distribution to the end customer.

Re:Can't wait for the voice controlled TV's

[SuricouRaven]

Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.

Re:Can't wait for the voice controlled TV's

[tlhIngan]

Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.

Kinect already does this as part of the tuner process. It plays some audio, and uses its microphone array to figure out room acoustics. It's used to help the media playback cancellation (it knows what is being played, but it needs to apply the room transformation to generate a cancellation signal so the microphone array can hear better).

From my experience, it works remarkably well. Especially when you consider it's hearing you from a distance and there's speakers all around it blasting audio. (The array helps by also helping to locate the audio and zero in on it).

Even more so if you've played with microphones and realize that hearing something at a distance is a lot harder because of the lower SNR. The brain does a remarkable job of it, but if you've watched YouTube videos of people who are far from the camera speaking, it can be quite difficult to make out what they're saying.

Re:Can't wait for the voice controlled TV's

[delinear]

Indeed - Kinect, for instance, has commands prefixed by "XBOX...". A user-configurable prefix would be even better.