As reported on Wired.
BY MAT HONAN
Illustration: Simone Shin
At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, the annual industry orgy in Las Vegas, manufacturers are going to introduce about a zillion new television sets. They’ll come armed with a bevy of specs: Full HD 3-D. 4K. OLED. Wi-Fi. Moth Eye. (Yes, Moth Eye.) The sets will be Internet-ready. They’ll harbor more ports than the eastern seaboard and come bristling with apps to let you watch Hulu and YouTube and Major League Baseball.
None of them are going to make your TV-viewing experience any better.
Is it any wonder the television industry is moribund? Global shipments fell in 2012 and are expected to be flat in 2013. That’s because the manufacturers are solving all the wrong problems. They’re fixated on pixels when the mere act of finding the show you want to watch has become frustrating and loathsome. Until someone solves that, there’s not going to be a compelling reason for most of us to plunk down several grand for a new screen. Even the sharpest 4K set, with the thinnest of bezels and darkest of blacks, isn’t going to help you track down that episode of Breaking Bad you missed.
It’s not as if the engineering-driven corporate giants are unaware of this. One of the big selling points this year will (again) be so-called smart TV. By connecting your set to the Internet and app-ifying it, the promise goes, all the problems of how to watch will be solved. But this completely misses the point.
Let’s say you do want to watch the latest episode of Breaking Bad. Quick: Where do you go? Hulu Plus? Netflix streaming? Amazon Instant Video? Xfinity On Demand? And how do you get there? Via an embedded function in your PS3? Apple TV? Roku? Something else?
We need to be able to decide that we want to watch something and have it just appear, right where we left off, regardless of whether it’s coming from cable or Internet. Navigating into some submenu and then hoping you’ve got the right app isn’t making things better. It shouldn’t take a genius to watch a smart TV.
Want to resurrect the television market? Make a set my houseguests can use. Give it an on-off switch and maybe a volume rocker. Then move everything else to a smartphone app. And make it cross-platform. I tell that app what I want to watch—with voice or text input or gestures—and it figures out if the show is on cable or Hulu or iTunes or Xbox or whatever, then delivers the video in the highest-quality version available, based on my subscriptions.
This is basically Google TV’s raison d’être. But that service lacks too many options (Hulu Plus, for example, and iTunes video). And because it follows the Android model of a device-agnostic platform that manufacturers can customize, the experience is markedly inconsistent from product to product.
Just about everyone is banking on Apple to solve all this. The company is generally great at interfaces, but its storefronts leave much to be desired. Moreover, Apple TV doesn’t work with your cable—or Amazon Instant, for that matter. And while Steve Jobs famously claimed he had cracked this problem, it’s up to Tim Cook to bring it to market.
There’s another problem with waiting for Google or Apple or Amazon or Microsoft or Sony to solve this: They all have skin in the video-delivery game. Each is trying to lock you into its own ecosystem, which is just a recipe for more fragmentation. That’s why the TV manufacturers need to step up.
HDTVs are everywhere, and it’s obvious that people are pretty happy with them. So LG, Samsung, Vizio, and definitely Sharp should stop trying to sell picture quality and gimmicky menus and focus on making TV easy. Because until they do, all a new TV will give you is an exceptionally crisp, clear picture of just how frustrating it is to watch.