More clarity on TV

The golden age of television no longer just refers to the profusion of great shows currently being produced, but also to the wave of disruption in hardware and distribution that is imminent. Television shows have never been as plentiful, positively quantitative and generally worthwhile as they are now, and hardware is making fresh breakthroughs. How we consume television content leaves much to be desired, however. And that is about to change.

The future is clearer now. TV is going on-demand.

Simon Dingle, contributor, ITWeb

The mechanisms we currently use to access television content are crappy. Remote controls are unintuitive, pay-television is a broken model and user interfaces desperately need the same kind of revolution that has transformed mobile phones and computing devices. More important than any of that, however, is the utter 'moronity' of content providers that prevents us from watching what we want, when we to - despite the fact that allowing us to do so would make them even richer than they are.

Much was made of Steve Jobs' suggestion in his biography by Walter Isaacson that Apple was about to launch a disruptive new technology in television. As with all things Apple, we don't know for sure whether we'll ever see the long-rumoured Apple television set. Besides, Apple already has a TV product and Jobs might've just been referring to the next version of that.

My sense is that Apple will bolster the disruption of television eventually, but before that happens, we are already seeing other companies take on the evolution of the telly.

One of those organisations has emerged as Apple's archenemy in other industry sectors, and is already a global leader in television. That company is Samsung.

The Korean electronics giant, Samsung owns the global television market. It has displaced Sony as the brand of choice for many enthusiasts, and rivals LG as a panel manufacturer. Now Samsung is working on interfaces.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, Samsung showed off some of its next-generation television technologies. Full disclosure: I attended CES 2012 as a guest of the company.

Both LG and Samsung displayed working 55-inch TVs using the new organic LED - OLED - technology. These will be the first true-LED televisions commercially available, as opposed to the products currently marketed as “LED”, which are really just LCD panels with LED backlighting.

The OLED panels are a striking improvement, not only in their vivid and super-high resolution images, but also their physical dimensions - LG's is only 5 millimetres thick - and power consumption, using a fraction of what existing LCD televisions do.

Sony, meanwhile, has pulled out of the OLED game and used the occasion of CES to introduce a new technology it calls Crystal LED, with an eye-popping 6 million points of light.

All of these displays are remarkable feats of engineering and really have to be seen to be believed.

When it comes to interfaces and connectivity, however, Samsung is picking up a lead on the competition. At CES, the manufacturer showed off televisions that can be controlled using hand gestures, ala Minority Report, and voice controls. While I was not able to test these myself, demonstrations of the technology were impressive.

If the speculation is correct, and Apple is working on a television interface that uses its Siri voice-recognition and “virtual assistant” technology, then we are set for another bare-knuckle patent war between these two giants - although this time Samsung will have been first to market, unlike in the tablet war where it has lost out to Apple in several courts.

Samsung has also established itself in the smart television space that refers to Internet-connected televisions with their own application framework.

With software development kits already available, Samsung televisions are now application platforms, with programs like Skype already available that utilise microphones and cameras available in modern sets. Other applications allow for access to popular online video content from the likes of YouTube and Vimeo. And with the addition of third-party development, the sky is the limit. Already there are third-party Plex clients, games and other apps that have been developed for Samsung's Smart TV Hub on its newer sets.

In the online and app arena, another competitor is developing new momentum. Google TV, considered a failed experiment by many, has ratcheted up some new partnerships. One of the more interesting of these agreements is with OnLive - a company developing cloud-based video games that stream to your television, bypassing the need for a physical console.

The future is clearer now. TV is going on-demand. And while Samsung and its counterparts are first to market with the technical bits and pieces, none of the leading players has made the convincing content agreements that will disrupt television in the same way that they did music.

Perhaps that will be Apple's secret sauce - an agreement with content providers like ABC and HBO that bring you app-based access to their content on a pay-per-episode basis, in a way that is more attuned to the market than current options from the likes of Hulu and iTunes - and with a broader content commitment.

And in those stakes, the real fight is likely to be between Apple and Amazon. It's all about content, not hardware.

So while television manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of price, scale and resolution, what we really need is for content providers to come out of the dark ages. And, for God's sake, abandon the archaic approach they have of licensing content territorially.

Instead, give us your episodes when we want them, how we want them - and I promise you we'll be willing to pay. Not doing so will exclude you from the next era of television, which is imminent.