The History of Smart TVs

satellite TV business. People have been presaging the death of cable and satellite TV for ages. In fact, I kind of did it in an interview I did with CNN years ago. Turns out that was a dumb move on my part. Not that I was wrong. I wasn't, but at the time the company I worked for was owned by Discovery Communications, and turns out the bosses of a cable company are not happy. If you may the observation that cable is in trouble. Now, I maintain it's not

like I caused folks to dump cable. I wasn't telling people to get rid of their cable. It's just observing the trend. But you know, I guess if you yell out Iceberg, you get the blame for the fact that the ship hit it. Anyway, that's not this episode, so

we will look into that in the future. But this episode, I'm going to uh cover something else because if I want to talk about cable and satellite decline, I really need to sift through a lot of information, a lot of statistics before I do that, because it can actually be tricky to know what numbers to trust in that field. There's some sites out there that uh give pretty dramatic numbers for the decline in subscribers, and I'd want to verify all of that before I actually do an episode.

So instead, today I thought I would talk a bit about smart television's, you know, essentially the standard kind of TV that you can buy these days. Not that every television on the market these days is a smart TV, but most of them are, like definitely the ones that tend to get prominent uh placement in in uh in in places like best Buy, those are definitely smart TVs. And you know, these are the kind of televisions that come preloaded with the ability to connect to various online

content providers, you know, like streaming services and whatnot. And while they are the norm Now, it was not that long ago that your typical television was just an output device, a dumb one like you would tune it to a channel, uh, you know, or perhaps connected to a media player like a VCR or laser disc or something, and you saw whatever was on that signal feed, and that was it, and and it was one way, right. You weren't sending

information back. No one knew what it was you were watching, unless you happen to be a Nielsen family, which would it require you to connect another piece of hardware to your television and that would register what it was you were watching when you were watching it for the purposes of collecting ratings. But most people, you know, they're just watching TV, and whatever they're watching, that data has lost. Today's televisions are very different. But how did we get there?

When did televisions start to turn quote unquote smart, or if you prefer, when did our televisions start to become nefarious data gathering tools feeding into the data rich ecosystem of our modern world. Let's find out. First, let's get into some prehistoric stuff. So for decades, televisions were dumb. Depending upon whom you ask, they were dumb in different ways or they would make you dumb. You know, they

would be the so called opiate of the masses. They were also large, they were heavy, they were clunky, you know. The earliest TVs were essentially pieces of furniture. They depended upon cathode ray tubes, which look a little bit like lightbulbs. These cathode ray tubes shoot a tight beam of electrons at the backside of the television screen. They scan line by line down the screen, and in the process they hit elements that would luminess and create the pictures that

you would see on the other side. In the nineteen sixties, color television began to transform the industry, though it would take you know, like more than a decade for color TV tech to surpass the old, reliable, and perhaps most importantly, less expensive, black and white television technology. Meanwhile, there were scientists and engineers who were creating the tech that would allow for the emergence of flat screens. Now, keep in mind, these old CRT sets were boxing. These were the big

cabinet style televisions. You could not easily mount these to a wall or anything like that. I mean, you could mount into a wall, but they'd be sticking way out on like an arm that was mounted to a stud in the wall, otherwise they would just fall right down. But as early as the nineteen six steas, you had teams creating the tech that would allow for flat panel TVs, and it would take decades for those to come to

the market. At the same time, you had other folks creating devices that would allow consumers to connect other stuff to their televisions. So in the old old days, really the only thing you could connect your TV two wasn't antenna and you would get over the air broadcasts. Later on, you'd be able to connect your television to a cable connection, either from a cable service provider or later a satellite dish.

Plus you would have connections that would let you hook up a VCR, laser disc video game system, that kind of thing to your TV. The television was gradually becoming a more versatile technology, or rather it's compatibility with other technologies would increase television's utility. The TV itself wasn't really getting that much more advanced, surprisingly, at least to me. One predecessor to smart TVs launched as early as the

nineteen seventies. Now I say surprisingly because in the nineteen seventies, you still had folks building out our panet, and our ponnet in itself was kind of a predecessor to the Internet. It's where a lot of the protocols that would later end up powering the Internet were first designed. So how could you have a smart TV if there were no Internet for the TV to connect to? Enter the video text? That's V I, D, E O t X. Now, in many ways, video text was like computer bulletin board systems

or bbs is. These were things where one person could turn their computer into a host machine by running some software, and they could allow other people to dial in using an over the phone line modem into that PC in order to access files, maybe save files to the machine. They could leave messages for other bbs members, they could play the occasional game AIM that kind of thing. So it wasn't the Internet. It was contained to this one

computer system, but people could dial into it. View text was similar, but it was meant mainly for television's or dumb terminals. Now, the view text typically consisted of two pieces of hardware that you needed in addition to your television. One piece of hardware was essentially a set top box, that you would connect to your TV. The set top

box would connect to your phone line as well. Later versions would be able to connect to cable TV feeds, so it would connect like a VCR to your TV and would have an outward connection that would connect to some specific provider that would let your television display information sent over that transmission line from whatever company it was that offered the service. The other piece of hardware was

some sort of controller. Frequently it looked like a keyboard, and these would often use infrared signals like your typical remote control to send messages to the set top box, and that made the video text. Technically, it could be a two way communications technology. Not only would you be able to view information on your TV like news articles or stock market quotes or whether information or whatever, you

could potentially send information back up to the service. So some of these would offer message boards like classified ads, that kind of thing. You could actually leave messages on those boards, and that became a popular service in a few places where this tech actually took off, which was mostly in France. Like it launched in different places around the world, but in most places it failed to get

much traction apart from France. Now one reason why it didn't get much traction is the hardware was typically pretty expensive. There were a few places that really tried to make it work. The UK really pushed for this. Uh there. The Post Office was really promoting video text technology pretty hard. And you might wonder why was the post Office interested

in this? While the time the Post Office was in charge of the telephone lines in the UK, and in the UK folks were charged for using the phones, even if it was for local calls. So the more you use your phone, the more you had to pay the post office. So why not create a service that encourages people to tie up their phone lines and generate revenue. Except it didn't really take off in the UK. Now,

video text was fundamentally different from the Internet. Yes, you were getting information sent over transmission lines from another place and you were viewing it on a screen, but apart from that, it was very different because the Internet is a network of computer networks, and over the Internet you can access information stored on servers that are all over the world, not just one server, but any of the

servers that are available to you to go to. Obviously, some servers have textions in place where unless you have the proper credentials, you don't get in, but you get my point. Video text was more like a direct line to a specific company's service. So if you purchased a video text system, you could only access whatever the company that offered this system had. That was it. You couldn't swap over to some other company's service unless you were to go and buy all new hardware and connect to that.

So imagine for a second that you could only use your computer to access I don't know all of Disney's material, but nothing from anyone else. If you wanted to be able to access I don't know Reddit, you would have to go out and get a different computer and subscribe to a different service. It's not exactly consumer friendly. One brilliant bit of business with the video text was that the companies that offered them could double debt in a way.

They could offer to carry information from specific providers, like content providers, like a like a prominent news paper, for example, and they would charge a fee to the newspaper and

in return they would carry the newspapers content to users. So, in other words, content creators would have to pay a fee to video the video text provider for the privilege of having their content sent to viewers, and I'm guessing they would do this because it was a new way to make those viewers aware of the source of the information and that hopefully they would go out and then

subscribe directly to the periodical for example. Then the video text provider turns around and also charges a subscription fee to the user on top of all the hardware fees they had to pay in order to get the system in the first place. So the video text company would

get paid on both ends, the content and and the consumption. Now, this is the kind of stuff that net neutrality proponents point at when they make their arguments that if you don't have net neutrality, you can have a situation where Internet service providers are charging both customers to access service and content creators to carry their content. That would fragment

the Internet experience. A person who's subscribing to I s P A could end up with a fundamentally different experience from someone subscribed to I s P B, all because the two different I s p s only offer access to a subsection of all the stuff out on the Internet. But I digress. The hardware and services were so expensive that they just never really took off in almost every market except in France. In fact, France was really an outlier.

The relevant service in France, called Mini Tell, was popular enough that it was actually more popular than the Internet, even as late as there were more people on France's Mini Tell service than there were subscribers to the Internet. But even many Tell could only remain relevant for so long, and in twenty twelve the service finally went dark. Still, Videotel, which had lots of different proprietary names depending upon the region,

acted as a as a kind of predecessor for smart television's. Granted, this technology was an add on. It was a set top box that you would connect to your TV, so it wasn't like it was directly integrated into the television set itself. But some of the ideas relating to smart TVs were definitely showing up as early as the nineteen seventies, using the television to access additional content and services beyond

your normal TV shows. Now, when we come back, we'll talk more about the early history of smart TVs, but first let's take a break for these messages. Another thing I need to mention is a Japanese technology, though this one we have to have some caveats. So, according to gen Gregory in his collection of articles, which is title Japanese Electronics, Technology, Enterprise and Innovation, which I have to add, is not necessarily an unimpeachable source when it comes to

historical data. According to him, Japanese companies developed an intelligent television receiver his words, that would allow Japanese broadcasters to include additional information that viewers would be able to access if they happen to have a television with one of those receivers. But beyond this assertion, I can't find a whole lot of information about this. Doesn't mean that that he's wrong or that he's not referring to something specific.

I just could not find corroborating information. However, I found a ton of different sources that reference Gene Gregory, So they're using him as kind of the prime source for this particular entry into the history of smart TVs. It very well maybe true, I just can't find verification for it, at least I it, and before the recording of this podcast, maybe I will eventually come across some and then I

can extend extensive apologies to Geene Gregory. But the idea was that there is unused bandwidth in a channel's range of frequencies, and that broadcasters would be able to tap into some of that because they weren't going to be using very much of it in order to send some additional information to viewers who happen to have these kinds of televisions. So if you do a search for the history of smart TVs, you're likely to see some mention

of this somewhere. But as far as I can tell, it all traces back to Gregory's collection of articles, and some people have said that he gets a little loosey goosey with historic facts because that wasn't really the relevant part of it. It was more of an overall view of Japan's influence in the innovation in general, and you know, the evolution of technology in particular. From there, things go quiet in the smart TV space for more than a decade.

But in the mid nineties, Jean Marie Gattau and Dominique Batrand filed for a patent titled Television system in a Digital or Analog Network. Now, the abstract for the patent

reads as follows. I'm just going to quote it directly, quote an economic television system used in a digital or analog network, incorporating at least one user identification device, at least monodirectional or bidirectional connector to data systems, and at least one image, sound, and data decompression and or compression element.

This system also comprises at least one instantaneous acquisition means application to the fields of interactive multi transactions, remote monitoring, simultaneous transaction, or other communications uses end quote and like all patents, that's pretty wordy. It's a real, real dense

with jargon. But in other words, the patent calls for a system that allows for a connecting a television not just to a network like a computer network, but to other components as well, including stuff like input devices such as light pens and barcode readers, or output devices like printers. Essentially, the patent is laying out the components needed to turn the television from a passive display device into something more interactive.

Though the inclusion of monodirectional or bidirectional means you could have a simplified version of this that's only output oriented, where you can't have any sort of meaningful interaction beyond consumption. So that patent dates back to Does that mean that's when we started to get smart TVs not at all. See, when you file a patent, the patent is supposed to describe a technology that will work. You're not supposed to be able to file patents for stuff that can't work.

Though that gets pretty tricky in itself. Uh. And it's supposed to work using the approach that's described within the patent. However, there is no requirement that you actually make the ding darn thing, so you don't have to come to the patent office with a working model. You might find out that actually building the device ends up being more expensive

and time consuming than it would be worth. Like, you might come up with a technology that does work, but it turns out that if you try and make it and then sell it, you wouldn't be able to sell any because you would have to charge such a high price to recapture your expenses, no one would ever buy it. You might also find that you can create the hardware, but then if you don't have content to run on

the hardware, the hardware is not very useful. I mean, imagine seeing a new kind of media player, but there's no actual content available on that specific medium. That wouldn't do you any good. It would just take up space. It would either take up physical space if it were something like, you know, kind of like a VCR, or it would take up digital storage space if it were talking about more of a virtual media player. And this is a big issue we see for video game consoles.

They have to have compelling games available at launch, or else there's no reason to buy them. Well, the patented idea would lay dormant for another decade plus some change, but that didn't mean you didn't have companies thinking about how to deliver Internet content televisions. Let's talk about another initiative that launched not too long after Jean Marie and Dominique filed that patent in nine talking about web TV. I actually knew a guy who had web TV. I

only saw it in action a little bit. I thought it was charming and odd and slow. But web tv was a startup company and it was co founded by a former Apple engineer, the guy who actually developed the QuickTime technology, Steve Perlman. He unveiled this idea in nineteen nineties six and I would say the web TV concept was kind of like video texts from two decades earlier,

but it had been updated for the Internet age. So instead of a set top box that would connect to a specific company's services, this was a set top box that would let you use your television to browse the World Wide Web. So why even do that? Well, we're gonna jump into some stereotypes for a moment. One stereotype is that older people have trouble grasping younger technology. And as a rapidly older person myself, I can at least

anecdotally vouch for this. You should see the look on my face when I have to dive into our project management tools. Tar knows. We've emailed about it. It's not that the tools are bad, it's just I'm old and I do not learn new things very well, which is a good thing that I run a tech podcast. Huh well, self deprecating humor aside, there was this perceived untapped market of older television owners, uh that weren't owners of computers. That these are people that we could access if we

could find a way to get them online. So these were users who were less inclined to purchase a computer for the purposes of going online, simply because that was a big expense. It was unfamiliar technology, so there was there were barriers to entry. So why television's well, everyone knows how to work at television. They've been around for decades.

So selling a device that you could just hook up to your television, like a VCR, which was another technology that had been around for a couple of decades, that was an easier sell, at least so it was thought at the time. Web TV was positioned as a technology that could bring the world of the web to your living room and it wouldn't require anyone to learn how

to operate one of those gosh darn computers. But the challenge of bringing online content like web pages to a television spanned beyond the technical While the technology needed to do that was relatively straightforward, essentially meant building a purpose built computer that was a set top box and it had a built in modem that could send signals to the television, getting it to be a good experience was more challenging. The Web was not designed to be viewed

from a distance. The assumption every web designer was making in the nineties is that their visitors were going to be sitting at a computer they might be at most two feet away from the screen. All the layouts and fonts, everything that was in web design was aimed at that experience, the assumption that the person who was consuming the website

was on a computer not far from a screen. If you're sitting on your living room couch and your several feet away from your TV screen, that experience isn't going to work for you. You won't be able to read anything. The print would be way too small, and it would be difficult to navigate the pages. It would be hard to click on links because you wouldn't be able to

see which link to what. So Perlman and his team focus not just on the technical requirements to make this connectivity possible, but also on the user experience and the display settings so that once you were online, you could actually see what you were doing. That would mean doing stuff like having to increase font sizes and figuring out how to get around the layouts of web designers and stuff.

And the font size thing was a relatively straightforward solution, but navigating pages what ended up being slow and cumbersome. It wasn't bad if you just need to check on a page for a moment, like maybe just check your email, but it was not a satisfying experience if you really wanted to and pardon my oldness here, Surf the web, as we used to say, web TV didn't get enough consumer support to really get the initiative or to get

any real leverage. And that's interesting because a decade later we would see a transformation in the way people consumed web content that did force web designers to change how they worked. Web TV failed, right, web TV was not popular enough. If it had become popular, then there would have been an incentive for web designers to create at least a version of their sites that was optimized for the web TV experience. That would have made browsing on

web TV much better. But with such a small target audience because not a lot of people were adopting web TV, there was no real reason to put forth that kind of effort. But a decade later, smartphones would succeed where web TV failed, and that the trend of people relying more on their smartphone to access websites and services meant that web designers were compelled to respond or else risk becoming irrelevant. Smartphones forced a change in how web designers

approached their work. I should know, because I was very well aware of that working at a website like there was a lot of work done to figure out how to optimize how stuff works for the mobile experience, because as more and more people were switching to using their phones to casually access the internet, that's where our audience was going. We had to respond or else we wouldn't have an audience anymore. But web tv never had enough customers to follow that same path, so it just kind

of floundered and obscurity. Now, oddly enough, Microsoft actually went on to acquire web tv for a whopping four five million dollars when the little startups service had only been active for like eight months, so less than a year in action, Microsoft swoops in and buys this company. So you might ask, well, why were the folks at Microsoft

thinking that this was a good idea. I don't know the answer to that, But then we're also talking about a company that had a lot of missteps in this era, leading up to and including the company's failure with Windows Mobile. I'll have to do a full episode about Windows Mobile

at some point to now. Just to close out the web Tv part of this story, Microsoft would continue to support the service until two thousand thirteen, although in order to do that it did have to send out some updates because as equipment gets older, it can't necessarily keep up with the changes that are happening on the software side. That's actually is a really big problem with smart TVs

in general. The Web evolves at a rapid pace and services evolve at a rapid pace as well, and in the case of web TV, the hardware couldn't accommodate all the changes, and so the hardware would become obsolete over time. Plus it would cost money to continue to support that service. Microsoft had to invest in order to keep that service going, and as we see, that's a combin issue with smart

TVs today in general. The required ongoing support means that there's an ongoing expense for companies that eventually tend to decide to pull the plug on that support, and that leaves customers with what who own that particular kind of hardware kind of up the creek, But we'll come back to that anyway. Microsoft would redirect a lot of its

web TV efforts to its video game console division. The Xbox three sixty would include many of the features that could trace their lineage back to the web TV days. Uh and it's set top box. Actually, really, the video game consoles kind of became front and center in this world. Briefly,

you might remember when Microsoft was promoting Xbox One. The idea was that the Xbox One was going to be the center for your media entertainment system, and it would allow all sorts of access to streaming content, to live TV, UH, it would open up gesture controls, all this kind of stuff, and actually ended up alienating a lot of Xbox fans because they were just interested or primarily interested in games.

But Microsoft was kind of shifting its promotion to say that this is more than a games console, and meanwhile the fans were saying, okay, but tell me more about the games part of it. Anyway, we're gonna get back to the actual emergence of smart TVs. Just as web TV was starting to become a thing, we started to see the first consumer flat panel televisions and flat panel TVs and smart TVs. Obviously, those are not the same thing. These are two different technologies that just happened to converge

into the current form factor for television's UH. And at this point in the late ninety nineties, when flat panel TVs first became a consumer technology, the tech was very very young and very very expensive. Like if you wanted one of the first consumer flat panel televisions, you had to be willing to shell out like fifteen thousand dollars

for the privilege. And obviously, as moreties began to produce flat models and improve manufacturing processes, we saw prices come down to a point where you didn't have to choose between buying a new flat TV or buying a car. And the same thing would be true with smart television's. Early smart TVs because they had this additional capability, would be marketed at a much higher price, but then it became the norm and prices would come down. Okay, we're

gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we'll start talking about what are arguably the first true smart televisions and where they came from the first another break. Okay, we were in the nine nineties before the break, and we're gonna skip ahead a bunch of years because while we started to see set top streaming services, we weren't really seeing much movement of incorporating those directly into televisions. Now, there would be attempts to bring some streaming capabilities and

digital offerings to TVs. Once we get into the mid two thousand's, a guy named Anthony Would created the earliest digital video recorder or DVR in the late ninety nineties. That would set the stage for companies like ti Vo to have a brief but impactful run in the industry. DVR tech saw some stiff opposition from the cable television world. Uh, this is typical. Whenever there's a technology that allows users to make a copy of something, you often see established

industries really put up a fuss about this. So in this case, cable companies didn't like the idea of folks being able to digitally record content and then, horror of horrors, skip commercials when the commercials popped up bad news. Folks were already doing that with older tech like VCRs, but that opposition slowed down the growth of the DVR business

until the early two thousand's. In two thousand two, Would would go on to found a new company called Roku, but it would be several years before a Roku streaming device would be available for consumers, and even longer for

Roku capabilities to be built directly into television sets. The first Roku device was also the first one capable of bringing Netflix is streaming service to television's Originally, Netflix was going to produce its own hardware, but then Read Hastings, who at that time was the soul CEO of Netflix. Today he is co CEO along with Ted Surrenders. He figured that if Netflix started to make its own hardware, that would potentially scuttle future partnerships with other hardware manufacturers

because they would view Netflix as a competitor. So he thought it would be better to not get into the hardware business instead just be the entity that provides the streaming service and partner with hardware manufacturers to bring that streaming service to customers. Roku was then handed the chance to make a name for itself by being the first product that let Netflix customers stream shows directly to their television's The company produced its first Roku player in two

thousand eight. One year earlier, in two thousand seven, HP introduced the Media Smart TV. This television would connect to your home network, so it required a PC a computer in order to stream content from the computer to the television. If you wanted to access online content so that capability wasn't native to the television itself, you had to have a computer that would act as kind of like a

set top box. Sort of like the Roku player, and some people refer to the Media Smart TV as the first smart TV, which would put the origin for smart TVs at two thousand seven. But the Media Smart Well innovative wasn't a huge hit. Samsung would create a quote unquote smart TV in two thousand eight that would only be available in South Korea. It was the p A

VV borda T the seven fifty or have bordou. It allowed customers to watch YouTube videos, they could scan news and weather, and they could do a few other Internet related activities. This television didn't need a set top box, didn't need a PC in order to access these features. The TV itself had an Ethernet port. It also had a USB port if you wanted to connect it to a network via a USB adapter. It also came with

a gigabyte of content preloaded on the television itself. It did not have writeable storage, so you couldn't use the television like a DVR, but you could access online content, you know, in the form of stuff like YouTube videos. Okay, so a lot of other stuff was going on around this time that would really push the evolution of smart TV. So here in the United States. The country was in the midst of a digital transformation in which all broadcasts

were going to switch from analog to digital. There was a lot of digital broadcast sting already, but now it was going to be a requirement. You were going to abandon analog transmissions for over the air broadcasts. Now this was when we first launched the tech Stuff podcast. We've gotten to the point where tech Stuff is a thing at this point, and one of our early episodes explained why some people would need a digital to analog converter, so it would accept digital signals converted to analog and

then send the analog signal to the television. But they would only be needed for over the air broadcasts, and it would be only for people who are actually using antennas to pick up their their television signals. This whole digital transformation had people in the United States confused. There were a lot of efforts to try and clear out that confusion, some of which were met with, you know,

differing amounts of success. There were a lot of people who are ordering these converters, and it turned out they didn't actually need the converters because they were getting their feed from like a cable box or something, but they didn't know because it wasn't terribly well communicated early on. This also, however, meant that the country was committing fully to digital transmissions and that would incentivize more innovation in

the digital TV space. Another big development was that more households in the United States were gaining access to broadband connections. Without broadband, streaming content is not good. It's kind of allowsy, particularly if you want to stream content at a size and resolution that would work well on a television. But this was when we started seeing an improvement in broadband accessibility in the United States. Of course, we are nowhere

near done with that phase. There's still plenty of communities in the US that have little to no broadband access, so it is not mission accomplished by any stretch of the imagination. The introduction of television is like the media smart and the p a VV sent the message that this is going to be the future of television, or at least a future of television. If not the future, I mean, you had companies that were hedging their bets,

but it was definitely seen as a potential future. Another big one that was being debated at the time was three D TV which ultimately went nowhere that that that branch of the timeline ended in a dead end. Then we entered into the era of widgets. Widgets. You know, these days we would just call them apps, but at

the time we called them widgets. And some widgets were very very simple, like it might just give you a quick weather report to you know, highlight and choose that widget, or maybe a stock market read out or a list of headlines. Some ended up getting more complicated, like you could have a widget that would allow users to launch

a service like Netflix or YouTube. These days, you're likely to find smart TVs that have built in interfaces for numerous streaming services, although with more arriving all the time, uh, you're not guaranteed to have access to all of them natively through the television and there were some drawbacks right so. A big one was that these televisions frequently need ongoing support from the manufacturers to ensure that those features remain usable.

This gets to that issue where new streaming services launch, and unless the company that makes your smart TV is able to patch out and update where they're able to include an app that lets you access this new streaming service, you might find that you can't do it unless you have some additional piece of hardware connected to your TV.

And just as we saw with the rapid evolution of the web, which ultimately left web TV in the lurch, we see streaming services change as well, and the behind the scenes changes of these streaming services might not be immediately noticeable to the average person, right like the changes could be done in codex and transmission and compression and decompress and all these kind of things might be changing behind the scenes, and ideally as a user, you don't

even know about it. You don't need to know about it. The technology handles it. But in some cases these changes can make a service incompatible with older hardware, Like there can come a point where the service has requirements that

the older hardware simply is unable to meet. Now, if you are lucky, your hardware will be resilient enough so that your TV's manufacturer can hatch it repeatedly send up out updates to the equipment so that way you can continue to access the services and it keeps your television relevant.

But in some cases that's just not a possibility, or the company just chooses not to support it anymore, and that means over time, those TVs lose functionality, right, Like, you might have an icon that says you can connect to YouTube, but it doesn't work because YouTube itself has changed and evolved and is no longer compatible with the old hardware of your TV, and so now it's just a widget that doesn't do anything except take up space

on your screen. And this was a problem, particularly for the first couple of generations of smart TVs, where because of changes that were not in the control of the manufacturers, the functions would lose relevance pretty quickly. So, yeah, that's a problem if you don't want to have to replace your television every couple of years. Right. You know, the price of TVs has fallen dramatically over time, but you probably still don't want to have to trade out your

television over and over. So one big downside of smart TV technology is there's no guarantee that all the features on the TV, the stuff that is meant to sell that television, there's no guarantee that those will remain relevant for the lifetime of your TV, or at least the amount of time you expect to own and use that TV. Sure, you know it should continue to serve as an actual television, right, It's not like all functionality is going to go out.

In most cases, I assume would be a terrible idea to have a hardware that would completely shut down the television entirely once it got irrelevant. But you know, if you want to do all the other stuff, you'd be stuck. You would have to find a set top box solution to give you more functionality. But you have to remember set top boxes have the same kind of limitations that smart TVs do. That services can evolve beyond the capability of the hardware to present those services. So that's one

big issue is just obsolescence. These devices can go obsolete faster than you would prefer. Because if you're buying a TV, chances are you plan on using that TV for a while. I don't know about all of you, but like the television I have in my living room, I've owned that for I don't know, maybe a decade at this point somewhere along there, and it works fine. It's not a four case set either. It's I have thought about upgrading to a four K, but I haven't, and it's fine,

especially since I don't watch much television at all. There's no reason for me to upgrade. Well, you don't want to have basic feature servior television become defunct and require you to upgrade every couple of years. That would be very frustrating. Another big issue, and a growing issue with

modern televisions is privacy. So in June of this year, this year being twenty two for any of y'all listening from the future, Roku and Walmart announced a new partnership and the plan is for Walmart to enable viewers the chance, the opportunity, if you will, to purchase featured products directly through their Roku streaming service. So, in other words, you can imagine a situation where maybe you're watching a particular show and there's some product that's prominently featured on the show.

You know, I see this all the time with laptops, Like if you watch certain movies, you can tell what year they were made based upon the incredibly prominent logos that are on display from all the different laptops that

are open on different tables and stuff. Well, in this case, there's a chance that Walmart can leverage that and then shoot you an AD to give you the chance to buy the product you've just seen on screen through Walmart, just by pressing a button on your Roku remote more than that, because smart TVs are essentially data gathering machines. Remember old TVs, it was output only, like no one knew what it was you were watching. They didn't know, you know, if you were paying attention to something that

had a lot of product placement in it. But with smart TVs that data goes both ways, and while you're watching that can all be sent back to the streaming service provider or the manufacturer, whatever it may be. That means data is being gathered as you watch different programs and when you watch, and how much you watch, all of those kind of things. Well, that would mean that Walmart could actually start to target ads to you based

upon your behavior. Walmart and Roku can analyze what you do and come up with the most ideal way to present ads to you that are most likely to get a positive response from you. So, in other words, your TV watches you. You're not watching the TV as much as the TV is watching you as measuring your behaviors in an effort to sell you more stuff and to

do it more effectively. And that it's possible that the ads you encounter as you navigate through the user experience are going to be based off that analysis of your behavior. So you could see this extending beyond this kind of implementation that I'm describing. Imagine that you have streaming services that are switching to add supported tears of service, presumably at a lower cost for subscribers, so that people who don't want to pay full price to subscribe to whatever

can pay us a lower fee for ads supported access. Well, you can imagine those streaming services paying attention to what people are watching and how they watch it, and then presenting ads that are customized based upon that user behavior. It's very easy to imagine you have five different households sitting down to watch the exact same program on the exact same streaming services, but they all get different ads

based upon the behaviors within that individual household. In order for that to work, that means your television is constantly paying attention to what you're doing on the TV, just as we've seen with computers and smartphones and other smart devices. So in a way, this is nothing new. It's not like, oh,

this new specter of surveillance is upon us. We've been under that for a long time, but now we've got another a piece of technology that is participating in that surveillance in an effort to make money off of your information, either by using your information to target ads to you more effectively, or maybe even to sell your information to some other third party, depending upon the user agreement for

that particular streaming service in that particular hardware. There are definitely privacy concerns with that kind of approach, but we're likely to see several instances in which people's privacy tends to be compromised before we start to see corrections to prevent similar issues in the future, just because that's typically how it works fun times, and it's not likely to change. If anything, I expect we're going to see a lot more integration of programming matched with user behavior that is

fueled by things like the smart television technology. According to Hub Entertainment Research, fifty seven percent of all televisions are now smart sets, so that means they now effectively they out and borthy non smart or dumb TVs. The television I mentioned, the one that I have upstairs, is a dumb TV. It's not a smart TV. It doesn't have any native ABS in it. I can't access anything unless I have another piece of hardware connected to the TV, like my Xbox. I can do it through there, but

the TV itself is a dumb TV. It is now in the minority of televisions that are out there in the United States of households with a television have a smart TV. That trend is also playing a part in the death of cable and satellite TV, as people access more streaming content and less traditional cable and satellite content, which leads people to say, why do I need a

cable TV subscription? I never watch cable TV, so I'm sure I'm going to come back to that if I do a full episode about the decline of cable and satellite TV, or when I do an episode, because I'm sure I will. I just don't know when I will do it yet. But yeah, that's kind of how smart TVs came into being, and it's I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen more leveraging of smart TVs in order to gather more data and to advertise more directly to

two users. There have been instances of that before this Roku Walmart deal, but generally speaking, it's been kind of on the d L. It hasn't been that big of

a trend. Uh not as big as I would have expected it to be, but it seems like that is changing now, and I think maybe the reason for that is that there is this noticeable shift away from the traditional media sources for television, that being like cable and satellite and over the air, toward the online streaming services, and therefore the opportunities to gather that information and to make use of it have increased. So maybe that's why

we're starting to see it now. If you have topics you would like me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me and let me know what those are. One way to do that is to download the I Heart Radio app, navigate over to the text stuff page, and use the little microphone icon to leave a voice message. It can be up to thirty seconds in lengths. The other way is to reach out on Twitter to handle for the show is tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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