Quarterly TV report

DisplaySearch released the new Quarterly TV Design and Features Report. 

The report finds that North American consumers favor large, inexpensive TV sets with fewer features, unlike other regions. Chinese consumers are enthusiastic about richly-featured sets with 3D, LED backlighting and smart TV capabilities.

The report uniquely forecasts the prospects for DVB-T2 reception in TV. It finds that a critical mass of countries have now adopted or committed to DVB-T2. Shipments of DVB-T2-enabled sets are expected to grow from 3.4 million in 2011 to 64.7 million in 2015.

Source: Display Search.

Smart TV standard

LG, Philips and Sharp have agreed to work together to define common technical requirements for their Smart TVs, based upon open standards such as HTML5, CE-HTML and HbbTV. The group's first step will be to introduce the first beta version of a common Software Development Kit (SDK), which highlights the need to define the technical requirements that would allow content developers to create a single application that can run on Smart TVs from LG, Philips and Sharp Aquos Net+.

The beta version of the common SDK will be released in early October.

Google TV this autumn

Google Inc. will launch its Android-based Google TV service to bring the Web to TV screens in the United States this autumn and worldwide next year, its chief executive said, as it extends its reach from the desktop to the living room. CEO Eric Schmidt said the service, which will allow full Internet browsing via the television, would be free, and Google would work with a variety of programme makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.

Sony said last week it had agreed to have Google TV on its television sets, and Samsung has said it was looking into using the service.

IETV vs. 3DTV

"Despite aggressive promotions from the industry and intense consumer interest generated by the blockbuster Avatar and other titles, the 3-D TV market in 2010 will be limited to a small pool of enthusiastic early adopters,” said Riddhi Patel, director and principal analyst for television systems at iSuppli. “In contrast, Internet-Enabled TVs (IETV) is entering the mainstream in 2010. This is because 3-D is still dealing with a number of barriers, including cost, content availability and interoperability, while IETV provides immediate benefits by allowing TV viewers to access a range of content readily available on the Internet.”

Shipments of IETVs in 2010 will rise by a remarkable 124.9 percent from 12.3 million units last year. Significant growth will continue during the following years. All told, IETV shipments will expand at rates north of 50 percent for the next two years, and then continue to increase at solid double-digit rates until the end of 2014. By then, global IETV shipments are anticipated to reach 148.3 million units, accounting for 54 percent of the total flat-panel TV market.

Source: iSuppli.

Skype to any device

The SkypeKit SDK supplies APIs for plugging into Skype's messaging, voice, and video chat service. It also includes an implementation of SILK, the company's audio compression codec. The SDK is currently in closed beta and is only supported on Linux at this stage. Skype intends to extend the SDK to additional platforms next month and will eventually make it more broadly accessible. Skype envisions hardware makers using the SDK to add voice and video chat to devices like televisions.

See also Ars Technica and Engadget.

IDF 2009 (2): the CE4100 SoC

At IDF 2009 Intel Corporation unveiled the Atom CE4100, the newest System-on-Chip (SoC) in a family of media processors designed to bring Internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes.

The CE4100 processor, formerly codenamed "Sodaville," is the first 45nm-manufactured consumer electronics (CE) SoC based on Intel architecture. It supports Internet and broadcast applications on one chip, and has the processing power and audio/video components necessary to run rich media applications such as 3-D graphics.

"The architecture of Intel media processors provides a powerful and innovative platform to showcase Flash-based applications in a vivid way," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "Flash Player 10 combined with the performance of the Intel media processor and its support for standards such as OpenGL ES 2.0 offers a compelling environment for Flash-based games, videos and other rich Web content and applications." The companies expect Adobe Flash Player 10 to be available in the first half of 2010 for Intel media processor-based CE devices.

Intel CE media processors provide a full-featured software framework called Widget Channel for the development of Internet applications, or TV widgets. Broadcast networks such as CBS are expanding the gallery of TV widgets to help their viewers find and connect to premium content in a more personalized manner.

See the full press release.

IDF 2009

The Intel Developer Forum has been held in San Francisco between September 22 and 24, 2009. All the Keynote and Briefing presentations are available at the IDF Pressroom. Here is the full program.

Day 1

• Keynote: Paul Otellini - Building a Continuum of Computing
• Keynote: Sean Maloney - Intel® Architecture Innovates and Integrates
• Briefing: Steve Smith - Intel Roadmap Overview
• Briefing: Mark Bohr - 22 nm SRAM Announcement

Day 2

• Keynote: Dadi Perlmutter - Mobile Computing: The Definition of Cool
• Keynote: Renee James - Developing for the Continuum of Intel Platforms
• Briefing: Mooly Eden - Revolutionary, Intelligent Intel® Core™ i7 Processors - Coming Soon to a Laptop Near You

Day 3

• Keynote: Eric Kim - The Architecture of CE Innovation
• Keynote: Justin Rattner - Convergence is So Yesterday: The Future of Television

Browser chip for TV

Should televisions be able to get access to the Web? And if they should, how should they?

Gordon Campbell, formerly Intel's first chief corporate marketing officer, now works at Personal Web Systems, a company which is ready to ship its first product, a $150 adapter that will attach to televisions to make them fully Internet-enabled.

Read the article on the International Herald Tribune or The New York Times.