Today's Wall Street Journal article TV Shapes Up as Web Battleground highlights a trend that I've highlighted for some time, but poses the wrong question.
Television manufactures will add the means to connect sets directly to broadband internet connections either through direct connect Ethernet cables or WiFi.
The article says that Web-enabled sets will grow to between 88 million and 90 million world-wide by 2013, around 40% of the television market. There are around 90 models on the market that are Web-enabled lead by manufacturers like Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Vizio.
Once connected, a set-top box becomes a monitor and/or a computer depending on what applications draw you to connect your set. The article highlights how consumers may use their set top as a substitute for web viewing and debates the correct viewing format (browser or not browser) for television manufactures to use. The core question, however, is what will consumers want to do on their televisions? Past efforts at adding a key board to a TV have failed largely because consumers habitually do not view their televisions as the place to interact with text.
The most obvious use (and killer app) is streaming traditional television, video, and movies directly to televisions using formats increasingly standardized by Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. Whether these formats are ideal is debatable, but designers need to focus on how to make dynamic video content from the web easy for consumers to use in the mode they are already accustomed to viewing television. One cannot need a degree in network engineering to make these connections happen. Ease of use and increasing volume of web deployed video content will lead to consumer demand for web enabled televisions. From there, innovation on user interfaces blending other modes of communication designed to enrich the consumer's viewing experience can occur.
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