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Be warned: the smart TV you bought this year will be well and truly obsolete by 2015. And the new ones will be running Android.
(Credit: LG)
Andrew Ladbroke is an analyst with Informa Telecoms and Media, and one of the authors of the recent smart TV forecast. He took to the Informa company blog with some very interesting predictions for the smart TV market.
Numbers wise, Informa thinks that in 2017, 221 million smart TVs will be sold, up 400 per cent from 2012. This will mean that 800 million sets will be in homes worldwide.
However, Ladbroke warned that the lifecycle of the smart TV is short, saying that “any smart TV bought in 2012 would have been obsolete for a minimum of two years by 2017”.
He added that due to the ongoing connection rates of IPTV-enabled devices, such as media streamers and gaming consoles, “many of the 800 million smart TVs in homes in 2017 will be used in a broadly similar way to how dumb TVs are used today”.
Fragmentation is an issue for smart TVs as well, according to Informa; each manufacturer has its own IPTV platform, which is harming uptake and causing issues for app developers. Informa thinks that in the end, Android will become the default platform for smart TVs, although this is some way off.
Ladbroke also suggested that manufacturers need to take a longer view on their products:
It is not just Moore’s law that will hasten smart TV’s transition to the status of dumb screens. Manufacturers’ short-term vision for their smart TV products will also hinder the device. Examples abound of services launched solely on this year’s smart TV models. Users who bought last year’s device are left out because of faulty reasoning, which believes not having this year’s must-have smart TV app — HBO Go, LoveFilm, Netflix, BBC’s Sport — will be enough to drive them to buy a new TV.
