Editor's note: This article is from WeChat public number "luming finance" (ID: luminglab), the author Qiang Jiahong.
"There is no such thing as good or bad design, only suitable design, appropriate design."
The term "television" has been around since the 1900's, but at that time, it was still discussed and explored how to convert images into electronic signals.
In 1906, the world's first picture receiver was born in a German laboratory, and 19 years later, the Englishman Bell successfully assembled the world's first television set.
Over the next 33 years, an American company called RAC began mass-producing black-and-white televisions: black-and-white picture, low definition, few TV programs, no remote control, only a few fixed buttons on the body of the TV, and the user had to stand next to the TV to operate it.
At the time, few people cared that their eyes weren't uncomfortable when they watched TV, and people were content to be proud of the new products that came out.
It wasn't until the theory of transmitting images in three primary color signals came along that Made in RAC had a color picture.
This was a historic advancement at the time. Later, people began to seek higher resolutions, more channels, larger screens, and, more interesting features.
When the sensory experience reaches a whole new level, and the technology is mature enough to reverse the digital signal, there is a true interactive television set.
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Bill Moggridge categorizes interaction design into six types: games, software, products, spaces, the Internet, and services.
Initially, the interactivity of TV design is mainly reflected in the sensory level, from CRT to flat panel display, from 2D display to 3D display, from SD to HD to UHD, but the progress of the display technology did not improve the adhesion of people to the TV screen, the mobile era of TV is gradually reduced to dispensable "family display screen".
The great success of the iPhone shows that terminal manufacturers can go upstream from the downstream of the industry chain and become the integrator of the industry chain.
Some are beginning to try to explore content experience enhancements based on upgrading the sensory experience, such as the addition of digital TV program channels, content re-watching, playback control, and even access to the Internet to browse web resources.
People have the autonomy to choose any program they want to watch as long as they want.
Apple's explorations in this area can be traced back as far as the 1990's. In 1993, they introduced the Macintosh TV, which was Apple's first attempt at computerized television integration, but sadly, it only sold 10,000 units before being discontinued in '94.
In the same year that the Macintosh TV was discontinued, Apple joined forces with British Telecom and Belgacom, Belgium's largest telecom operator, to develop an interactive television set-top box, the Apple Interactive Television Box, which was not fully marketed.
After two failed attempts, Apple's exploration of the living room space came to an end.
It wasn't until 12 years later that Apple TV was unveiled as 'iTV' at a special convention in San Francisco, CA, followed by its official launch at the January 2007 Macworld conference.
Also announced was the first iPhone and the company's name change from Apple Computer to Apple Inc.
The first generation Apple TV was originally designed to be more of an extension of iTunes, simply supporting the transfer of iTunes videos from a Mac to a TV. The fact that only 250,000 units were sold within six months of its launch forced even Steve Jobs to admit that the product was more of a 'hobby' than a serious endeavor.
On January 15, 2008, Apple made a major software update to the Apple TV: turning the Apple TV into a standalone device that allows users to rent or purchase content directly from iTunes, rather than requiring a computer running iTunes to transfer and synchronize content.
Subsequent updates allow users to use the iPhone, iPod and iPad as a remote control for Apple TV devices.
On March 17, 2010, Google, Intel and Sony announced that they are jointly developing a platform called "Google TV" that will bring online content to TVs through a new generation of TVs and set-top boxes.
This is the same search engine giant Google's renewed challenge after a decade of letting Internet content dominate the living room TV screen.
In the words of former Intel CEO Paul O'Denning, "We're about to experience the biggest revolution since the advent of color television."
In their vision, Google TV can search for TV videos, can browse a huge amount of online videos, but also can download a variety of applications, the user is as convenient as changing the channel to switch back and forth between TV programs, search engines, and web portals and other applications, it can be a photo browser, it can be a game console, and can be more electronic products you want! ......
"By the summer of 2012, most TVs on the market will come with Google TV pre-installed." This is one of Google's "Big Three" Eric Schmidt's ambition.
But the first generation of Google TV did not continue the myth of Android, because of the poor interactive experience, Logitech 2011 Q1 Google TV set-top box returns even more than sales.
Even so, in Las Vegas in 2011, Samsung, LG, Changhong, TCL, Hisense still chose to release their own smart TV products, this is the industry's mouth "smart TV year".
This year, TV salespeople all over the world are learning how to drum up a three-inch tongue to sell users the need for "TV networking", the end result is that those who are "smart TV" concept to make a blank face of potential consumers, while chanting "oh oh really high-tech ah" while pulling out their wallets. The end result is that potential consumers, dumbfounded by the concept of "smart TVs," are pulling out their wallets while saying, "Oooooh, that's high tech.
As for how many people are connected to the Internet once the TV is delivered to their homes, who cares?
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Compared to the traditional black power manufacturers will be "intelligent" as a set of sales flimflam, really discover the value of TV intelligence, on the contrary, some of the previous and the industry chain is far away from the layman.
The progress of SoC makes the emergence of Smart TV possible. In order to meet the needs of 3D video, the TV SoC has the ability to support simultaneous two-way decoding for both left and right eyes and automatic adaptation according to the 3D format of the video; in order to adapt to the diversification of Internet video compression standards, the TV SoC has the ability to support multi-standard decoding; in order to allow the TV platform to carry more intelligent applications, the TV SoC integrates high-performance application processor cores and graphics processor cores ......
Entering the second decade of the 21st century, MediaTek and MStar Semiconductor, which have an 80% market share in the TV main chip market, have launched the smart TV main chips MT5326/5502 and A801, which use the dual-core, high-performance ARM Cotext-A9 as the application processor core.
In an effort to replicate the successful model of smartphones, smart TVs have ushered in the era of third-party development of apps.
Google released its Android-based Google TV system, Apple released its iOS-based Apple TV system, Samsung released its Web-Based Smart TV platform, and LG, after releasing its own Netcast Smart TV platform, acquired HP's WebOS with the intention of developing a Netcast and WebOS convergence-based Smart TV Platform ......
Meanwhile, in China, TCL, Changhong and Hisense, three manufacturers with greater market influence jointly launched a technology community - China Intelligent Multimedia Terminal Technology Alliance.
At the beginning of the market, the establishment of the alliance has played a huge role in promoting the progress of the industry: the technical standards of smart TV application stores, smart TV interconnection application specifications and smart TV operating system technical specifications and standards are all from the alliance.
Everything is ready, all we need is an east wind.
Lexus is this shareholder wind.
As the operator of a video website, their products coincide with the mainstream of products appearing in the market. 2012 was the launch year of LeTV Smart TV, and at the beginning, considering that every household has a TV, they launched an enhancement device for a regular TV, the LeTV Box.
According to LeEco's early marketing strategy, their set-top boxes are centered on rich online content resources, with an order of magnitude expressed as more than 100,000 episodes of TV dramas, the online broadcasting rights of more than 5,000 movies, and more than 30 self-produced works produced steadily by LeEco Pictures every year.
When people began to get used to the various applications on the TV, used to the big screen to get the video resources on the Internet, set-top boxes as a transitional stage of the product to complete their historical mission, LeTV Smart TV came into being.
Four months later, three years after the establishment of millet also hitched a ride on the Internet TV express.
As we can see from Apple's and Google's development models, the complete model for becoming a platform is to provide a development environment and development tools.
LeEco's choice was as good as it gets: in addition to the LeEco Store as a platform, they developed their own SDK development environment service and created communities and forums for communication between developers.
The basic intermediary for intelligent terminal devices to realize human-machine interaction is the operating system. On the basis of perfecting its own environment construction for content, LeEco has developed an operating system for Chinese users and their viewing habits, and launched China's first smart TV operating system--LeTVUI, based on Android.
But from the longitudinal view of the development of smart TV, smart TV is derived from traditional TV, so its industrial chain is also a gradually extended relationship.
Obviously, for the whole industry chain of smart TV, LeEco lacks overall operational resources and experience, they can only complete their own industry chain aggregation through the grafting of multiple resources: hardware supplier Sharp, SoC chip company Qualcomm, manufacturing and assembling enterprise Foxconn, the partner of online content CNTV6, and the video cloud platform based on Microsoft Azure public cloud technology.
In the early stage of the rise of smart TV, the profit margin of the product is large, the market specification is limited, so the price of smart TV is often high. LeEco made full use of this point in the market positioning, to far lower than the same period of the market price of the way to cut, cleverly create a "TV sales + content charges" profit model, for LeEco circle compared to other smart TV high-end narrow positioning more broad high-end user groups.
So LeEco has bundled a 24-month membership fee - 980 yuan - with every "Super TV" it sells.
In their early days of developing the smart TV business, they had pioneered a marketing model that has since been widely used - CP2C (customer planning to customer, crowdfunding marketing). For LeEco, this model can kill three birds with one stone by raising capital, forming a feedback chain with users' needs before the product is launched, and conducting low-cost precision marketing.
From the subsequent market performance, the effect is remarkable. Some data show that during the three years from 2014-2016, the sales of LeTV were 1.5 million, 3 million and 6 million units respectively.
Xiaomi TV in this period is not comparable to LeTV Super TV. When the sales of LeTV exceeded 1.5 million units in 14 years, Xiaomi TV had just sold 300,000 units.
Under the environment of three-network convergence, smart TVs based on open software platforms have become an important carrier of the national policy, assuming the heavy responsibility of the family multimedia information platform.
In 2016, Mr. Jia sang a song "wild child" at the annual meeting of 10,000 people in LeTV, and ambitiously drew a "ecological reverse" pie for LeTV: film and television, television, cell phones, automobiles, sports ...... At the end of the year, LeTV, Samsung, and Hisense occupied the top three positions in the domestic smart TV stock, with market shares of 9.6%, 8.4%, and 7.7.% respectively. At the end of the year, LeTV, Samsung and Hisense occupied the top three positions in the domestic smart TV stock, with market shares of 9.6%, 8.4% and 7.7.% respectively.
He has a "wild" streak.
Xiaomi, although not as bright as LeTV, but also successfully ate the first bite of China's Internet TV dividends.
The world is all about profit; the world is all about profit. Driven by LeTV, Micro Whale, Storm, Fengxing, PPTV, Lenovo, etc. have entered the market, and China's smart TV market has changed from a competition of a few players to a big melee with many players.
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Flowers don't last a hundred days.
The collapse of the LeTV empire happened overnight, but the ambush was buried three years ago.
In Boss Jia's vision, LeTV binds one user for every terminal sold, and in addition to renewing subscription services can sell them wine, seafood and even electric cars.
There is a lot of space, LeSee is not Apple, and Jia's capital chain can't capture his wild imagination. And BAT's business extension logic is not the same, LeTV ecology lacks a support point for attack and retreat, just like the search for Baidu, e-commerce for Ali, social for Tencent, unfortunately, LeTV is the direct or indirect source of funds needed for the group's other projects.
And in our inherent impression, it is a basic judgment that video sites generally lose money.
Boss Jia has complained on many occasions that Leshi's ability to raise money is a shortcoming, and that it can't raise money in the primary market, and the Jia siblings' stock pledging actions have been suddenly frequent since 2013.
In the 17 months from February 8, 2013 to July 3, 2014, the siblings made a total of 26 pledges and 11 unpledge pledges, according to Eastland's estimation in "How LeEco is going to the abyss step by step by packing its financial reports", the two borrowed about 5 billion yuan through equity pledges, while LeEco's net assets at that time were only 2 billion.
Not only this. LeEco also in 2014 in the preparation of the annual report, the annual sales of 1.5 million units of Super TV tied to the 1.53 billion yuan membership fees are recognized as revenue, but according to the reason, the "prepaid" nature of the income only after the completion of the service will be recognized as revenue for the corresponding amount of money.
In addition, LeEco also lightly used the straight-line amortization of the cost of copyright purchases of the accrual method and let the affiliated companies to bear the losses of the way to package a beautiful financial report.
I watched him raise a vermilion building, I watched him feast his guests, and I watched his building collapse. When LeTV's financial chain broke in 2017, a mountain of negativity in the court of public opinion hit them, crushing their terminal revenue and membership payment revenue, and LeTV only sold 2,623 Super TVs in Q1 of the year.
In fact, this year is not only the Waterloo of LeTV, the whole industry's days, are not very good.
Traditional TV manufacturers for LeTV's joint resistance is obvious, these manufacturers in technology, cost, channels and market size of the advantages accumulated over the years is difficult to reach LeTV.
For a long time, the production technology of upstream panels has been monopolized by foreign manufacturers. Starting from April 2016, panel prices continued to rise until the first half of 2017 is still at a high level to maintain a relatively stable state, in contrast, but the industry's performance continued to slump. According to the data published by Industry Online, the production, sales, domestic sales, and foreign sales of TVs in this period fell by 10.7%, 7.8%, 5.5%, and 9.3% year-on-year, and the growth rate fell to a record low.
This year, Lenovo 17TV stopped updating and gradually faded from view, PPTV, Fengxing and other Internet TV brands that once followed the trend also slowed down the pace of releasing new products ......
In this critical fall, the average price of traditional TVs and Internet TVs have risen. According to zhejiang securities published in the year "black electricity industry depth report: traditional TV leading edge gradually, industry competition pattern is expected to improve" shows that the domestic traditional brand TV (Hisense, Skyworth, TCL, Konka, Changhong) cumulative retail average price increased by 20.4% year-on-year.
It is worth mentioning that the representative enterprise of Internet TV, adhere to the "ecological subsidies hardware" concept of LeTV in September 2016, November and February 2017, three consecutive price increases, the rate of increase over the average level of the TV industry.
The millet TV, which once claimed in a high profile on Weibo that it would not increase the price, raised the price of its products three times at the beginning of the year 2017, and the price increase even exceeded the average price increase of LeTV.
There is an unwritten rule in the panel industry that whoever has a large volume is prioritized for supply, and it is difficult for small players to prioritize getting a full supply of panels. At this point Xiaomi has the most to say, 2014's Xiaomi TV 2 has been delayed due to supply problems on sale.
Time came to 2018. Storm's Feng Xin step Jia boss's dust, sitting on 2 billion yuan of start-up capital and Chinese culture, Ali, Tencent backing of the micro whale is also negative, and even failed to stop the founder's departure ......
Xiaomi took over the banner of Internet TV and announced in September 2018 that it had taken the first place in sales in the Q2 domestic Internet TV market.
It is just a coincidence that the statement is taken, only. Because according to the data published by Zhongguancun Online, as of August 2018, the market share of Chinese smart TV brands is led by Samsung, which solely occupies 18.6% market share, followed by Hisense, Sharp, Sony, Skyworth and TCL.
Among the top ten brands in terms of market share, only Xiaomi belongs to the Internet companies, ranking seventh with a market share of 4.3%.
This is a foreign brand using the bargaining power of the upstream raw material supply to realize the counterattack, if the old TV manufacturers rely on the accumulation of years or have the power to fight, the emerging Internet brand seems to be in addition to the rout, there is no other way.
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Globally, the flow of capital is tilting in the direction of smart TVs, whether it's IT companies that make hardware or Internet companies that got their start in software.
Traditional veteran manufacturers have also begun to try to introduce new Internet genes: whether it is Love Qiyi and TCL to create a smart TV TV +, or Skyworth to join hands with Ali's sub-brand cool open, or Tencent video TV terminal in the TOP6 TV manufacturers shipments pre-installed more than 50%, as much as the shadow of the fusion of the two.
Yiga, Poundland and Jingdong, too, are said to have rushed to the battlefield.
An example was mentioned in Interaction Design - Design Thinking and Practice: in the past, we only needed to press the on/off button of a black and white TV set to watch TV; later on, we could use the remote control to switch the channels of a color TV set and adjust the volume at will; nowadays, smart TV sets allow us to control the playback of programs through gestures and touch screens.
In addition to this, we would like to be able to customize the various software needed on the TV.
The application of advanced technology on the one hand makes the product have more powerful functions, on the other hand, also makes the user's operation more complicated and bitter, the first generation of Google TV is precisely because of the unfriendly interaction experience and lost the city.
TV has evolved and the way it interacts has changed qualitatively.
From the initial button remote control to realize multi-screen interaction with different terminals to somatosensory, voice, gesture and other control methods, the way of human-computer interaction from complexity to simplicity, becoming more and more natural.
When the user stands in front of the TV, the TV comes with a body-sensing device can detect the user's hand or body movements, upward, downward, forward push, backward pull corresponds to the TV's change of channel, pause and other functions, respectively, in the process of the game, the body-sensing technology to bring the experience of the game is novel and interesting.
Sounds cool, but not popularized. The reason is that the user operation process of learning costs, mobility of the elderly and underage children need to assist other forms of control, as well as the immaturity of the development of hardware, somatosensory control of the smart TV camera clarity, image recognition and response speed requirements are very high, of course, for the requirements of the light is also equally demanding.
But is that all there is to Smart TV?
And no.
As the media center of the family, Smart TV can provide comprehensive services as a smart home butler in addition to providing diversified media services.
The introduction of deep learning models has made this possible.
In the era of artificial intelligence, voice recognition has entered the practical stage, so that the TV has a "sense of hearing", which is an important embodiment of TV intelligence. This not only involves the issue of voice recognition, but also includes semantic understanding, dialect recognition and other issues. To get rid of the remote control entity voice control, you need to break through the remote voice recognition, multi-user voice interference and a series of problems.
No perfect solution has emerged.
But there has already been progress.In October 2017, Changhong launched the world's first voiceprint recognition AI TV, which is able to recognize the voice of each member of the family, with a recognition rate close to 90%.
When the word "intelligence", which is unique to human beings, is applied to TVs, the ambition of TVs to replace smart speakers as the hub of AIoT becomes obvious.
In the ideal best of all possible worlds, everything is set up for the best of all possible purposes: when the smart TV acts as the IOT hub in the smart home, unifying the management and deployment of smart home appliances, the user only needs to control all home appliances by interacting with the smart TV.
Through AI technology, smart TVs will automatically analyze the status of home appliances and provide users with appropriate suggestions: under the authorization of the user, smart TVs can also control some of the home appliances to do their work, such as starting the sweeping robot to clean the room, and cooking the meal before the user arrives home.
It is a long way to go, and we still need to go up and down to find our way.
But back to the present time, we miss the interactive era of smart TVs oriented to personalized needs, or we are longing for a commonwealth society where "each is beautiful in its own way, and the beauty of the beauty is shared by the beauty of the people". This article is one of the series of "Interactive Scene Observation" by Luming Finance.
Reference:[1]. Research on smart TV interaction design oriented by personalized demand, Hao Wang, 2013 [2]. Research on Smart TV System Construction with Interaction Design as the Core, Dandan Pan, 2013 [3]. Research on key technology of smart TV software platform, Ren Fei, 2013 [4]. Research on the development strategy of smart TV business of LeTV, Yao Meng, 2015 [5]. Research on smart TV interaction design oriented by user behavior, 2017 [6]. Artificial Intelligence and Smart TV, Zheng Li Rui Fu Wang Dongfei, 2017 [7]. How LeTV goes to the abyss step by step by packing financial report, Eastland, 2017 [8]. Research on smart TV interactive interface design under the background of media integration, Zhou Xin, 2018 [9]. Research on the analysis of smart TV users' behavior of watching online videos and recommendation problems, Lian Tao, 2018 [10]. Smart TV competition intensifies, technology becomes the key to determine the winners and losers among manufacturers, 2019 [11]. Twelve years of Apple TV:
The Pride and Stubbornness of Steve Jobs, Lovefan, 2019 [12]. The Seven Year Itch of Internet TV, Guo Ren, 2019
