The Trajectory of Television—How the Internet dust-up will settle

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Right now, traditional TV and media and the Internet exist in uneasy tension. It's far from an all-out war, but by no means have the two come to an agreement. The Internet is affecting everything from the services we use to watch conventional TV shows to the new hardware we do it on: laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Both parties in the fight have plenty of money, but one is losing cultural clout while the other only gains. Five to 10 years down the road, how will this juxtaposition of old and new shake out? Can the Internet liberate content to a free-for-all, endless catalog of all the best TV shows, movies, and Web series? Or will the content creators, rightsholders, and providers decide they’ve waited long enough for not enough kickbacks from the supposed digital revolution before they pull back into their proprietary caves and resign customers to a line of channels, preprogramming, and pokey set-top boxes?

In this final installment of our series looking at the history of TV, we examine where all aspects of the video entertainment business may head, where we’d like to see them go, and where we hope they never dare step foot.

Televisions are on a path right now that we don’t see diverging any time soon. In the next several years, they’ll get thinner, the resolutions will get higher, and their lighting technologies will become both higher-quality and more energy-efficient. OLED will lead the charge. While these TVs are about the price of a luxury vehicle now, they will take the same price dive that plasma HDTVs did back in the early- to mid-2000s.

The jump to a 4K/8K, or “Ultra HD,” standard is an inevitability, but it will be harder for consumers this time around to justify the purchase compared to the SD-to-HD transition. The introduction of HD marked the first time that TV resolution had changed in half a century. But by the time 4K TVs enter the market en masse, even relatively early HD adopters will have purchased their screens only 15 or so years ago.

Along with 4K and 8K resolution displays, content suited to the display will start to come. The first examples will be from sources that focus heavily on picture quality, like Discovery, documentaries, premium channels (witness Discovery's Planet Earth Blu-ray set, the typical first and sometimes only Blu-ray purchase of a Blu-ray player owner). A few years elapsed between the appearance of HDTVs and a large-scale change over to HD content; we expect for 4K and up, this change will take less time.

Enlarge / Samsung's curved 4K TV at CES.
The HD transition hardly registered in terms of the difficulty of transferring data: while Blu-ray discs were a hard sell to most consumers, streaming services and cable adjusted with aplomb. This may not be the case for Ultra-HD content, which is a few times the size of HD.

At present, uncompressed 4K footage has a bitrate of 600MBps; for comparison, the read speeds of SSDs with a PCIe connection, which are still arriving on market, achieve around 1.4-3.2GBps, and current consumer level drives with SATA III connections hit 500-600MBps read speeds. Never mind that when it comes to streaming, our current Internet connections can scarcely handle YouTube and Netflix at times. A raw 90-minute movie at 4K resolution would constitute about 3.6 terabytes-worth of data.

Technically, Blu-ray discs may be able to support 4K using a new compression standard called HEVC (high-efficiency video coding), but the standard has yet to be ratified by the Blu-ray Disc Association. So a sea change in our displays means that a lot of software and services will also need to catch up before we can take advantage of the resolution bump.

4K resolution is most advantageous at large screen sizes. The difference in picture quality between a 55- or 60-inch 4K TV and the same size HDTV is sizable; at 32 inches, the difference in quality between HD and 4K is more difficult to perceive.

Those implications are two-fold. For one, there won’t be much point in upgrading small sets to 4K. For another, people who want to take advantage of 4K will essentially need to purchase a large TV in order to make it worth their time. But not every space can reasonably accommodate a TV that big. For that reason, 4K may have a slightly harder time penetrating the market than HD did.
Samsung's booth at CES: achieved by a team of projectors, but someday, could this be one big OLED screen?

Curved panels were a relatively novel thing we saw show up at CES this past January in the form of a 4K TV in Samsung’s booth. At 55 inches, this form factor strikes us as more odd than effectively immersive; perhaps for a very large TV, very close to our faces, we could benefit from a curve.

But again, at this size, a 55-inch curved screen doesn’t really provide the communal-living room experience that a flat panel does. Maybe someday we’ll have wall-size 4K TVs that can envelop a few people at a time as long as they’re sitting close together, not unlike a mini IMAX theater.

The hardware evolution of the next few years of “television” is not constrained to living room screens. Laptop and tablets are growing on us now. Without an easy solution to get their connectivity over to the TV, we are sometimes just as content to settle for the small screens closer to us.

In the future, transferring this content will be easier, but it’s somewhat unlikely the path will be provider-to-laptop-to-TV. Laptops and tablets will remain popular, but TVs will have to develop their own Internet connectivity to remain competitive.

Right now, streaming in the living room is usually achieved with supplementary boxes like those from Roku or Apple TV, or game consoles that integrate streaming services. Not much will change on the game console front—in five years, we’ll be in the same place with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 that we are now with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

But we would not be surprised to see some TV manufacturers, particularly those that are pursuing smart TV interfaces, buy up set-top box manufacturers or buy into streaming services to get exclusivity on their own hardware. Roku and its catalog could be the sole province of LG; Hulu may only be available on Samsung sets. Or vice versa.

TV sets filled out with their own streaming services, either through manufacturers acquiring existing ones or imitating them, will transcend the barrier that currently resigns some viewers to watching streaming stuff on their laptops. The less likely scenario is that TV manufacturers will create ways for TVs and laptops to talk more easily to one another, maybe as a component of the "smart TV" interface. DLNA's UPnP guidelines have existed for a decade now but tend to be used more in smartphones and consoles. If laptop and TV manufacturers rounded out their products with UPnP, or a similar interoperability protocol, we could see a lot less laptop-watching and far more TV-watching.

As tablets and smartphones have grown slightly in use as remotes for TVs, we could see them growing further by allowing users to pass or throw content easily from one to the other. Certain apps and setups allow for this now, like Sony’s Xperia tablet with an IR blaster. A few years from now, this transition will be more seamless and more common. Transferring a YouTube video that someone tweeted from tablet to TV will be achievable with the flick of a finger.

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