At the SID Business Conference, I had a chance to sit through a few presentations, as did my colleagues at Insight Media. While the presenters focused on business issues, for the most part, they did not rise to the occasion to really provide any innovative insights, comments or revelations. That’s unfortunate as they had a big theater and an attentive audience to talk to, so I think it was an opportunity lost.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

As an example, I’ll focus on the talk given by Jim Sanduski, who was asked to describe the state of the TV landscape here in the US. He was the former VP of marketing at Samsung’s visual display group until last November when HP hired him away to run their TV solutions business in their personal systems group.

Sanduski’s talk was informative, but it broke no new ground. He started by segmenting the DTV evolution into HDTV 1.0, the transition from analog to DTV, calling this a bigger phenomenon than the black/white TV transition to color back in the 60’s. Given form-factor and resolution upgrades (i.e. up to 6X CRT at 500 lines) he may have a point. Although there are still some of us around who remember going to a neighbor’s house to watch TV in color for the first time. It really was a big social change-and adjusting for inflation, perhaps the sets back then were just as expensive as the newly minted 50-inch 1080p plasma (that just broke the $3K price barrier-courtesy of Matsushita).

For Sanduski, HDTV 2.0 is the transition to networked DTV defined as having Ethernet and/or wireless capability with an IPTV and/or PC home server video source. He offered this as the alternative to the path of "bigger, better, cheaper" that CE manufacturers are currently following. Sanduski pointed out that conditions both outside and inside the home are ripe for this transition to networked content delivered to the TV.

• • Broadband is reaching critical mass, check
• • On-line content is exploding, check
• • Home networking is on the rise, check
• • Digital content is being created at an accelerated pace, check.

To this list Sanduski may want to add a simple growth slide showing the market cap of Google-or even Microsoft’s $6B cash buyout of aQuantive last week, an Internet ad company.

Sanduski concluded this portion of the presentation with a forecast showing networked DTV’s at 5M units by 2010, out of more than 30M units due to ship that year in the US (based on CEA and IDC data). But in a bit of shameless self promotion, Sanduski offered the culmination of this DTV evolution as embodied in HP’s "Managed Home Initiative".

We didn’t hear anything really new here as it echoed what Bill Gates showed (and Sony delivered on the PC side) perhaps as early as CES 2005. It’s also not too different from the HP / Lifeware technology the two companies showed in a 2000 sq. ft. house built outside the CEDIA Expo last September in Denver. There, HP featured the same media closet solution with a server running special software to connect not just content, but lighting, security and even the next generation "networked oven."

What Sanduski failed to do was convince at least some in the audience that there is a real distinction between an off-the-shelf TV serving as a network display device using traditional connectivity, and a full-blown "network TV with Ethernet or Wi-Fi access." Like it or not, the networked TV is going to face the stark reality of not only traditional set-top boxes, but the new breed of media extenders like AppleTV, lesser known alternatives like ITVN or even Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Elite. All are networking boxes with traditional connectivity to the TV, with some offering excellent content management schemes and entrenched loyal users. Bottom line: the consumer probably doesn’t really care if the TV is fitted with yet another connector, let alone one that makes it look like a computer. Maybe it’s time for HP to do a re-think on this market.