Netflix said TVs from three manufacturers will wear the Netflix Recommended TV logo at retail, certifying that the TVs offer “easy access to Internet TV services, faster performance, and new features that enable a next-generation smart TV experience.” TVs include LG 4K UHD TVs with webOS 2.0, Sony Android Full HDTVs and Roku TVs from Hisense, Insignia and TCL. In a Tuesday blog post, Netflix said it’s “particularly excited” about instant on functionality supported by the Roku-powered and Sony Android HDTVs. “These TVs wake up quickly, remembering where you left off, similar to how smartphones and tablets behave today,” Netflix said. The Sony and Roku models are also capable of turning on and launching Netflix with one button press, it said. The LG 4K UHD TVs with webOS 2.0 have made “special optimizations to make streaming services like Netflix launch much faster,” it said. All the TVs offer “improved user interfaces, allowing you to move seamlessly between live TV and Internet TV services,” Netflix said.
Panasonic used its European line show Monday in Frankfurt to showcase its quad-core 4K Studio Master Processor chip it said will enable wider color gamut and high dynamic range display. The processor chip was demonstrated on a working 1000-nit screen with signage labeling it: “Extreme Brightness Prototype.” It showed a loop with rapid-cut, short-clip excerpts from Netflix TV series Marco Polo. The highlights we viewed were painfully over-bright and the screen flashed all white before the Netflix logo appeared. A highlight of the conference was a workshop in which panelists debated the limitations of the smart TV ecosystem and the merits of migrating toward “open source” smart TV operating systems. “The whole point of connected devices is that they talk to each other,” said one panelist, Paul Gray, DisplaySearch director-European TV research. “If we continue with silos and stacks not talking to each other, most consumers won’t bother,” Gray said. “Consumers want a frictionless experience. Everything must talk to everything else. Open source can make this happen.” Most new Panasonic 4K TVs will now use the Firefox OS, the company said in Frankfurt. This was chosen because it is an open source system, Panasonic said. Live demonstrations showed how, when the Firefox set is first switched on, it displays three circular widget icons, one each for live TV, apps and devices. The owner can then "pin" similar icons to the home screen that provide shortcuts to favorite TV channels, connected devices such as a Blu-ray disc player or connected catchup TV services such as BBC iPlayer.
Panasonic in the U.K. will be the first manufacturer to launch TVs with the Freeview Play connected TV service, the company said Monday. Freeview, the U.K.’s subscription-free digital TV service, is being rebranded as Freeview Play “in preparation for a new product launch that will introduce a mass market connected TV offer,” said a recent announcement from DTV Services, the consortium of Arqiva, BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Sky that runs the service (see 1502120036). Panasonic will make Freeview Play available in its new 2015 lineup of Viera TVs, the company said.
Samsung “clarified” its privacy policy “to better explain what actually occurs” when voice recognition functionality is activated on its smart TVs, the company said Tuesday in a blog post. Previously, Samsung’s privacy policy warned users that if spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, “that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party” through the use of voice recognition, the company said. Acknowledging that such statements have “led to confusion,” Samsung in the blog post elaborated by saying that some interactive voice commands “may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.” Samsung also “may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features,” the company said. “Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.” Samsung “takes consumer privacy very seriously and our products are designed with privacy in mind,” the company said. “We employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.”
The disclosure in the wee hours of Christmas Eve that the PlayStation Now videogame streaming service will be available on select Samsung smart TVs in the first half of 2015 represents an unusual collaboration between two companies doing battle through side-by-side stores within a store at hundreds of Best Buy locations. The "partnership," as both companies called it, will mean Samsung smart TV consumers in the U.S. and Canada “will have easy access” to hundreds of PS3 games streamed from the cloud, “with no consoles, downloads, or trips to the store needed,” Samsung and Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) said Wednesday in a joint announcement datelined from Seoul and Tokyo. The service will launch as an app that can be accessed through Samsung's Smart Hub, the companies said. The app “will support all functionality of the service, including the ability to earn in-game trophies, play games online with friends, and save your game progress in the cloud,” they said. Sony’s “vision” since launching PlayStation Now at the last CES “has been to open the world of PlayStation to the masses by offering the service on the devices they use every day," said SCE Executive Vice President Masayasu Ito in a statement. "Partnering with Samsung is a key step toward realizing this vision, as we can reach a broader audience of consumers who may not own a PlayStation console to show them why gaming with PlayStation is such a unique and amazing experience." Smart TVs at the Samsung booth at CES will showcase PlayStation Now, the companies said.
Faster performance will be among the improvements LG brings to its WebOS smart TV platform for 2015, Tim Alessi, director-new product development, said in a briefing. The new "WebOS 2.0" for 2015, to be showcased at CES, will feature a "quick start" mode that sharply reduces boot time to about three seconds from 35-40 seconds, Alessi said. WebOS 2.0 also will now have the ability to put favorite channels "right on the launcher bar," as well as quicker menu access for commonly used settings, he said. The "whole premise" of WebOS smart TV navigation technology, which LG introduced in 2014, was "to make TVs simple again," Alessi said. "Over the past several years, since smart TVs first started coming out, there’s been a big race to get the most content." CE makers as an industry "succeeded in providing a lot of content options to consumers," he said. "But the down side of that was that it started to get a bit complicated -- finding what you want, multiple apps with similar content, and difficulty switching back and forth, kind of turning the TV into a computer of sorts. A lot of people got turned off by that and either hesitated to buy or didn't really use the product they bought to its fullest potential." To address that problem, LG went to market with WebOS touting simple functionality and with the message that it was "simple connection, simple discovery and simple switching," he said. "We’re really happy with the results. It seemed like all the efforts that were made were resonating with consumers once they saw it."