Smart TV City Road: Do not look at technology to see features

Recently, 2011 has undoubtedly become the "first year" of smart TVs. From the CES show to the recent major manufacturers have released their own smart TV products are confirming this point. The smart TV market "has seen the wind come to the building." With traditional TV products having more and more IT attributes, more IT companies have joined the smart TV market competition, such as consumers familiar with Intel, AMD, Microsoft and Lenovo and so on.

In this regard, Ms. Huo Jinjie, vice president of research at IDC Asia Pacific, believes that although smart TVs have become informational IT products, unlike the traditional IT market, the smart TV market is not technology-driven but function-driven. The participating vendors, especially IT vendors, must establish a different business model than the traditional IT product market.

Zhang Wei, an analyst at IDC China responsible for the display device research, believes that this view can be interpreted from the following two aspects.

First, the consumer experience decision-making function drives the market, and technology cannot be a condition for attracting consumers.

The traditional IT products represented by PC products, the upgrading of technology will drive the growth of the entire market one after another, and each round of growth will bring about a substantial upgrade of hardware and software, but this is difficult in smart TVs. Market replication. The smart TV market is born out of the traditional TV market. When consumers choose smart TV products, the most concerned question is often what kind of function this TV can provide. Is it practical to use these functions and whether they are used when these functions are used? Convenience. As to how these functions are implemented, whether they use Android or Windows systems, whether they are Intel or AMD processors, dual-core or quad-core, are not what smart TV consumers are most concerned about.

Second, manufacturers need platform-based solutions.

As shown in the figure below, the "platform" encapsulates hardware, software, and applications that are located upstream in the value chain of smart TVs. Due to the feature-driven nature of the smart TV market, providing a functional "platform" is critical to the final product of the smart TV market. Since smart TV manufacturers cannot invest too much resources in the research and development of smart platform technologies, and the software and hardware standards of smart TVs are still very confusing, upstream manufacturers must cooperate with smart TV manufacturers to provide platform-based solutions. It is more attractive than providing simple chips or software products.

IDC estimates that from 2011 to 2015, the compound annual growth rate of China's smart TV market will reach more than 60%. By 2015, about 90% of TVs will become smart TVs, and the market capacity will reach 76 million units.

IDC believes that, unlike traditional TVs, smart TVs all have embedded operating systems (such as Android, Windows, Linux, etc.) that provide entertainment applications such as Internet TV, home connectivity, games, and even home security, education, and Medical and many other smart features. At the same time, based on the embedded operating system, the user can install, run, and uninstall the application by himself/herself so that certain functions of the television can be loaded, expanded, or deleted.