Smart TVs have a serious communication problem
Smart TVs are the new fashionable thing for popular TV-manufacturing companies to push on consumers. But we’ve still yet to see a really compelling, easy-to-use product trotted out—from CES or anywhere else. The more rounds that smart TVs go on the shelves at electronics expos, the more they seem to suffer from the same fundamental problem: a failure to communicate, or more appropriately, a failure to receive communication.
Internet-connected TVs that provide functionality beyond simple video displays have been on the agenda for nearly two decades. Despite the age of the technology and the fact that new smart TVs piggyback on possibly the most prevalent non-essential household electronic device (tablets), they’ve still failed to become a compelling device.
As screens move closer and closer to our laps in the form of notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, the TV is insistent on remaining at a distance. This is partly out of necessity—once a screen is in someone’s lap, it becomes a solo experience, difficult to share with people around them. But as smart TV functionality grows, our ability to communicate across the living room needs to grow with it. Manufacturers haven’t quite streamlined a way for us to shout across the abyss (metaphorically or literally) and make our wishes known to that increasingly thin box.
Even going as far back as plain TV remotes, the control experience of TVs has nearly always been user-hostile. Modern remotes are littered with often-inscrutable buttons (“sub.code”?) some with multiple functions (“comp/mix”?), and only a few are used regularly. Multiply that by a remote for every component connected to your TV, and reading a book instead doesn't sound so bad after all. Though some third parties had success unifying control of various devices with one remote, like the Logitech Harmony series, the industry failed to solve the control scheme problem for TV even when TVs were only a matter of channels, volume, and inputs.
While the term has more to do with how content is served than what the TV does, it’s a close relative on the user end. Time-shifted viewing and interaction with broadcasts created more options, requiring more controls and complicating the interaction between a TV and a viewer. Now manufacturers want to give them apps, social media, and Web browsers, but this only multiplies the communication problem that was never really solved in the first place.
The IPTV control schemes of yore are, to put it lightly, design nightmares. Keyboards that were either fat and ugly or miniaturized for one hand, and mice or touchpads that have to work with poorly scaled displays for viewing, typing, or manipulating text. Those controls may have been better than using a remote’s hard buttons to scroll around an alphabet on a screen and enter text letter by letter, but not by much. In newer remotes, some of the more inscrutable buttons are eliminated and replaced with keyboards. Their settings may be offloaded to an interactive onscreen menu, but that doesn’t make access any quicker or less complex.
Now, television manufacturers don’t just want viewers to be able to watch what they want, when they want. TV interfaces are being imbued with Web browsers, Twitter, Texas Hold ‘Em, Google Talk, photo browsers, plus a bundle of other content delivery and recommendation services. It's clear from the marketing that companies want smart TVs to be the center of a home. But TVs feel like babies, and we’re the parents who have taught them to say and mean the word “dada.” Now the baby is trying to write a dissertation on the human condition as informed by usage of Hulu and Netflix. It hurts to watch. It’s not going to work.
Instead of significantly improving the physical input mechanisms TVs cling to or eliminating them, many manufacturers are simply adding new control schemes on top of them. There's a camera to accept gestures and a microphone to hear speech commands, all alongside a remote still littered with buttons, possibly a touchpad, and sometimes a joystick.
We might say the problem has now been reversed: at first we couldn’t communicate enough, quickly enough, with a TV to bear interaction with it for too long. Now, there are so many ways to reach it, the optimal method of communication changes depending on what you’re trying to do. We're left constantly cycling between them.
Granular UI navigation, such as selecting between individual items, might be easier with remote buttons because they’re precise. Paging along swaths of content in a catalog may be easier with the voice command “next page” or even better, a gesture swipe to either side (rather than using the separate remote button to “page,” which shouldn’t exist, as it adds to the button overpopulation problem).
Playing or pausing content is easier with buttons than waking up a camera or microphone to listen to or see your command. Scrubbing through to a particular location seems best suited to a gesture or voice command. All of these things can be accomplished with any of the input devices; it’s a matter of figuring out which one is best for every single interaction you’re trying to have. Rather than solving the negatives of each communication medium or working around it, companies are layering them on top of the other to solve each problem. This puts the onus of figuring out what is actually effective on the user.
Until this point, we’ve laid aside the issue of whether these new input methods work well. Voice control and gestures are not new, but still, what we saw at CES this past January did not impress us. Even in a quiet room at Samsung’s booth—with the microphone remote placed firmly in front of a demonstrator’s face—a new smart TV misunderstood simple commands repeatedly. Gestures are more the domain of separate components like Microsoft’s Kinect, but Samsung recently started to add cameras to its smart TVs as well. As a whole, the gesture input method remains imprecise and unsteady.
As we mentioned earlier, above all of this, the screens of TVs are still a problem when it comes to interaction. They’re still across the room, trying to communicate a large amount of info. For an interface to handle a large number of options on one display, the features and text must be relatively small. Inherently, this means they’re difficult to see at a distance.
One solution is to reduce the number of features on the screen—for instance, putting 16 app or video options per menu page instead of 24—but then the amount of navigation you have to do to see everything goes up. In a browser, manufacturers can make the onscreen navigation tools bigger, but that only makes it harder to see what you're trying to see. The interaction remains difficult, just in a different way.
If the screen is sufficiently big, the features likewise become bigger, so you can sort of mitigate the problem by buying a larger TV. But then you’re spending more money, giving up more space, and compromising your possible viewing comfort of video content just to accommodate new functionalities.
If we want to interact with most gadgets, we get close to them and touch them. Entertainment systems’ problem of communicating with That Thing Over There, the remoteness, is rare in consumer technology. Many problems stand in the way of the viewer-TV interaction working on all of these new levels like browsing and apps. So far, manufacturers seem to be trying to solve it with the addition of mediocre interaction schemes. Perhaps they would be better served by making one—at most two—controls robust and high quality, with as little overlap as possible. Otherwise, we’re spending all this money to do the same thing we always do: zone out to a marathon of How It’s Made on the Science channel.
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