ARM Community: CES: Key TV Trends 3D, Ultra Thin, Internet & Convergence Part 2 - ARM Community

In my last blog I highlighted the latest TV trends in 3D TVs and Thin TVs. Now I’ll explore the Internet and TVs. Now we’ve been talking about the Internet and TVs for years, but this year most TV companies were showing Internet TV as part of their lineup as well as the software widgets that are making the Internet more attractive for display onto consumers’ TV.

Consumers are looking for easier access to content held on social networking sites, such as YouTube videos from the comfort of their sofa enabling a more family experience. Several TV manufacturers were showing their implantation of the “connected TV” bringing these capabilities to the living room, with many of them showing their support for Yahoo! TV widgets, with a different mix of content sources to choose from:

Samsung: Internet TV showed support for Yahoo! TV widgets, enabling additional information such as news, weather forecast, Samsung application store, Netflix streaming video to be shown on the connected TV. etc.

HiSense: released a Yahoo! TV widgets TV, supporting YouTube, facebook, twitter, RSS, news/music, etc, while announcing its partnership with Yahoo.

LG and Panasonic DTVs also showed their first implementations of Skype video conferencing – expect to see more of this going forward.

Samsung Internet TV


One of the other trends evident during the CES show was the transition of technologies between market segments – enabling technologies designed and optimized for mobile applications bringing opportunities for differentiated products in the home. With mobile focused silicon vendors such as Marvell announcing their high performance processors targeting high end mobile computing and home devices, whilst showing concepts from home storage to media players and home appliance automation/management.

CES 2010 also marked the entrance of Ziilabs (a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology)with with their 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 powered ZMS-08 SoC device bringing 1080p Blu-ray quality H.264 decode to low-power consumer devices.

Frank Kruszenski, Home CE Solutions, ARM, works in Silicon Valley. He has been a founder of, an investor in, a consultant to, and an employee of several high technology companies, especially in the areas of video compression and telecom. Like many of his ARM colleagues, whose exposure to future technologies offers a special perspective, Frank thinks the best times are about to come for home entertainment.