June 15, 2014

The latest in TV Technology - June 2014

The world of TV is an exciting and fast moving place, with new technologies and platforms appearing every month. Here is the latest overview of the most relevant new developments.

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced major changes to the Xbox One: it dropped Kinect as a mandatory part of the Xbox One package and dropped the requirement for a paid Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to use media apps on the Xbox One and Xbox 360. The change of heart was widely regarded as a response to disappointing sales numbers compared to Sony’s PlayStation 4.

Sony has been showing stronger sales of its PlayStation 4 and announced it will be expanding the sales area of its related PlayStation TV set-top box to the USA and Europe. Definitely also have a look at Sony’s Project Morpheus virtual reality headset.

LG has been on a strong run with its 2014 webOS TV sets, selling 1 million of them already. LG has been working on another very interesting initiative as well, launching the open source Connect SDK, which is intended to make it easier to add support for playback on TV to mobile apps. Samsung has also been busy building new software for TV, specifically its new Tizen TV sets and SDK.

Apple and Google have been relatively quiet since our last update. There was no real Apple TV news at its developer conference WWDC, although its sales numbers are still impressive. Google’s Chromecast has been steadily growing its international availability and support in mobile apps.

Amazon has also been busy improving its Fire TV set-top box slowly but surely, by expanding its embedded voice search to other apps and adding an HBO Go app and HBO content to its Amazon Prime subscription service.

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