Smart Television Showcase

by Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
Fall 2001

For nearly 50 years, television that clunky, static old medium offered the end user little or no control other than the ability to change channels and adjust the volume and picture. Beginning in the 1990s, television began to get a whole lot smarter.
Which smart TV is right for you? The editors of Smart TV & Sound have prepared this buyer's guide, which lists the many TVs with brains on the market. In order to make sense of the "alphabet soup" of buzzwords surrounding smart TVs, we'll explain all of the gobbledygook, so that when we're done, you will be much smarter than the new smart TV set you are planning to buy.
A smart TV should have some or all of the following annoying buzzwords and TLAs (three-letter acronyms don't you hate jargon like this?) EPG, PVR, DVD, an ATVEF Decoder and Internet access.
Each of these features is a big improvement when it comes to watching TV. We'll also explain how all these features can interact with each other to make a truly smart TV set.

What's on TV Tonight?
An EPG is a built-in electronic program guide that displays TV listings. DBS systems (direct broadcast satellites) have long had EPGs that allow viewers to see what's on and shift to that channel with one click. Digital cable companies also frequently have EPGs. Having a TV set with a built-in EPG makes it much easier to see what's on.
A built-in EPG also allows for programming of a built-in personal video recorder (or PVR for short). You've probably seen the ads for TiVo, the digital TV recorder, which feature an unseen viewer fast-forwarding past retired NFL superstars Ronnie Lott and Joe Montana discussing the ever-so-fascinating subject of "masculine itching" and its cure. ("Boy Howdy!" was one of Ronnie's more memorable lines.)
While fun, that TiVo ad just scratches the surface of what PVRs can do. They can display instant replays of a spectacular touchdown or missed line of dialog during a live show. They can pause and rewind a live broadcast, which means you'll never have to miss part of a show because of a snack or other break that goes on too long.
They also make for some nifty improvements in the traditional timeshifting that VCRs have offered for ages. The Nashville Network airs great old TV shows like Miami Vice, WKRP In Cincinnati and Bob Newhart's 1970s and 1980s sitcoms. Unfortunately for many viewers, especially those on the West Coast, their airing times may be too early. A PVR makes it easy to record these shows, watch them in the evening, then discard them. You don't have to worry about videotapes wearing out, and the digital picture is usually indistinguishable from a live broadcast. If you have only three or four hours a night to watch TV, a PVR is a great way to make the most of it.
In addition to using a hard drive instead of tape, with all of the flexibility that entails, PVRs often have sophisticated search engines tied into an electronic programming guide. You can type in, say, "Star Trek," and each day, it will hunt down and record all episodes of the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, every Star Trek movie that is on that week and any PBS or Discovery Channel documentaries on the physics of Star Trek.
Most PVR EPGs also allow you to search by actor's name. So typing in "Shatner" gets a bunch of those same Star Trek episodes, as well as episodes of T.J. Hooker, Rescue 911, Judgment at Nuremberg, Big Bad Mama and Bill's upcoming appearance on The Tonight Show.
Needless to say, this is one nifty technology. Alfred Hitchcock once described his films as being "like life, but with the dull bits cut out." A personal video recorder partnered with an EPG is TV with the dull bits cut out.

DVD in the House
VCRs have had long lives in the living rooms around the world and they have migrated into the TV sets themselves in growing number. Now that DVD is gaining popularity as a medium for watching recorded content, it is a logical step for smart TV sets to include DVD video players. Not only does the resilience and resolution of the DVD format make these additions worthy, but interactive discs are available for maximizing the viewer's experience.

Surf the Net on Your TV Set
Surfing the Net from your TV can be so useful that it is amazing it hasn't caught on more. The household name in this area is Microsoft's WebTV, but there are many other manufacturers of external and internal Web access products for the television.
Web access truly makes your TV smart. You can get the news from hundreds of different newspapers and online magazines, read Roger Ebert's take on the latest movie before paying eight bucks to see it, catch Matt Drudge dishing the latest political dirt, find out how your local sports team is doing. Frequently you get picture-in-picture, so that a football game can be on simultaneously with Internet stats. With a TV connected to the Internet, the whole family can surf the Net together from the comfort of your media room's cozy couch or reclining chairs. Because others can see what's going on and join in, this can be a much less isolating experience than the normal one-on-one of a PC and monitor.

Look For The ATVEF Label
Long promised, but until recently just in the experimental stage, interactive TV has really taken off in the last couple of years.
As the name implies, interactive TV sends data. It allows receivers to recognize enhanced programming and interact with those files like HTML pages on the Web. Information within the program content is sent down from a broadcaster to your TV set and replied back to the content server by way of your ATVEF compliant device.
As we said, millions of satellite and digital cable viewers already have a bit of interactivity, through their electronic programming guides. WebTV reports over a million subscribers, who also have some level of interactivity with their TV sets. What an ATVEF decoder insures is interactivity with specific shows, so that home viewers can play along with Jeopardy, participate in interactive polls or make purchases on-screen with the click of a remote. But whether live or recorded, it's simply no fun hearing Al Michaels tell you to vote in a Monday Night Football poll and not being able to do so. In order to ensure that your smart TV set will work with whatever interactive TV shows are on, look for the ATVEF label. ATVEF is the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum, a standards group to help ensure that interactive TV products, such as those at your local TV station or cable company, can work with the equipment inside your TV set.

The Revolution Will Be Televised!
If all of this sounds far removed from your father's old 1950s console TV, it should. Combined together, the alphabet soup of today's smart TVs is a heady broth that makes watching TV a whole new experience. The TV sets on the following pages prove that the hippies of the 1960s were dead wrong the revolution will be televised!