Why Make the Boob Tube Smart?

CES is still a couple of months away, but already I can hear the drumbeats. Smarter TVs. Internet ready. More widgets. A next-generation way to watch television.

The promise is that, at the click of a button on a remote control, the Internet will spring to life on the TV screen. The problem is that the reality isn’t quite as simple as the promise makes it out to be.

For one thing, it takes two—or more, in this case—to tango. As Google TV is finding, a smart TV is only as good as the content relationships it can forge. And the quality of that Web video is only going to be as good as the consumer’s broadband connection.

Then there’s the matter of televisions’ lifespan. In a CE world where products are turned over every two or three years, televisions have remarkable staying power. They move from family room to master bedroom to guest room, but odds are the display we buy today will be with us long after technology has passed it by.

So rather than making the television smarter, wouldn’t we be better off putting that intelligence in the network? Streaming content and interactive applications from the network cloud so your TV—don’t they call it a display?—can do what it does best, and do it for many years to come?

Rather than setting up confrontational “us-vs-them” scenarios, putting the intelligence in the network cloud leverages existing content and service provider relationships. It also allows the CE industry to make smaller investments in hardware, and gives consumers the comfort of knowing that the connected TV they buy today won’t be a dinosaur a year from now.

So as we point toward CES, let’s remember that the smartest thing we can do might not be to try to make our televisions more than they are. Ultimately, we’ll be better off if we keep the boob in the “boob tube” and put the intelligence in the cloud.