Time to get smart with TVs
The PC-TV combo is here — and buyers are saying: bigger is better!
By Anand Parthasarthy
Yes, Godzilla got it right. Size does matter. With multiple festival seasons around the corner, TV buyers are telling us, bigger is better — and are gearing up to avail seasonal discount sales to snap up the largest model they can afford.
Recent announcements, made interestingly, by a couple of China-based players, whose previous launches here, were smart phones, hold out the promise of very compelling pricing for smart TV sets. And especially at the large screen end of the spectrum, the asking price is less than half of what is currently prevalent.
What is more, these new entrants into the Indian TV scene have cannily bundled a lot of local content into their offerings. Smart TVs have been around for some time now — sets which incorporate connectivity to Internet. Now, you can do more than just surf the Net, look at YouTube and check your mail. The trend this year is to bundle a lot of infotainment — movies, sports, live shows, archival TV serials — both free and pay-by-view. This opens up the whole new game of offline viewing, unshackling the viewer from seeing content only when it is broadcast.
These new entrants seem to have brought learnings from the phone business — and are scaling up their screens, from a 6 inch phone to a 60 inch TV set (and often, both are Dolby DTS sound and full High Definition or even Ultra HD).
Le Eco which in its earlier avatar, LeTV, was one of the biggest content providers for television in China, has smartly (pun intended), entered the TV market here with a trio of sets at the big -screen end of the smart TV spectrum, with a canny combo of carefully curated desi and international content thrown in. By tying up with content biggies — Hungama, Yupp TV, Eros and the like — they are able with little effort of their own, to offer a platter of 2000+ HD movies, over 3 million songs and 100 satellite TV channels as a package deal with each TV model. The first generation of television was a a one way broadcast-only technology. The second was a platform for multiple channels. Now Generation 3.0 is a big screen that is Internet -connected to an entire ecosystem of global infotainment options. The Connected Smart TV is here.
You can control the screen by voice or gesture. You can change channels by waving the remote — or using your mobile phone instead. And you can store your favourite programming in your own cloud, and share clips or music much as you now do with Whatsapp.
What is finally happening, is seamless merger of TV, mobile and Internet where every viewer in a family can create his or own personalized version of TV content — and control what to do with it.
LeEco has chosen to address the top end of the TV market: their three sets for India are: the top of the line 65-inch 3D UHD TV, the Super3 Max 65; the 65-inch ultra HD Super 3 X65 and the 55-inch UHD Super 3 X55. All three are so-called ‘4k’ displays which means 3840 x 2160 pixels compared to Full HD which is 1920 x 1080 pixels. Do the multiplication — and you can see why 4K (or UHD) has 8 million+ or four times more pixels in the same area compared to 2K or Full HD, making for much sharper images.
All the TVs are WiFi enabled (802.11 ac, the fastest standard currently available in consumer electronics) and Android 5.0 driven. I was tickled to see TVs rated like PCs: “3 GB RAM, 16 GB Flash storage”…this is PC-TV sangam in action.
The Max 65 is priced at Rs 1,49,790 which is about half what competing 65-inch 3D sets cost. The X 65 costs Rs 99, 790 and the X55 is Rs 55, 790, all aggressively priced in their categories. Their common USP is the access to all that extra content which is valued at around Rs 5000/ year and comes free for two years. Anytime online content, over and above the cable/satellite channels, has finally come to Indian TVs.
Return of TCL
TCL is the other Chinese company, to launch aggressively priced TVs in India this month. Readers may know it by the Thomson brand it brought to India some years ago. It has chosen to launch its TV business in India with four sets: two full HD models in the D2900 series: 32 and 40 inch at Rs 13,990 and Rs 20,990 and the TCL P1 Smart TV series with a 48-inch curved full HD TV for Rs 37,990 and the better-resolution, but smaller UHD 43-inches for Rs 31,990. A curved smart TV has hitherto cost about three times this price. The TCL smart TV sets have conveniently put their more interesting functions into an app.
There is no overlap between the India offerings of TCL and LeEco for a reason: They work closely in China and in fact, TCL makes some of the sets for Le Eco and in turn uses its content. and is the No.3 TV seller in the US. It seems, the upcoming festival season will see some compelling deals for customers.
Is 4K worth the price?
Readers often ask: Is 4K/ UHD TV worth the extra asking price? Having seen UHD and HD TVs from TCL and Le Eco’s UHD only TVs, side by side last week at their respective launches in Bangalore and Delhi, here is my take for what it’s worth. In TV sizes 42-inch and smaller, you will hardly tell the difference from Full HD/2K and UHD/4K. It is only in larger sizes that there is discernible difference. At 55-inch to 65-inch if you look at the same content on a 2K and a 4K set, the latter shows a lot more depth — ie what looks like a black shadow area in a 2K set, reveals a lot of detail in 4K. The real difference will be seen when viewing sports, where a 4K set shows absolutely no blurr even when the action is very fast. When 4K TV sets were priced Rs 90,000 and more, I would have said: Don’t rush, there is hardly any 4K content to view and hence this is not value for money. But now you can get a 43-inch 4K set for around Rs 31,000 and a 55-inch for about Rs 55,000 — and if I had the money, I would think: no harm in buying now at these prices: the content will eventually come!
IndiaTechOnline
Originally published on The Golden Sparrow
