Welcome to Lowpass! This week: TV trends at CES 2024, and Apple’s Vision Pro is coming.

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Your 2024 CES smart TV cheat sheet

CES used to be all about big TVs. Every year, television manufacturers would show off new TV sets that were bigger, brighter and supposedly better than last year’s models. That’s still true in 2023, to a degree – TCL just introduced a 115-inch TV – but there’s also been some movement in the opposite direction for the past few years.

Taken aback by audiences that seem perfectly fine watching full movies on their phone screens, TV makers have been increasingly looking to make that big living-room TV less obnoxious. Less of a big black hole when it is turned off, and perhaps even less of a disruption when it is on, but nothing is playing.

For years, TV makers have tried to find ways to effectively make the TV disappear, either by physically hiding it, or by making it blend in with its surroundings. That trend is also on full display at CES 2024 in Las Vegas this week, alongside other interesting updates to the smart TV ecosystem. Here’s a summary of a few things that stood out to me:

TVs are disappearing. Knowing that bigger, brighter, louder doesn’t work for every customer, TV makers have tried a variety of things to hide TVs in plain sight over the past few years. Remember LG’s rollable TV?

• This year’s version of this trend are transparent TVs. LG is showing off a 77-inch transparent TV in Vegas this week, while Samsung is showcasing transparent Microled displays, but stopping short of announcing any products incorporating the technology.

• LG’s transparent TV does look interesting in person, and it does make you rethink what it means to put a TV in your living room. Do you need to rethink your cable management? Do you want to put art behind your TV? Or would you even, as one LG employee suggested to me, put the TV in front of a window so you can look outside when it’s off?

• However, at least for now, these TVs fall more into the highly-engineered status symbol category – something you might buy if you previously spent thousands of dollars on a curved TV, only to grow tired of the unnecessary effect soon after.

• For me, the real story in this space is the enduring success of Samsung’s The Frame. First introduced in 2017, Samsung sold over one million The Frame TVs in 2021. This year, the company is not only releasing more energy-efficient versions, but also adding a dedicated Music Frame speaker that can be paid with Samsung TVs for surround sound.

• Further proof that The Frame is working for Samsung: Hisense is releasing a copycat model dubbed the Canvas TV.

Casting is getting another look. Ten years after Google released its very first Chromecast device, casting is still a thing – and, increasingly, a moat for the Android maker. 

• Just this week, Google announced that it is bringing Chromecast built-in tech to LG’s new webOS smart TVs.

• At the same time, Amazon is looking to break free from Google’s cast dominance by embracing Matter Cast, an open casting protocol for Matter-enabled devices. In addition to adding Matter Cast to its own apps and devices, Amazon also announced that it is working with Plex, Pluto TV, Sling TV, STARZ, and ZDF to make their apps Matter Cast-compatible.

• Here’s why this is important: Fire TV devices have supported casting for some time, thanks to Amazon’s Fling SDK. However, by throwing its weight behind Matter Cast, Amazon clearly wants to establish an open standard that could one day bring universal casting to third-party hardware as well, while keeping Google’s influence at bay.

• This is a bit of a deja vu for digital media veterans: Netflix and YouTube originally collaborated on an open casting protocol called DIAL, which is still being used by the two streaming services.

• Soon after, Google established its own casting protocol. Chromecast / Google Cast can be freely implemented by media apps, but adding receiver capabilities to hardware requires a business relationship with Google.

Everyone is searching for TV’s next killer app. For years now, television makers have been trying to figure out what else people could do with their TV sets. You know, other than streaming. A few things do appear to be getting some traction (cloud gaming, home control, fitness). But without a definitive killer app, TV makers keep throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.

• Samsung is aggregating all of its non-video services under the Daily+ moniker. New this year: A workout tracker, and telehealth for yourself and your pet, the latter courtesy of a partnership with Dr. Tail.

• LG is touting partnerships with Volley (AI voice games), Udemy and ABCMouse for entertainment and edutainment, among other things.

• A bunch of companies are giving TV-based shopping (I refuse to call this T-commerce) another look. I get a demo from Telly this week that uses ACR to identify content on the screen, and then displays related products on Telly’s second screen. Also, TCL is betting on AI avatars for TV shopping.

AI is everywhere. AI was the buzzword of 2023, so it’s no surprise that TV makers would be jumping on the bandwagon as well. As in other areas, AI isn’t actually all that new to the TV space – many TV makers have for some time been using AI upscaling to make HD streams look good on 4K displays – but that didn’t stop some of the biggest brands from doubling down on the AI frenzy.

• Roku is using AI as part of its efforts to improve TV picture quality based on the type of content people are watching, as I reported last week.

• Hisense’s AI picture quality processing includes face detection to “create lifelike skin tones,” among other things.

• LG’s high-end TVs have a new AI chip that is capable of fine-tuning brightness and contrast for subsections of each picture “by analyzing variations in brightness where light enters the scene, creating images that look more three-dimensional.”

• Samsung is also doing all kinds of AI image enhancements. These include an AI motion enhancer that “automatically detects the type of sport you’re watching, and uses deep learning to help you visually track fast moving objects like baseball and footballs on screen with crystal clarity.”

• While some of these enhancements may be welcome news for consumers, I can’t help but think that we’re going to see creators, and possibly streaming services, rebel against AI-guided over-processing of their works.

What did I miss? I’m still in Vegas until the end of Friday, and have been picking up a bunch of nuggets for future stories already. But I’m sure I’ve also missed a few things. Let me know if there’s something I should check out, or if you have questions that no one has answered yet, by replying to this email!

Apple Vision Pro is coming next month

Kudos to Apple for stealing the show during CES week: The iPhone maker announced on Monday that its Vision Pro headset is being launched on February 2, with pre-orders beginning on January 19.

Industry folks seem to be split about the announcement. Some are very excited about Apple’s big bet on spatial computing, while others voice criticism about the price and positioning of the device. Two thoughtful voices stood out to me this week:

My former boss Om Malik is excited about the way the Vision Pro will change media consumption:

“Apple Vision Pro has ultra-high-resolution displays that deliver more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye. This gives you a screen that feels 100 feet wide with support for HDR content. The audio experience is just spectacular. In time, Apple’s marketing machine will push the simple message — for $3,500, you get a full-blown replacement for a reference-quality home theater, which would typically cost ten times as much and require you to live in a McMansion.”

Longtime tech blogger turned developer advocate Christina Warren on the other hand has problems with the way Apple is marketing the device:

“Here is my continued discomfort with the Apple Vision Pro and how its announcement/roll-out has gone: In every single way, this is a dev kit, which I think is completely valid and is the proper positioning for a device like this at this stage. But Apple, while somewhat positioning it like a dev kit in terms of price/release/how it can be tried out, continues to market this as a direct to consumer device. You cannot be both, and I cannot stress this enough. You cannot be both.”

Both are valid perspectives, even though I’d argue that the market for a $3500 TV that you can’t watch together with family members is fairly small. I’d expect we will get to hear more about the way Apple actually wants to position the Vision Pro in the coming months.

What else

Netflix may bring ads to video games. The streamer is reportedly exploring in-game advertising, but only for subscribers to its cheap ad-based tier.

SoundCloud is looking to sell. The music service is reportedly looking for a sale at a $1 billion valuation.

Netflix’s next live stream is … a tennis match. The Netflix Slam will stream on March 3.

Apple doesn’t want you to call its headset a headset. The Vision Pro is also not an AR, VR, or XR device, as the company is advising developers not to use those terms.

ByteDance is looking to sell its Nuverse gaming unit. The TikTok owner is reportedly in talks with Tencent and others about offloading Nuverse.

Sony has announced a standalone VR headset. The device is being marketed as a “Spatial Content Creation System,” and will be available later this year.

Amazon’s latest sports deal falls through. The company was reportedly looking to secure multi-year baseball streaming rights in exchange for a $150 investment in bankrupt sports network Diamond Sports.

Lowpass sponsorships now 20% off. Reach 18,500 AR, VR and streaming insiders by sponsoring this newsletter. Here’s a special deal for CES 2024. 

Apple VP of Finance Saori Casey is becoming the new CFO of Sonos. Current Sonos CFO Eddie Lazarus will remain Chief Legal Officer, also become Chief Strategy Officer.

Google is laying off hundreds of assistant, hardware staffers. Some of the hardware cuts included folks working on AR.

Netflix’s ad tier now has 23 million monthly active users. That’s according to Netflix advertising president Amy Reinhard.

Discord is laying off 17% of its staff. This continues a brutal week in tech …

That’s it

I’m at CES this week, albeit briefly. If you’re here, say hi! Also: Can anyone help me solve the mystery of the Chromecast adapter in my hotel room? It’s on, but I can’t figure out how to cast to it … which is bothering me more than it should.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!