July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After all the money we spent buying flat screen TVs in the past decade, LG is reintroducing the curved TV. This curve, however, is focused on you.

Today, LG announced that it is accepting pre-orders for the first curved OLED TVs ever to ship. The LG 55EA9800 is a 55-inch organic-light-emitting-diode TV with a concave curve, not convex like the old tube TVs. In other words, it curves gently towards you, not away from you.

The result, LG says, is spectacular.

“The entire screen surface is equidistant from the viewer’s eyes, eliminating the problem of screen-edge visual distortion and loss of detail,” LG said in a press release.

The curved screen, which is only .17 inches thick and weighs just 37 pounds, took five years of research and development to create, LG says. And the technology gives it a leg up on competitors, according to LG CEO Havis Kwon, who said the curvy television is “proof of LG’s unmatched leadership” and an example of the “most exciting TV technology available today.”

Kwon’s comments are apparently a challenge to Samsung, which also announced a curved OLED TV in January.

In addition to LG’s WRGB technology for delivering color with a white “sub-pixel” in addition to the typical red, blue, and green pixels in standard TVs, the other gloat-worthy feature of the 55EA9800 is the invisible speakers.

The TV’s audio output is in its transparent stand, where LG uses transparent thin-film speakers to deliver what it calls “high-quality” sound. That helped it win a design competition earlier this year, although I’m doubtful it will make for the best sound available.

The new curved TV might make for a great personal TV-viewing experience, but it looks like LG is also building in technology to let users daisy-chain them together for a larger, even more immersive experience, which would be useful for large public places and venues.

One caveat on the curves: I wonder how well they will work for a large viewing audience, like a Super Bowl party. My assumption would be that the curve would negatively impact some of the viewers’ experience, particularly those at the edges of the room.

Pricing has not been released, but some sources have placed it at $13,500.

YouTube announced this morning that its app is now available on the Nintendo Wii U. This is obviously a big deal for Nintendo, which is trying to own the living room entertainment experience, as the app is not just available for free download — it’s featured right on the Wii U’s main menu.

Users can use the soft keyboard on the Wii U’s GamePad, which also doubles as a remote control for your standard TV content, to search for videos:

Videos will play on your big-screen TV in full high-definition at up to 1080P resolution, and while the video plays on your TV, the video details, description, and author data display on the GamePad. Naturally, since you’re signed in to your Google account, you’ll also have access to your channels, favorites, and history.

Whether this will help Nintendo in its attempt to make the Wii U the center of the living room entertainment experience is hard to say, but it is at least a statement that the company is here to play. With standard TV, online video, video conferencing, gaming, and more, the statement is getting bigger and bigger.

But the competition is fierce and has been there for a while.

Good luck!

photo credit: wiiu-spiele.com via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Nintendo Wii U video game console is now hitting homes everywhere gamers who must have the newest new thing out — and it’s coming with high quality video-conferencing technology built-in. That technology, I learned last week, is actually the basis for a content delivery platform that its provider thinks is a billion-dollar opportunity.

Until now, it’s been a mystery who was providing the video-conferencing technology in the Wii U. It turns out that Vidyo, the same company that powers Google Hangouts, helped Nintendo deliver living-room teleconferencing.

Vidyo is “disrupting” business-to-business video conferencing with a fairly radical price point — free — and is now looking to expand its reach in business-to-consumer, via the living room.

“We’re trying to bring video-conferencing to the world,” Vidyo chief executive Ofer Shapiro told me last week. “We want to carry it to the masses.”

That’s not because Vidyo wants to display Skype for simple person-to-person video communication. Rather, it’s because it sees a whole new consumer platform based on simple, high-quality, living-room teleconferencing capability.

“Imagine the yoga teacher doing online yoga to 50 people,” Shapiro said. “Think about an audience of 100 million people … for instance buying a subscription for an online Zumba class.”

People have that capability now, Shapiro admits, on devices such as laptops, tablets, and netbooks. But when it’s in the living room, on the big screen, it’s different, he argues. Different enough to create a new way for content creators, teachers, coaches, speakers, and others find and build an audience for live video content.

“The big screen,” he told me,” is more social. You can move around … certain things are better in that environment. Also some people are still more fearful of computers — this reduces the barrier. It’s a market expansion.”

The first uses of Vidyo’s technology, of course, are the in-game experiences and the video chat built into Nintendo’s Miiverse. It’s a software-based solution that runs on Wii OS and does not require any special hardware, Vidyo’s senior VP Amnon Gavish, told me.

Gavish would not reveal the quality of the Wii U’s video-conferencing technology, saying only that it is “excellent, but not trying to have the same quality as a professional system.”

With this deal, Vidyo now has more than 25 partners including Google, NTT, Philips, and others who are bringing its technology to market. Most of those are revenue-share deals focuses on expanding the market for video-based conferencing. Now with Nintendo, Vidyo has a unique opportunity to hit the mainstream — and the living room — at the same time.

That all depends, however, on whether the Wii U is a market success or not.