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The Coming Tech Battle Over 'Smart TVs'
An anonymous reader writes "One persistent theme from this year's CES is that television manufacturers are racing to establish the concept of 'Smart TVs,' sets that integrate modern browsing features, control through voice or motion, application support, and even upgradability. This article suggests the living room will be the location of the newest tech war. Quoting: 'To compete, the companies will have to offer carefully curated, high-quality applications and be open to supporting mobile devices such as tablets. Other media companies have already started: Comcast, for example, announced that it's going to allow OnDemand streaming not only to Samsung Smart TV's but also to the iPad. The TV makers are hoping that the multitude of additional features will be enough to trigger turnover like the industry saw after the introduction of flat-panel screens, Bloomberg noted. It's a big market, if the television makers can figure out how to crack it.'"
It's been that way forever.
Panasonic, Samsung and LG as well as NEC all run linux on their HDTV's and always have.
Cool part is some TV's have a bug that let you into the OS via the rs232 port (if you bought one that was not bottom of the line and is missing that port) I was rooting around in a NEC E322 just yesterday looking through /etc and /bin. Just wished the TV had xmodem software installed so I could pull files off of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually, from a signal processing perspective, that is almost trivial. Treat the room accoustics as a FIR filter (Which it is), and it becomes a simple problem of taking signal (filter(audio) + uservoice) and (audio) and then calculating (uservoice). The only tricky part is updating your FIR model to account for changes in accoustics caused by opening/closing doors, moving furniture, people walking in front of the TV and so forth. Tricky, but entirely doable. Mobile phones use exactly the same method to prevent the noise from the ear-speaker being transmitted back to the microphone.