[Mahn]

Maybe because early adopters don't care for TVs. I'd be willing to bet most folks here in HN don't really watch TV for instance, other than for the occasional news, and for something to eventually catch on and become mainstream having a base of early adopters helps. Perhaps I'm just assuming things, but I feel like this will be a major block on the road to everyone building "smart" TVs.

[jackalope]

I think group watching will remain popular, especially among kids, and for that you need a large display. Maybe the trend will be towards screen sharing, where you'd use a tablet or phone to select programming, then switch it to the screen. Maybe 'screen control' would be a more apt name, since I wouldn't want to depend on the tablet/phone for data & rendering. I'm not convinced that enormous standalone tablets are sufficient, because I have to believe that fingerprint smudges on a TV would be seriously distracting.

[mixedbit]

Yes, people for sure will still want to watch stuff on good quality displays. But I think dump TVs: large displays that you can easily connect to a standard computer or a mobile device and stream content to are much more compelling than 'smart' platforms.

[PostOnce]

You can plug computers into the HDMI port of any new TV already, right? Whats the difference between a TV and a large display, for the purposes of the average consumer?

[koralatov]

None whatsoever. I know lots of non-technical people who do exactly that, without having the faintest idea of how their laptop magically outputs stuff to their TV. To them, in that use case, it becomes much the same as the DVD player or video recorder they're used to; it just so happens that it also does more than either of those two things.