TV Makers Are Out of Ideas

[Commentary] The latest and greatest TVs are curved, offering viewers a left-to-right concavity, like watching TV on a skateboarder's half-pipe. And, somehow, curved screens make TV better, TV makers say. TV is stuck in an innovation cul-de-sac.

There are no new ideas in TV hardware that are worth paying for, so, thanks to competition and production efficiencies, good TVs keep getting cheaper. The cheaper they get, the more desperate TV makers become, filling their sets with more and more useless piffle. The death of innovation in TV hasn't come about because TVs are perfect. Far from it. It remains a big hassle to find something you want to watch, or to stream TV shows and movies without consulting a handful of remotes, or to navigate your cable system's byzantine menus. Indeed, in our modern, multidevice, multi-subscription-service livings rooms, almost nothing is as easy as is it needs to be. But TV makers aren't in a position to address any of these real problems. They don't have the clout to make significant deals with entertainment companies, which would be necessary to fix the problem of having to subscribe to many services in order to watch everything that you would like. They can't alter the way cable systems bundle channels, which might make it easier to cut your monthly bill. And TV makers, like everyone else, can't make all the devices connected to your TV obey a single, friendly on-screen interface -- which would, ultimately, be the best way to crack the problem of annoying living-room tech. In the absence of solving what really ails TV, manufacturers add on extras meant to fatten their profits.