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The world’s first Android TV has been launced in Sweeden, promising an experience much like enlarging and hanging a smartphone on your wall as a TV. We heard about the Android TV back in April, but they have now released it.
Lava, the small private manufacturer based on the Swedish coast, launched the new TV named Scandinavia in Swedish stores. The company hopes by next year to sell the set in major overseas market like the US. as well.
Internet connected TV has been around for quite a while now from big manufacturers like Samsung and Philips, but these devices tend to offer “walled gardens with widgets for predetermined online content like YouTube or certain news sites rather than the free browsing and downloading possibilities of a laptop or smartphone”, Lava’s Chief Executive Christian Svantesson said in an interview.
But this Android TV, which has been in the making since Lava’s management team thought of the idea last summer, is set to change things.
With the exception of voice calls, the “Scandinavia” on display in the company’s Stockholm sales office allows me to do pretty much anything I would expect in a mobile smartphone. The set has a home menu with widgets including Google’s Chrome web browser, Facebook, YouTube and Google Maps. It also has its own application store where users can download additional content.
There are only 20 or so apps in the dedicated store at the moment, but there will be more than 1,000 before year-end as it will be able to import many of the apps in the online Android Market store as long as they are scalable to fit a TV screen rather than a handset, according to People of Lava’s marketing director Martin Ljunggren.
The TV, which runs the rather dated Android version 1.5, known as cupcake, comes with a remote control with a built-in keyboard. The company plans an app to control it with an Android phone, says Mr. Ljunggren.
Apart from the smartphone functionality, Scandinavia is a pretty nice TV in its own right. The one on display is a 55-inch flatscreen built with a composite including a lot of bauxite rock, which makes it surprisingly heavy at around 40 kilograms (88 pounds).
The hardware design is clean, in white, black and grey, and the screen responds quickly. It’s priced towards the high end, at 40,000 Swedish kronor $5,833 or €4,257 for the 55-inch model.
Though Lava only has around 20 employees, it has its own assembly line on the Swedish west coast with externally-contracted workers, which can produce up to 50,000 TV sets per year, says Mr. Svantesson. The company hopes to sell 200 million kronor worth of Scandinavia TVs in 2011, and aims to win a niche in markets like the U.S. and the U.K., where there has been significant consumer interest in the new Android TV.
Still, says Mr. Svantesson, financing of the planned expansion remains a hurdle. Lava needs €10 million to launch the TV in major markets like the U.S. The company hopes soon to raise the sum from an industrial investor or venture capitalist.
If Lava gets the money for a U.S. launch, the company will be up against consumer electronics giant Sony Corp which is just rolling out its own Android-based TV, building on a different solution that intermingles TV broadcasts and Internet content rather than running them side by side.
Google’s own TV launched recently in the US but unlike the Scandinavia, it is a more-conventional set-top box for an existing TV set.
As yet another part of the consumer electronics industry gravitates into the world of cloud services, open source platforms and application stores, new business opportunities will arise for the players in the sector.
Including not only TV manufacturers and app developers but also content providers and telecom operators who might for instance want to bundle their subscriptions with free TV sets in order to increase customer loyalty, Mr. Svantesson says. Whatever happens, it going to happen soon, he added. “Within five years, smart TV will be a mainstream household product.“Image may be NSFW.
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