With all that said, though, I'm going to hop right onto the cloud bandwagon and talk about how the cloud, as defined by my favorite wiki, is changing how you use your television and consume your content. Your television will, of course, continue to receive your standard channels. I can't imagine that consumers would put up with a TV that doesn't let them watch the Happy Days marathon or catch the local evening news.
Streaming Media
A lot of people, myself included, invest a fair amount of money into a nice television/sound system set-up. Normally, you'll have a nice flat panel TV, a 5.1 system and maybe a dedicated A/V receiver. What about when you want to listen to music, though? Sure, you may have a clock/radio in your bedroom, but how many people have a good stereo hooked up to their computer? How many people even have a computer in a place where they could hear their music as they move about the house?
With TVs that can connect to your home network through Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable, your living room suddenly becomes the center of your media consumption without the need for a huge CD changer or a computer sitting next to your Wii. You can find TVs that have built-in support for music services like Pandora and Amazon Cloud Music, letting you blast your tunes while you do laundry, build your kid's new bed or just lay around after a long day of work.
Plus, these same televisions usually have support for one or more video streaming services, like Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix or Hulu. Whereas before you'd need a dedicated box attached to your TV to access these services, now it just works. Instead of buying another piece of hardware and trying to figure out how to work it into your current system, you can just plug it into your router and take advantage of the benefits of all of your favorite streaming media services.
Local Content
So you'll be able to watch shows on Netflix and Hulu without needing another box? That's great, but is there any other benefit to having your television plugged into your local network, greedily slurping up your precious
bandwidth?
If you have a library of local videos, songs or pictures, there is. Imagine this, you've downloaded all of your purchased movies from Amazon and CinemaNow plus the digital copies you get on DVDs. The problem is, they're still on your computer, not your TV. What do you do? With an Internet-connected TV, you can watch all your movies, listen to your local mp3 library and browse your computers' photo albums through your home network. No more lugging hard drives around or hooking your laptop up to the TV.
Plus, if you use a service to sync your files across computers, you could purchase a digital movie or copy your pictures to your laptop while you're on vacation or on a business trip and have it all ready and waiting on your network when you get home. Imagine being able to watch your home movies and show visitors pictures from your trip without the work and hassle of transferring them to your desktop computer and crowding around.
In the future, most people will be buying televisions that have the same functionality as TVs with set top boxes do today. Several of them are already on store shelves, but they haven't gained much penetration yet. I'm assuming it's due to the fact that they don't look different from another TV without the extra services and most people will probably choose to go with the lower-priced TV if they can't see a major difference. Rest assured, though, that those older, less-varied TVs will be largely replaced within a few years as people increasingly turn to their living room as the mainstay of their entertainment, rather than dividing it between their computers and TVs.
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