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Tim Baxter, President of Samsung Electronics America. Photo by Tim Carmody/Wired.com

NEW YORK Just forget about its giant screen for a moment.

Yes, that new plasma TV is gorgeous, that LED backlight efficient, and that refresh rate ridiculous. But in truth, just like smartphones and tablets, smart TVs are about platforms as much as pictures.

Today in New York, Samsung presented its updated line of smart TVs and related electronics, almost all of them available for sale now. The Korean electronics giant has too many new individual devices from cameras that sync with your TV over Wi-Fi and smartphone speaker docks with honest-to-goodness vacuum tube amplifiers to tricked-out, touchpad-and-microphone-equipped remotes that are 85 to 90 percent of everything you want a smart TV remote to be to give more than passing consideration here to each and every one of them. If you want to get started with that, Ars Technicas Casey Johnston has a great rundown of whats good and bad in all the new interface technologies for Samsungs smart TVs here.

Instead, heres my big takeaway from Samsungs event at least as I see it now, with an eye toward Apples definitely-an-iPad, most-probably-an-Apple-TV event on Wednesday.

In the future, the living room will replace the home office as most households home for the stationary personal computer. Instead of printers and mice and other corded accessories, networked appliances and post-PC machines share data with one another and with the cloud. Play and productivity both become decentered; gaming and entertainment might be on a tablet or a television, with recipes at the refrigerator, a shopping list for the smartphone, and an instructional video on the television set.

All of these experiences will be coherent, continuous and contextual. And like the personal computer at the height of Pax Wintel, the living room will be a platform characterized by triumphant pluralism.

The thing about the living room is that its universal; everyone in the household uses it, Samsung VP Eric Anderson told me at todays event. We know that were not going to capture every single member of the household. In my family, my wife and my daughter are Apple, me and my sons are Android, he noted, pointing out that the majority of devices introduced today can interact with either mobile platform.

The big question for us is what is the core of your household, Anderson added. What is the device of origin? Where do you start, and to where do you return? Thats why we look at the living room, the kitchen along with some mobile devices. Here, no company can be a platform purist: Every consumer electronics company is looking for a differentiator; maybe the differentiator here is the devices ability to work with anything.

Samsungs been manufacturing and selling smart TVs since 2008. Its sets have carried Yahoos widgets, Google TV, and now Samsungs own app-driven Smart Hub software. In those four short years, the technology powering the TV, customers expectations, and entertainment companies willingness to embrace cloud-delivered, app-based over-the-top content have all changed.

Go here to read the rest:
Smarter TV: Living Room as Digital Hub From Samsung and Microsoft to Apple and Google