Philips-brand Television Set Maker TPV Turns to IBM Cloud for Smart TV Services

Philips-brand Television Set Maker TPV Turns to IBM Cloud for Smart TV Services

TPV, the maker of Philips-branded television sets, has partnered with IBM Cloud to help create and deliver smart TV apps and services such as instant playback and video-on-demand directly to the devices.

In an attempt to stand out of the crowd, electronics manufacturers must constantly keep innovating their products and keep adding newer and better features with each model. As it is these manufacturers typically work on wafer-thin profits, so it’s crucial that they keep the creativity flowing.

TPV’s agreement with IBM involves the latter’s IBM Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), a cloud-based software applications development platform. According to IBM’s press release a few minutes ago, they’ve already created a service that TPV can start using to develop new applications for smart TVs and have them delivered over the cloud.

The biggest advantage of the Bluemix platform is that it allows clients to leverage the cognitive and analytics capabilities of IBM Watson, which powers much of IBM’s artificial intelligence projects.

This is just the beginning, however. TV manufacturers will now be able to get on to Bluemix and immediately start using up to 1,000 third-party applications to configure their smart TV capabilities the way they want. In doing this, IBM has opened up the door to electronics companies to built their own ecosystem of smart apps that have artificial intelligence, cognitive technology and analytics capabilities at the heart of their functionality.

But that’s not all. In addition to creating and delivering the apps, users will also get huge amounts of data about the usage of their products, which can then be analyzed and presented with IBM’s business intelligence applications. The data will be made available in an understandable format with insights so clients can use it to make decisions about how they are monetizing various services, how many users are accessing each app and so on.

The visibility that such a system gives its creators is tremendous, and it will help them fine-tune their offerings based on what’s popular and what’s not. On the other hand, it may also give rise to privacy issues that typically come with data aggregation, as most tech companies today are fully aware.

Still, if it’s a trade-off between my TV knowing what I feel like watching and me being worried about my data being used that way, I’d go with the smart TV any day.

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