it is low pass By Junko RoettgersA newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of technology and entertainment, syndicated exclusively for The Verge Customers once a week.
Earlier this month, UK Comcast-owned pay TV operator Sky announced plans to shut down one of its more ambitious hardware initiatives: Sky Live, a smart camera accessory for the company’s line of Sky Glass TVs, will stop operating in early December.
“We are proud of the ambition behind [Sky Live],” a Sky representative wrote in a forum post announcing the plans. “This has taught us valuable lessons that are helping shape the future of our products. However, we have made the difficult decision to close in order to focus our investment on what matters most to customers.
Launching in mid-2023, Sky Glass was supposed to transform smart TVs from passive media consumption devices into something more social and interactive by bringing Zoom calls, workouts with body tracking, and Kinect-like motion games to the home’s biggest screen. Now it’s all coming to an end, with Sky discontinuing the camera and reimbursing consumers who purchased it.
Sky’s decision to discontinue the product comes as other TV makers are also rethinking the concept of cameras in the living room. LG’s Smart Cam, due out in 2023, is out of stock at major retailers and appears to have been discontinued, as is TCL’s Smart TV Camera. And while Samsung still ships such an external camera, it has stopped integrating cameras directly into its TVs.
All of this made me wonder: Why did smart TV cameras go out of fashion so quickly? And what does it take for the camera to create a successful story in the living room? To get some answers, I spoke to Nex CEO David Lee, whose startup helped Sky with the Sky Live cameras, and is now selling its own camera-equipped motion gaming device.
By itself, the camera adds nothing
Lee started Nex in 2017 to bring kid-friendly motion games to mobile devices, and got some early recognition when Apple showcased the startup on stage during an iPhone event in 2018. However, they quickly realized that smartphones weren’t the right form factor for games that used full-body tracking to let players shoot hoops, play whack-a-mole, or jump with Peppa Pig.
When they looked for ways to make the jump to TV, they teamed up with Sky in 2021. “It was a deep technical collaboration,” says Lee. “I spent a lot of time with him personally.” Sky licensed some of Nex’s motion games for its Sky Live cameras, but the two companies also worked on optimizing these games for the chipsets Sky chose for the cameras and its Sky Glass smart TVs to reduce latency.
This experience made him realize how challenging it was to make computer vision-driven experiences work on smart TVs. As video chatting went mainstream due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many TV producers were looking at cameras as the next big thing. However, few people were actually willing to put the necessary hardware horsepower behind the efforts to make those cameras a useful accessory.
“Adding a camera [alone] Nothing gives you that,” says Lee. “You need a real compute platform.”
Running camera-equipped apps and games requires powerful SoCs and GPUs, as well as more RAM and storage than many of today’s smart TVs – which is why some early TVs with built-in cameras left a lot to be desired, with limited app support being one of the biggest issues raised by consumers. Or as Lee says: “A camera app, hand gestures: this is the best you can do?”
The reason most smart TVs are less powerful than mobile devices is due to the industry’s extremely low margins. TV manufacturers often sell their equipment at cost or even at a loss, and instead make money from advertising and services. An example: Before being acquired by Walmart last year, Vizio was losing an average of about $4.30 per TV shipped through 2024.
There is no business model for camera-equipped TVs
Some companies have seen success with more powerful standalone streaming boxes, and may potentially use built-in cameras to differentiate their products from the competition. In fact, at one point, Apple considered adding a camera to its Apple TV streamer bloombergMark Gurman. Lee estimates that adding a camera and the necessary compute power to a streaming box will cost manufacturers an additional $30 to $40.
“The question you have to ask is: Who’s going to pay for it? What’s the business model behind it?” He says. “Because if your focus is on selling advertising on streaming services you don’t need any of that stuff.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a demand for any of the things Sky and others try to do with their TV cameras. Video chat has become a part of many consumers’ daily lives. However, Apple’s approach to pairing the iPhone with the Apple TV shows that you don’t need a dedicated TV camera to bring phone-based video calls to the biggest screen in the house.
Meanwhile, motion gaming, first popularized by Microsoft’s Kinect, is showing signs of a comeback. When Lee couldn’t find other devices to license his company’s games, he decided to create his own hardware: the Nex Playground, a console that runs motion games with characters like Peppa Pig, Barbie, and Care Bears, has become a hit with families with young children. According to Lee, Nex has sold more than 200,000 devices this year alone, and could surpass half a million cumulative unit sales by the end of the year.
Lee credits that success to Nex’s partnership with Sky and the lessons learned from its now-defunct Sky Live cameras. “They were very innovative,” he says. “Without them, there would be no playground.”