Will consumers pay for adding a camera to the TV for social networking in order to differentiate themselves?

OPPO TV is here, and it comes with a front camera.

Perhaps it is due to the inertia of mobile phone thinking, or perhaps it is to seek different product highlights. Since 2019, many mobile phone manufacturers including Huawei, Honor, and OnePlus have used front cameras as their secret weapons and stepped into the smart TV industry.

Product changes inevitably require novel ideas, but if such changes ignore consumers, then consumers will only vote with their feet - and will not pay for this added value.

Does television need to be social?

The continuous entry of new forces into the smart TV industry has a great deal to do with the explosion of the market. As a natural large screen in the smart home scene, smart TV is likely to become the data center of the entire family.

Although the entire smart TV industry is unprecedentedly hot, its long life and narrow application mean that its market does not have huge room for growth. According to CMM data, from January to July 2020, the retail volume of China's overall color TV market fell by 9.0% year-on-year. This market-level pressure means that new manufacturers must find unique product highlights to stimulate sales.

Of course, the above two factors are just two sides of the same coin of "transforming products" and have not been implemented at the specific functional level. The reason why new power manufacturers have found a specific transformation plan for "proactive photography" is mainly related to the trend of terminals.

Complementing the transformation of smart home scenarios, the terminal transformation at the level of the Internet of Everything is also taking place quietly. According to Valuates data, the global IoT market size is expected to grow from US$992 million in 2019 to US$31.9256 billion by 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of 64.2%.

Considering that social interaction is a natural need of users, under the general trend of the Internet of Everything, new power manufacturers not only have smart phones representing mobile Internet, but also will enter the smart TV market for smart home scenarios. Then, they only need to set up a camera to organically connect these two devices. This product feature is very likely to touch the emotional needs of consumers and make a difference at the market level.

Do users need to socialize on TV?

Although from the perspective of the market and terminals, it is understandable that new manufacturers launch smart TV products equipped with front cameras aimed at social networking, but from the perspective of the overall trend of social changes and the current defects in large-screen terminal connections, the front cameras of smart TVs actually have natural defects.

From the perspective of the overall social trend, although there was a tendency to migrate from mobile terminals (text messages) to PC terminals (QQ) in the early 20th century, this tendency was mainly due to the shortcomings of mobile terminal interaction, not because of the attractiveness of PC terminals. For example, in 2012, more than ten years after the rise of PC social networking, the number of text messages in China still reached a peak of 900 billion, implying users' demand for mobile social networking.

On the other hand, with the explosion of mobile Internet after 2010, mobile social networking has completely become the main battlefield for user social networking. The "2019 WeChat Data Report" shows that as of September 2019, the number of active WeChat accounts was 1.151 billion, making it the largest app in China. With the rise of WeChat, the number of text messages in China has decreased by 10%, and the traffic of PC social networking has also begun to decline at a rate of 4.3%.

These two trends clearly show that the main battlefield of social networking has long bid farewell to fixed terminals and has emerged on mobile terminals. However, smart TVs with social functions and cameras actually deviate from this trend.

More importantly, even if we strip away the macro trends and look at it from a social perspective, from the level of products and connections, we can find that smart TVs that use front cameras as an important fulcrum for social interaction are actually unnecessary.

Looking at the social tools on the market, whether it is QQ, mobile phone numbers or WeChat, we can find that these social platforms have no absolute connection with the terminals. In other words, all terminals can communicate freely through these platforms.

In contrast, as there is no corresponding social platform for smart TVs, most manufacturers only strengthen the social aspects of mobile terminals and smart TVs within their own ecosystems. However, since there is no absolute connection between social aspects and terminals, what consumers really care about is the "circle of friends" connected through social aspects, and this is precisely the shortcoming that TV social aspects cannot make up for.

Consumer demand is the ultimate guide

In the final analysis, no matter the trend or the terminal, the ultimate guide is the consumer. Therefore, product changes must require novel ideas, and consumer demand should always be the first guiding ideology of the product.

In the first half of 2020, China's smart TV market fell by 9.0% year-on-year, but the same was not true for the sub-sectors. In Q1 2020, the total size of China's game market reached 73.203 billion yuan, a month-on-month increase of 14.743 billion yuan. Industry insiders predict that with the decentralization of 5G and ultra-high-definition large-screen technology, cloud gaming will become the top priority of the gaming industry in the future, and as a carrier of large-screen games, smart TVs may also usher in a market breakthrough.

In short, although the smart TV market is becoming increasingly popular in 2020 with the continuous entry of new forces, the blind changes of manufacturers in this hot market atmosphere seem to be a bit hasty. In the context of increasingly fierce competition, consumer demand is a yardstick to test the product orientation of manufacturers. Why can ultra-large screens and gaming TVs become potential growth points in the market, rather than social TVs?

The market is always changing, and products are always changing, but I hope that respecting consumer needs will never change.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.