Lenovo is once again making efforts in smart TV. What are the chances of the PC industry giant making a comeback against the trend?

After experiencing a series of events that have led to rising costs, such as upstream price fluctuations and exchange rate fluctuations, the market structure of China's color TV industry that relies on low prices as a means of competition has become difficult to maintain. When the market falls into a downturn, the key to a brand's breakthrough is not just to make good products.

Recently, Lenovo, which has been active in the PC field, has once again set its sights on smart TVs. Jia Zhaohui, senior vice president of Lenovo Group and head of smart TV business, recently brought the new product 65i3 to the media to analyze its product features in detail, and also analyzed and discussed Lenovo's smart TV strategy for the coming year. In addition to focusing on human-computer interaction in its products, Lenovo will try to use a mixed online and offline sales model, and strive to open up the TV market in fourth- to sixth-tier cities.

Analysts said that Lenovo's resolute choice to return to the smart TV industry at a time of market downturn shows that Lenovo has different thoughts on the Chinese color TV market. With Lenovo's huge size and offline channels around the world, it may be the first in the industry to take a path that conforms to the laws of industry development.

Human-computer interaction makes TV truly intelligent

Artificial intelligence has become a feature that almost all smart TV manufacturers have to talk about in their new products. For Lenovo, rebuilding smart TVs not only requires keeping up with the industry's hot trend of artificial intelligence, but also putting excellent human-computer interaction design in the first place.

Lenovo's new smart TV 65i3 focuses mainly on human-computer interaction. The product comes standard with an air mouse remote control with a built-in gyroscope. Especially in the Metro style interface with large color blocks, the convenient operation of the air mouse is combined with the excellent voice interaction function. The combination of the two brings higher efficiency to the TV.

At the same time, Lenovo Smart TV 65i3 has also cooperated with Baidu and Sibichen to launch an artificial intelligence voice assistant, which can realize functions such as screenshot query of actors, purchase of the same product, answering questions to grab red envelopes, etc.

In addition to the basic hardware design and audio and video aspects of the product, Lenovo attaches great importance to human-computer interaction because allowing the TV to gradually "understand" the user's intentions will produce a completely different user experience.

Of course, at present this experience is still very simple, just voice control, or automatic program push, but this may directly bring about an essential change in human-computer interaction. The interaction between people and machines is no longer a simple "you speak and I listen". This will not only give smart TVs a broader development space, but also is the real development direction of intelligence.

The new business model of online and offline mixed sales is revitalized

In addition to products of greater epoch-making significance, it is reported that Lenovo will also focus on channels when launching the 65i3. While focusing on improving offline channels, it will retain the online sales model and utilize existing resources to combine different online and offline sales models to form a new hybrid sales model.

As one of the most well-known companies in China, it is well known that Lenovo is different from those traditional TV manufacturers or Internet companies. Lenovo not only established the connection between online and offline early on, but also relied on the resources accumulated before, and going deep into offline is already a piece of cake for them.

At the same time, we can also see that the rapid growth of smart TVs in the past two years, both in terms of product sales and the user groups behind the products, are mostly concentrated in large cities, mainly first-tier cities. The development space contained in the country's fourth to sixth-tier cities is obvious.

Faced with broad market prospects, Lenovo is confident in targeting fourth- to sixth-tier cities with its hybrid online and offline sales strategy. On the one hand, it can avoid other competitors in the TV field and explore new ground for its return. On the other hand, this new ground also has a sufficient user base, including more than 100 million users in the rural market, which will provide favorable conditions for Lenovo to rewrite the market ranking of smart TV brands.

The growth rate of color TV market slows down, new attempts will lead to new breakthroughs

According to the "China Color TV Market Summary Report for the First Quarter of 2017" released by the China Electronic Video Industry Association, the domestic color TV market was not optimistic in the first quarter of this year, with retail volume of 11.79 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 5.2%.

When Internet TV brands that are accustomed to price wars have chosen to raise prices, it has to be said that the smart TV industry has indeed reached another critical juncture in industrial development. This means that the old path is no longer viable. Lenovo's return shows a new path for the smart TV field.

The trend of hardware homogeneity has affected the TV industry, forcing TVs to come up with more and better new ideas for the user experience of human-computer interaction. The saturation of the smart TV market in first- and second-tier cities has forced TV manufacturers to move down, testing the ability of TV brands to discover and grasp potential markets and consumer groups.

We regard Lenovo Smart TV 65i3 as the comeback of Lenovo Smart TV. In fact, the more important meaning behind it is that it allows us to see Lenovo's comeback this time and truly see the model that is suitable for the development of its smart TV business, and outline a more practical blueprint for the long-term development of Lenovo Smart TV.

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.