Manufacturers are in a wait-and-see mood as China Media Group pushes its own operating system

"The development, promotion and application of independent smart TV operating systems are of great significance to safeguarding China's cultural security, supporting the digitization, broadcasting and intelligence of China's radio and television, and promoting the healthy development of the smart TV industry." Wang Xiaojie, Director of the Science and Technology Department of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, recently delivered a speech at the "DVBOTT Ecological Construction and Operation Summit Forum" and reiterated the importance of independent operating systems. She revealed that the development of TVOS received support from the National Core High-tech Project, smart TV terminal reference design and batch application at the beginning of this year.

Yuan Ming, chairman of Tongzhou Electronics, said in an interview with a reporter from China Business News that television Internet has become the third largest Internet industry after its emergence. If television Internet does not have a unified operating system, Internet interconnection and content docking will be impossible.

Using TVOS to attract the ecosystem

"Currently, the smart TV operating system TVOS1.0 has received support from first-class domestic and foreign smart TV chip companies such as Sea-Lion and ST in terms of chips. In terms of terminals, it has support from domestic companies such as Tongzhou Electronics. At the same time, the General Administration has carried out TVOS large-scale experiments and application demonstrations in radio and television network companies in Jiangsu, Shanghai and other places." Wang Xiaojie said at the meeting.

In fact, the promotion of autonomous operating systems for smart TVs has been going on in the radio and television field for four years.

The fundamental reason is that cable digital TV terminals with different hardware platforms and different operating systems cannot realize the unified bearing of the same digital TV service application, that is, the same digital TV service application must be "personalized" for different hardware platforms. Secondly, cable digital TV terminals using receiving systems from different manufacturers cannot achieve standardization of software and hardware. Set-top boxes must solve the problem of personalized development and production for regional cable TV networks using the same conditional access system.

An insider of Tongzhou Electronics told reporters that it is very difficult to upgrade the original box. At present, the middleware we originally made is just an application development jointly advocated by several manufacturers. For example, can the platform we made in Jiangsu be put into Guangzhou? It may not be certain.

In a sense, radio and television hope to end the current situation of each smart TV operating system acting on its own through the industrial chain headed by TVOS, and gradually control and standardize the development of smart TVs from the source. However, facing the mature Android industrial chain, promotion is obviously difficult.

"Our approach is to make it open source and allow more people to participate." Sheng Zhifan, chief engineer of the Broadcasting Science Research Institute of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and one of the leaders of the project, said that in order to attract more manufacturers to participate and unify standards, as many as 15 units participated in the development of the TVOS operating system.

"We adopt an open technology line, and hope that TVOS can integrate the strengths of all the companies in the world." Sheng Zhifan said that due to the cooperative development model adopted, the codes of more than 10 manufacturers must be open source, which is a huge challenge.

Is the 3 million pilot project difficult to implement?

It is understood that the overall task of the smart TV autonomous operating system project is to achieve a total installed application of no less than 3 million sets during the implementation of the project.

"However, the standards adopted by TVOS are not national mandatory standards, so it is unlikely that Internet manufacturers and other third-party manufacturers' OTT TV operating systems will participate." An industry insider admitted that although there are many smart TV operating systems emerging, all of them have chosen to conduct in-depth development of the Android system. Currently, more than 80% of mainstream smart TV manufacturers at home and abroad use systems developed based on the Android system kernel.

Perhaps anticipating this situation, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have established a joint smart TV promotion group to promote TVOS.

As the first batch of pilot units, Jiangsu Cable and Oriental Cable have each undertaken the target of completing the installation and application of 500,000 sets of DVB smart TV set-top boxes by the end of 2015.

"By the end of last year, we had deployed 10,000 DVBs based on the TVOS 1.0 version software to households, and the results are quite good." Liu Jiuping, a relevant person in charge of Oriental Cable, said at an industry conference on the 18th that by the end of next year, Oriental Cable will have at least 500,000 TVOS-based smart set-top boxes distributed to users, about 200,000 this year, and 300,000 next year.

Liu Jiuping frankly admitted that the software upgrade business of the original set-top box, whether it was standard definition or high definition, was very difficult. Every time the upgrade was carried out, there were many discussions and disputes among various departments, and many problems brought pressure during the process. "On the other hand, in the Internet age, no one can clearly say which businesses are truly valuable. You may spend a lot of time thinking about upgrading the application, but the effect may not be good."

Manufacturers are in a wait-and-see mood

Wang Zhiguo, director of Skyworth Group Software Research Institute, revealed to our reporter that Skyworth has also participated in the co-construction of the TVOS system since June and July last year.

"TVOS has two functions," Wang Zhiguo believes. One is to make third-party applications "manageable and controllable"; the other is to unify digital TV standards across the country. At the same time, it has established standards for smart TV operations.

However, Wang Zhiguo admitted that TVOS1.0 is still not perfect, and it is estimated that it will take a few months for Skyworth to have a prototype machine with the TVOS1.0 system installed.

A relevant person in charge of the R&D center of another well-known color TV company said frankly that he was worried about whether the TVOS system could be compatible with the Android system, and that "the future development prospects are unclear."

"Once it is incompatible with Android, many applications will not be able to come in." He said that since the country currently has no mandatory requirement to install the TVOS system on televisions, the color TV manufacturer will adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

An industry veteran familiar with OTT told our reporter that the radio and television departments are currently only promoting TVOS in Shanghai and Jiangsu. The number of cable set-top boxes in Shanghai is only 500,000, and they are high-performance set-top boxes, not ordinary set-top boxes. Therefore, the TVOS system "has limited impact at present."

As for the six major domestic color TV manufacturers, TCL , Hisense, Skyworth, Konka, Changhong and Haier, and many copycat set-top box manufacturers, most of them are in a wait-and-see state towards the TVOS system.

"This does not mean that the SARFT has no means to influence them," said the senior person. For example, the SARFT could require that the licensees of the Internet TV integrated broadcast control platform "say hello to the color TV manufacturers" in order to ensure information security. Therefore, the impact of the TVOS system on color TVs, set-top boxes and the radio and television industry in the future "needs to be further observed."

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.