Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/30/many_uk_smart_tv_owners_dont_know_what_its_for/
Half of UK smart TV owners don't know what the 'smart' bit is for
Bought to be up-to-date, not to connect to interweb
Posted in Hardware, 30th April 2012 09:44 GMT
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More bad news for TV makers and smart-telly fans: only a third of Brits planning to buy a smart TV are doing so to make use of its internet connectivity.
It gets worse: only half (53 per cent) of smart-telly owners know what the 'smart' but is actually for.
Still, some who don't have manager to connect their smart sets to the internet. Only a quarter of smart TV owners have yet to do so.
No wonder BBC bosses have complained in the past that smart TVs aren't easy enough to use [1].
YouGov relies on data from a panel of 350,000 folk in the UK - though it didn't say how many of them had said they own, or plan to buy, a smart TV.
We're not entirely surprised by the results. If you're buying a new TV, internet connectivity will only be one factor among several, screen size and picture quality among them.
You're not, after all, going to buy a crap TV just because it can connect to the internet.
Indeed, YouGov's numbers show that picture quality is important to 96 per cent of smart-telly owners and size matters to 93 per cent of them. Next on the list is sound quality, a key criterion for 89 per cent.
Folk who own a smart TV may not all know what it's for, but some are making use of the feature. Just over one in three (35%) of them say they now spend more time watching content provided by catch-up and on-demand services, such as BBC’s iPlayer and Amazon's Lovefilm, than they do watching broadcast TV. ®