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"Not made clear by the study is how the devices are being used. While the survey measures actual users, it is not clear if the Roku televisions are being used for regular cable programming with the Roku streaming system idle, or if they are actively being used for internet streaming."

Pretty much no one pays extra for a smart TV without using the smart features.

"Leading the category is smart televisions, with nearly half of all connected viewers at 81.2 million users in 2017. "

This is what I would like to see broken down. The major players here:

Samsung's Tizen smart TV platform (originally Intel's smartphone platform that Samsung bought to use for their Android competitor)

LG's webOS smart TV platform (again originally intended for smartphones by Palm and HP but they gave up without really trying thanks to the iPhone then LG bought it to use for their TVs)

Roku's platform: the most popular platform not tied to a single manufacturer

Firefox TV: technically was not manufacturer-specific but in practice was only adopted only by Panasonic, receives no more support from Mozilla but Panasonic is keeping it going for now

Android TV: lack of adoption by Samsung and LG nearly killed their chances, as did Google's stupidly refusing to release a $40 dongle to compete with the Roku and Fire TV streaming sticks (because they didn't want to cannibalize Chromecast). However, Sony uses it for their smart Bravia smart TV line, plus a bunch of smaller players (Philips, RCA, Sharp, TCL, LeCo, Haier). Many of the Android TV-based smart TV manufacturers make and sell Roku-based smart TVs also (LeCo, TCL, Haier for example) which ruined Google's hopes of dominating the cheap smart TV market as they do the cheap phone market.

If Samsung, LG and Sony releases numbers on the amount of smart TVs that they move, the media never sees fit to report them. The other OEMs either don't release this data, or the media doesn't report/analyze it. Variety claims that Roku has a 13% smart TV share, which is a lot lower than I thought, but then again that is up from 8%. Google claims that they see about half a million Android TV activations a year, nearly all of which are almost certain to be Sony Bravia smart TVs.

viclauyyc said:

Should these patent lawsuits judge by relative experts? Sometimes it is super technical not something a layman or a judge can fully understand. I know they have expert witnesses but is it good enough to teach a normal person to understand something that complex?

It isn't that complex at all.
1. Apple incorporated the University of Wisconsin's designs in their own designs.
2. The University of Wisconsin's designs are not not an open standard that can be used on CDDL, LGPL, Mozilla 2.0, Apache 2.0, BSD2, BSD3 or any of the other FOSS terms. We agree on that too right?
3. Which means that if Apple was going to use the University of Wisconsin's IP in their designs they were going to have to pay the University of Wisconsin.

If you want to use someone else's tech, or your own tech that is derived from someone else's tech, you have to pay the someone else for it unless the someone else gives it away. Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on, and the only reason why you disagree is because this is Apple and not Samsung, Google, Qualcomm or Microsoft we are talking about here. If you disagree, please name for me all of the Apple IP that Samsung, Google and everyone else should get to use for free. And don't be coy. Don't claim that Google should have to pay for Android. They don't because the Supreme Court said otherwise almost 25 years ago. And Samsung has long paid Apple over mostly cosmetic "your product looks too much like mine" issues - not over things that the product fundamentally needs to work in the first place - so that dog won't hunt either.

Apple's only counterargument: we changed the original design, it became our design when we changed it so we don't have to pay for it anymore. Never mind that this argument has been shot down millions of times already. But if that is what you support then hey, I have an idea. Google is looking to design their custom chip for the next-gen smartphones, tablets and PCs that they are going to release running their Fuschia OS that they will launch in 2019 or 2020. (It will run Android and Chrome OS apps, but otherwise be entirely different from both, including not having a Linux kernel.) Here's an idea: how about they just use the A11 SOC? They could tweak it to accommodate the fact that Fuschia isn't a UNIX-like Darwin/BSD derivative and optimize it for the the Java JVM and their own Dart language instead of what Apple has done for Swift and Objective C and be off to the races, right? How many of you would be in favor of their doing that? While. Not. Paying. Apple. A. Dime. In. The. Process.?

Exactly. I say that if Apple shouldn't have to pay UW-Madison for their old Ax designs, Google shouldn't have to pay Apple if they take the A11 and tweak it for their Android replacement. Agree? Disagree?

Stop. Please stop. For goodness sakes. Whenever Apple accuses someone of infringing their patents or abusing FRAND, everyone sides with Apple and wants the offender that Apple accuses crushed by paying huge licensing fees,  having their products banned from the market, and massive financial penalties and even driven out of business outright. But when someone accuses Apple they are always a patent troll, Apple is free and clear and innocent, or the amount that they are seeking from Apple way exceeds the value of the patent because it is how Apple incorporates everyone else into their tech that gives the IP value in the first place. Look, there is being a fan and being a fanboy.

The same patent laws that applies to everyone else with Apple's IP applies to Apple with everyone else's IP. It is amazing: the same people who want Android banned despite a decades'-old Supreme Court ruling allowing one company to copy another company's UX/UI, a ruling that Apple has since taken advantage of themselves like everyone else. The same people who insist that Apple should have to pay pretty much pennies for critical hardware patents like ARM CPU designs and 2G/3G/4G designs without which smartphones and mobile tech in general wouldn't be practical AT ALL agreed with Apple's attempts to ban all Samsung products from the market - or pay a $50 per device licensing fee - over trade dress, rounded corners, icon shapes, home buttons and pinch-to-zoom.

It is hilarious. How many people wanted Oracle to drive Android off the market over APIs that Sun allowed EVERYONE to freely use at the time - and which Google could have easily rewritten if they didn't - do not want Apple to pay practically anything over ARM designs and wireless standards?

Here is the deal: Apple chose Wisconsin's designs over ARM Holdings' design. Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and everyone else pay ARM Holdings, Inc. because the Snapdragon, Exynos etc. are based on the ARM Holdings base design. (In fact, Qualcomm had overheating issues with the Snapdragon 810 because they used an ARM Holdings design for the cores. When they used their own design that was derived from the ARM Holdings base design for the 820 the problem went away.) So your rationale for why Samsung and Qualcomm have to pay ARM Holdings but Apple doesn't have to pay the University of Wisconsin is what exactly?

Finally, you mention that it was a Wisconsin court, as if that is all nefarious or something. The problem is that this actually HELPS the University's case. Why? Because were UW-Madison some troll filing a flimsy case, they would have filed the lawsuit in East Texas like all the actual trolls do. Instead of court-shopping, the University of Wisconsin actually filed their case in the appropriate jurisdiction: where they are located. Why? Because they knew that they would win based on the merits of the case. And this is why UW-Madison has won every appeal on this case.

Apple will ride this out because it is cheaper to pay lawyers - who work for Apple and are on the payroll already for the most part - than it is to pay $1 billion. But they will pay eventually, just as Samsung paid Apple over rounded corners and icon placement eventually.

Appleish said:

Hulu is terrible. Bad plans. Bad service. Bad everything. Sad to see some of these shows lingering on this crappy platform.

Yeah ... everything that you said is totally wrong. Bad plans? Essentially the same subscription rate as Netflix and Amazon Prime. The only difference is that the cheapest tier for Hulu has commercials. Bad service? Yeah right. I have NEVER had service problems with Hulu ON ANY DEVICE and I have (or have had) them all: iOS, macOS, old gen Apple TV, Android, Linux, Windows, Fire TV, Roku and "smart" Blu-Ray players with proprietary platforms etc. I have experienced far more interruptions/lag/buffering/outright "this is temporarily unavailable please try again later" on Netflix. Hulu's UX/UI is comparable to Netflix and is far better than Amazon Prime. And Hulu is supported by all operating systems and browsers. I get it ... you need to bash Hulu because Apple HOPES to launch a live TV service that will compete with Hulu (and YouTube and Sling and Plex and a bunch of other live TV providers) SOME DAY. Never mind that Apple practically invented the whole industry with iTunes and the first-gen Apple TV box nearly 20 years ago in the first place, sat on this tech for years and did absolutely nothing with it. Even after Netflix and YouTube went big Apple did nothing with expanding iTunes from being a music and video download service whose tech really wasn't much beyond Napster. Well hey, at least there you can say that Apple is a hardware company and not a software and services company, right? Except that it took years after Roku and Chromecast came out for Apple to finally make Apple TV a modern product. And even now it lacks capabilities that the better Roku, Fire TV and even Android TV boxes have. Apple could have dominated this space, which would have driven demand for their hardware through the roof. Don't blame the competition for doing the innovating, risk-taking and infrastructure investment years before Apple decided to get around to it.

sflocal said:

Amazon is like Google in that it's building as much crap as they can in the hope something sticks.

This will fail, or at most will be just a barely-used curiosity.  Stop wasting time and money and work on your core services.  It's amazing that this company barely makes a profit, yet still has a stock-price that in no way correlates to any kind of reality that we live in.

Good grief. The same hypocrisy on this thread that is on so many others. If Apple wants to enter a new field or debut a new product, whether it is music players, smartphones, tablets, smart watches/wearables, IoT, VR/AR, TV and music streaming, ebooks (all of which had viable, profitable, traction-gaining products before Apple entered) it is a good thing. Great for consumers, the market, technology, humanity as a whole. But let other companies do the same thing? Evil. Wrong. Copyright infringement. And so on.

It is funny that fans of the company that renamed itself from "Apple Computer, Inc." to "Apple Inc." in 2007 precisely because personal computers were no longer going to be their primary product because since then they have moved into areas like mobile devices, wearables/IoT, AR/VR, AI, streaming media, cloud, green energy, original entertainment etc. and plans still more expansions into the future is telling everyone else to stay in their lanes. Seriously?

As far as the old "create as many new products as possible in the hope that something sticks" it is very simple to answer that: structured versus RAD. Waterfall versus agile. Apple is the former, along with IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Sony, Nintento, Intel, and the American telecom companies (AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon etc.). The latter includes Google, Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm and a lot of the South Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese hardware companies (Samsung Mobile, Nvidia, Acer, Asustek, Huawei). Which of those are doing better right now? Before you answer, realize that the former legacy waterfall group also included the likes of DEC, NCR, RCA, GE, Motorola, Eastman Kodak, Xerox, Toshiba and Mitsubishi. Which means that nearly all have been bought by foreign competition (RCA, Motorola), have all but exited the hardware game and are now eking along as software/services only (AT&T, NCR, IBM) or flat out no longer exist in a meaningful sense. By contrast the only major RAD company to have truly gone belly-up was Sun. Which means that not only is Apple the biggest company in the world, but also the last major player of its kind. 

Remember that before you mock all these other companies for not having the same product strategy and overall business model as Apple. Because nearly every other company that does things the way that Apple does is either out of business, heading that way or is only surviving as as a shell of its former self. Meaning that what works so well for Apple will probably not work as well for well for everyone else. And for that matter, it is highly debatable how Apple's way of doing things worked before the iPhone or will continue to so after it as more and more things shift to the very platform-independent web and cloud based models that you folks mock Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. for using to make billions, with a good chunk of it coming from Apple's own hardware and in competing with Apple's own software and services.