The Streaming Wars (Part2) | War Of The Buttons
Streaming services are fighting for real estate on TV remotes and it’s getting a wee bit slovenly. In 2019, Netflix changed our lives for the better and for worse by introducing the Netflix button for remotes. They just surpassed themselves with the “skip intro†button, but that’s well kind of another discussion for another day.
More buttons than ever:
A few weeks back a Chinese smart TV company launched a remote with 6 brand buttons which include Prime, Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Peacock and TUBI. VIZIO “hold my beer'd em†with a 7 button remote.
Streaming services dish out ~$1 per remote for the real estate, making the buttons a valuable wealth stream for TV companies looking to offset a ~60% decline in TV prices between 2014 and 2020. On the other pole— with the smart TV market expected to grow 10% annually by 2025 — streaming services see the buttons as a means toward subscriber growth and enhanced viewership.
Now, with voice assistants, brands are fighting a front line battle
In 2020, for instance, LG was supposed to integrate Google Assistant and Alexa into its mic button, but Google reportedly didn’t want to share and neither did amazon. This meant that to access Alexa or Google Assistant on LG’s remote, users had to long-press the Prime Video button for Alexa and google assistant button for Assistant — and who likes a long-press, so that feature was a complete failure. And this year, they learned from there mistake and the dispute between them kind of settled, well in a bad way for LG.
LG gave Google Assistant and Alexa dedicated buttons. But LG also gave itself a button for the webOS— meaning LG’s remote now has 3 separate voice assistants.
Seems a little excessive if you ask me.
Click Here To Read Part 1
Comment