The TV's vanishing act: Radical new display and content-delivery technologies will doom the television set

Abstract

Since the 1950s, when television displaced radio as the major form of home entertainment, the TV set has ruled the consumer-electronics world. Its look has changed–from a tiny, round porthole in a sturdy, wood-grained cabinet to today's impossibly thin screen balancing on a sculpted stand or hanging on the wall. But through its various incarnations, it has been this box of electronics–tuner/demodulator, video-processing boards, audio hardware–fronted by a glowing display that has determined the design of homes and the placement of furniture and, in general, dominated people's entertainment lives. ¶ There have been many technical skirmishes along the way. Flat-screen technologies displaced the cathode-ray tube, then warred with each other, the LED-backlit LCD emerging dominant (for now). In the 1980s, you probably took the antenna off your roof and plugged your TV into a cable box, and later you might have even bought something called a smart TV and started using it to watch Internet video along with broadcast shows. But there is still something in your house that you recognize as a television, even though it's vastly flatter, lighter, and wider than the thing on which you watched cartoons as a child. ¶ That comfortable familiarity is about to end. First of all, the tuner–which converts RF signals into audio and video and, essentially, makes a TV a TV– is getting pushed out, along with nearly all the other electronics in the box you call a TV today. And the screen itself, thanks to new display technologies, is about to disappear, at least when it's not in use.