Welcome to Lowpass! This week: A look at the most important smart TV innovations shown and announced at CES 2025.

Your 2025 CES smart TV cheat sheet 

The next time you’re in the market for a new TV, you’re not just going to buy a big, bright and beautiful screen with some built-in streaming apps. Instead, you’re going to be shopping for an AI supercomputer for your living room. At least that’s what companies like Samsung, LG and TCL would like you to believe.

The world’s TV makers converged in Las Vegas for CES this week, aiming to rebrand their living room devices as AI machines. Every CPU built into a TV is now an AI processor, every color optimization is now AI-powered, and the voice search button on your TV remote is suddenly an AI button.

To be fair, the AI-ization of TV has been happening for some time. AI upscaling of HD content to look better on 4K HDR screens has become a common feature, voice assistants have long been present on TVs, and machine learning has of course been key to personalizing streaming for years.

But during this year’s CES, TV makers did show off some genuinely new and interesting AI features, and also made some other announcements that could influence how consumers interact with the screens in their living rooms for years to come. Here’s what stood out to me:

You’ll never have to turn your TV off anymore. As TVs have grown in size over the years, so has the black-hole problem: When you turn off your 98-inch TV, it inevitably becomes a 98-inch eyesore. TV makers have long championed the idea of simply not turning the TV off, and offered all kinds of ambient experiences to make those idle times a little more entertaining – be it slideshows of your personal photos, art displays, or Roku City. This year, companies bet the house on this trend to ensure that your TV becomes an always-on display.

• Frame TVs, which double as ambient art displays while not in use, have proven especially popular, prompting Samsung to double down on its pioneering product: The company announced a new Frame Pro model at CES that is supposed to provide an even better picture for those times when you actually do want to watch TV.

• The company also announced generative AI wallpapers for its smart TVs, and will expand its Samsung Art Store to a range of new models beyond the Frame series, effectively turning many more TVs into art displays.

• Google has partnered with Hisense and TCL to add proximity sensors to select TV models, which effectively turns them into dynamic smart displays: Walk up to your TV, and it starts showing you relevant information about the weather, your commute and more.

• TCL is also introducing a Sleep Sounds mode, so you can leave your TV on even while you’re trying to nod off.

• LG seems to believe that the TV will be increasingly part of your working hours as well. The company is adding a dedicated “Home Office” on-screen category … just in time for those latest return-to-office mandates.

• LG’s gaming category will probably see more usage, thanks in part to a partnership with Microsoft that will see Xbox Cloud gaming come to supported TVs.

Your TV will follow you everywhere. Features like Samsung’s click-to-search are designed to stop you from taking out your phone while you binge-watch in the living room – but what about the times when you’re not in front of your TV? Consumer electronics makers want to minimize those as well by allowing you to literally take your TV everywhere.

• LG’s battery-powered StanByMe display is getting an updated version this year that comes with a carrying strap, and it actually looks pretty neat.

• A bit more conventional, but still good-looking: TCL’s PlayCube projector, which is powered by Google TV.

• Not in the mood to lug a TV or projector around? Samsung’s Ballie robot can autonomously follow you everywhere (in your own home, anyway) and project videos and images onto your walls. And while the company has shown off similar concepts before, it wants to actually ship Ballie to consumers in 2025.

AI is everywhere, and then some. It’s not just the Ai chips, and the AI buttons on your TV remote. TV makers are actually trying to figure out how to use AI in useful ways, and some of their efforts do look promising:

• LG is using voice matching to customize the home screen and viewing experience based on who is talking.

• Samsung’s AI remote button offers access to a click-to-search feature, allowing viewers to quickly look up information about an actor who appears on screen, or offer other contextually relevant information.

• Samsung TVs will also be able to translate captions in seven languages in real time, thanks to an on-device AI translation model, which could be genuinely very useful.

• Google is working on AI news summaries for its Google TV platform. Initially, this will be all about creating a morning news brief based on hard news sources, but it wants to expand to entertainment news and other categories over time.

• The company is also bringing its Gemini AI assistant to Google TV. “You can actually have natural conversations, whether the TV is on or off,” I was told by Google TV head Shalini Govil-Pai. “It is going to be 100x better than what it is today.”

• Govil-Pai also told me that her team is thinking about bringing Google’s NotebookLM generative AI podcasts to the TV. “Having those experiences on your TV with some visual cues [is] going to be amazing,” she said.

• But Gemini isn’t the only AI assistant on the big screen: In addition to LLM-powered voice experiences built in-house, Samsung and LG have also teamed up with Microsoft to bring the company’s Copilot to TV. Details on the implementation are sparse, as The Verge’s Tom Warren noted.

Smart TV consolidation is always just around the corner. The number of TV operating systems and platforms has long been unsustainable (and a nightmare for developers), and smart people have just as long told me that some major consolidation is inevitable. And yet, every year at CES, TV makers strike deals with new platforms.

• Xperi has partnered with Sharp to debut a TV set powered by its TiVo OS in the States this year.

• Sharp also partnered with Xumo, the joint-venture between Comcast and Charter, to release a range of Xumo TVs this spring.

• Panasonic has teamed up with Amazon to return to the US market with three new Fire TV-powered TV sets.

• Whale TV announced the launch of its new Whale OS 10 platform.

• That being said, it did feel like Google was dominating the show. Hisense, which has been pushing hard to grow its own operating system Vidaa while also making TVs powered by Roku’s, Amazon’s and even Xumo’s OSes, only really mentioned Google TV as part of its press conference. 

• And TCL, another company that has been hedging its bets on multiple TV operating systems, even invited Govil-Pai on stage during its CES press conference.

Coincidentally, Govil-Pai told me a few days before CES that she does believe that there will be significant consolidation in this space, but for real this time. “It's happening,” Govil-Pai said. “It's happening as we speak. It's ongoing.”

What else

Meta stops selling the Quest Pro. The company is telling would-be buyers to get the Quest 3 instead.

Tubi now has 97 million monthly users. The streaming service’s user base collective consumed 10 billion hours of video in 2024, according to Fox.

Roku surpasses 90 million households. Not to be outdone by Tubi, Roku announced that its products are now being used in more than 90 million households.

Peacock will get mini games, vertical videos. Both will come to Peacock’s mobile apps this month.

Discovery+ is raising subscription fees. Prices are going up by a dollar for both ad-supported and ad-free plans … but why is Discovery+ still a thing, again?

Lenovo has a new pair of AR glasses. The visor-style Legion 2 glasses will start selling in February for $399.

And so does TCL’s RayNeo. The TCL subsidiary actually built some real, standalone AR glasses with microLED projectors, which it hopes to sell for around $1500 later this year.

VLC is demoing AI-powered subtitles. The free, open source video player is working on on-device AI subtitling and translation.

That’s it

CES wouldn’t be CES without some cringe-worthy keynotes. This year, LG decided to take its AI pitch just a bit too far with a scene that had a guy plunk down on his living room couch for a bit of uncomfortable dialogue with his TV’s AI:

Guy: “Well, hello there my precious shiny new toy!”

AI: “Good evening, Thomas! Here are some recommendations to get you going today.”

Gert a room already! And then put your keynote script writers in that room, and have them redo the HR training …

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Header image courtesy of Samsung.