Sony today announced the local release details of all their CES Bravia models, and made the startling admission that only one in four of the Bravia Internet Television capable TVs are actually connected to the net when consumers get them home.
Despite easily having the strongest lineup of IPTV offerings through the television UI, it seems Sony’s Bravia Internet Television service hasn’t quite captured the imagination of the everyman.
There are two ways of looking at the stat – that 25% is a minority percentage and is therefore an indication that the majority of people aren’t ready for services like IPTV. Alternatively, there’s the bigger picture scenario, which considers that up until recently, the vast majority of broadband quotas weren’t sufficient to cater to VOD services like Bravia Internet Television, regardless of the quality or bitrate.
Given that the service is really only 12 months old, the 25% figure probably isn’t too bad. With pretty much the entire range of 2011 Bravia TVs capable of delivering IPTV content, plus bigger download quotas for lower prices, you’d expect that figure to rise substantially over the next 12 months.
Also helping that figure will be some of the new services Sony is planning on introducing this year, like movie rentals on demand, Twitter, Skype and Facebook services plus things like TrackID for identifying music in TV shows on the fly, which is a kind of nifty feature in many of this year’s models.