The color TV market has ushered in a new trend this year.

In July, Glory released its Glory Wisdom Screen, which added cameras to TV products, enabling users to make video calls via TV. In August, Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, also released a demo video of video calls on Weibo. Hisense took social functions as the highlight of its products and launched social TV S7, showing three functions around social communication: six-way video chat, shared movie hall and 3D Avatar. Social attributes seem to be a new way of thinking about the layout of some color TV industries.

The Significance of Adding Social Attributes to Television

According to Ovi Cloud, the retail sales volume of China's color TV market in the first half of this year was 22 million units, down 2.7% from the same period last year, and the retail sales volume was 64 billion yuan, down 11.8% from the same period last year. Although the average price fell 9.3% year-on-year, the performance of the color TV market showed no signs of reversal.

The shrinkage of the market scale of color TV intensifies the competition of products, and the brand also shows a trend of two-level differentiation. Some brands keep pushing down the price of products, expecting to increase their market share through the layout of low-end products, and improve the position of products in the eyes of price-sensitive users; others choose to upgrade the value of products through display technology and additional functions to meet the needs of more subdivision of middle-end and high-end users.

Social TV clearly belongs to the latter. Although the concept of social TV has been growing in software for a long time, only this year have companies launched color TV products with social functions. From the point of view of the client side, it is quite novel to configure a camera for TV and add video calling functions similar to smartphones and computers. On the basis of 5G network coverage, it can meet the needs of some users for video sharing. From the enterprise side, color TV products with video chat function can fill the gap of traditional color TV products before. Considering that color TV is in the period of "reinforcement" and "substitution", social functions may become a bright spot to attract consumers to update, thus driving sales and revenue growth.

Can social TV reverse the downward trend of color TV market?

The decline in the growth rate of color TV industry is inevitably related to the rapid development of mobile Internet, the extension of smart phone functions, and the acceleration of life rhythm. These factors lead users to rely more on smart phones with more flexible use scenarios. The opening rate of color TV declines, and the desire to buy is weakened. Limited by the time and place of use, color TV products have been upgraded in display technology and function, but they have not fundamentally solved the problem of user habits migration.

The application time of video chat function in color TV is obviously lagging behind that of mobile phones and PC. Although it is an innovation in color TV products, it still has no advantage in flexibility compared with mobile phones. Therefore, unless color TV products introduce social functions ahead of the mobile end, the video chat function of color TV products alone will not change the current trend that users rely more on the mobile end.

In addition, a practical problem is that if users want to use the function of chatting while watching in color TV products, they may need to use the same brand and specific model of products to achieve. If users want to use chat function in color TV products, besides the social function of the product itself, they also need to have a huge user base as a guarantee, which requires cross-platform compatibility of social functions and pro-people price as a support. At present, the standard version of Hisense Social TV S7 costs 4999 yuan and the flagship version 6499 yuan, while Glory Smart Screen costs 3799 yuan and Glory Smart Screen Pro costs 4799 yuan.