Summary
- Micro-LED should eventually replace OLED, offering equal or better picture quality without longevity or burn-in problems.
- Expect generative AI to become even more prevalent, with autonomous voice agents tweaking settings and fetching content for you.
- AR glasses could eventually make TVs redundant if companies like Apple and Meta can get around cost, comfort, and size issues.
TV technology used to evolve relatively slowly, as any kid of the ’90s or earlier can tell you. Things continued moving slowly into the 2000s — when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005, it was the first time a lot of people discovered how much they needed HD. By the 2010s, however, the race was on. 720p resolution was quickly eclipsed by 1080p, then 4K. The first smart TVs started shipping, and screen sizes ballooned beyond anything I could’ve imagined owning in high school. 40 inches went from being gigantic to tiny. Today, many living room TVs are over 60 inches, and there are reasonably affordable 100-inch TVs if you care more about dimensions than quality.
Where are things headed from here? It’s not an academic question, since it’s going to decide what you should buy next, if anything. There’s a distinct possibility that five years from now, it may make more sense to buy AR/VR glasses than a giant slab of glass stuck in your living room. Or perhaps that idea could prove to be way too early, much like the fad of 3D TVs in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar. Only time will tell how significant any of these trends will be.
1
Micro-LED
The old king is dead, long live the king
On most current devices, the ideal display technology is some form of OLED. That’s because OLED screens can shut off individual pixels at will, unlike traditional LCDs, which depend on LED backlights that can’t go completely black. The result is that OLED offers superior contrast, and often a superior color gamut as well.
The inherent flaw in OLED is the O, which stands for “organic.” That limits its lifespan, and makes it more prone to burn-in, an effect triggered by leaving a static image onscreen for a long time. In fact, I recently bought a replacement work laptop with an OLED panel, and the store clerk explicitly coached me on how to minimize burn-in issues.
Micro-LED (not to be confused with mini-LED) provides the picture quality of OLED with the longevity of inorganic material. As a bonus, it offers an incredibly quick response time, minimizing ghosting effects. The only real catch is pricing — if you can even find one, existing micro-LED TVs cost tens of thousands of dollars. In five years, though, I’d expect to find micro-LED sets at your local big-box retailer.
2
Generative AI
All aboard the hype train
Generative AI remains more hype than substance in a lot of cases, given how often it “hallucinates” — that is, fabricates lies, or otherwise gets things wrong. Even when it gets things right, it’s often a gimmicky addition. In the case of Google TVs with Gemini, for instance, it often does little more than summarize a show episode, or point you in the direction of a YouTube video when your child asks a science question.
Google and other megacorporations are hardly going to stop trying, however. The ultimate goal seems to be an “agentic” assistant that can find or change anything for you — for instance, adjusting multiple picture settings at once or displaying all the movies with both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Duke.
If hallucinations can be minimized, expect these agents to start taking predictive actions, too. In theory, your TV might one day recognize that Saturday at 7PM is movie night, and automatically change the volume and smart lights while pulling up your watchlist. There’s no reason why AI couldn’t add movies to your watchlist on its own, either, and have a reasonable chance at getting things right, assuming human reviewers are still around.
3
Advancements in ‘lifestyle’ TVs
Decorative TVs won’t just be for the picky
If you’ve been shopping for TVs in the past few years, you have no doubt run into products like the Samsung Frame, which uses a combination of decorative bezels, a matte screen texture, and screensaver software to mimic an art installation. I like the idea in theory more than I do in practice, since there are trade-offs in image quality, and leaving a TV on most of the day is a surefire way to raise your power bills while reducing the hardware’s lifespan.
There is demand for the concept, though, so expect to see technologies improve to support it. What would really help is the proliferation of dynamic refresh rates down to 1Hz, much like my iPhone, which uses that to support its always-on lockscreen without draining the battery in an hour. A micro-LED TV with a 1-144Hz refresh rate would be a thing to behold, although I’m not holding my breath on that one.
In recent years, companies like LG have experimented with rollable and transparent TVs, pairing questionable value with absurd price tags. As foldable screens become cheaper and more reliable, however, they may actually become a practical way of blending TVs into a room or stashing them out of the way. I’m less convinced that transparent TVs will succeed, since most of us want our TVs against the wall anyway — but interesting developments could come out of them.
4
AR and VR experiences
Who needs a TV?
You can be forgiven for dismissing the idea of watching movies in VR if you’ve only ever tried an older headset, like the original HTC Vive. Newer products like the Meta Quest 3 and Bigscreen Beyond 2 are considerably better, being lighter, sharper, and more convenient. Some models — like the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro — are completely standalone devices, meaning you don’t need to tether them to a PC.
It’s genuinely fantastic to watch a movie in a new VR headset if you don’t encounter any issues with cost or comfort. In a virtual environment, there’s no limit on screen size, and you can include or exclude other people at will if an app supports it, no matter how far away they live.
Cost and comfort do remain issues for a lot of people, but the good news is that the situation is continuing to progress. Companies like Apple, Meta, and Google are aggressively pursuing AR glasses, which should be able to project movies and shows in front of you without bulky face pieces, or isolating you from the rest of the world.
If promises are kept — and that’s a big if, mind you — there might not be much call for 100-inch TVs in 2030. You may still want to gather friends on your couch, but mostly to share snacks and chat in real life.
