Pieces in Place for TVs As Digital Picture Frames, But Challenges Abound

The notion of using a flat panel TV as an electronic display for art masterpieces in the home goes back to the 1980s when Bill Gates wanted the functionality in his own whiz-bang home of the future. Gates founded Interactive Home Systems (now Corbis) which was going to sell that functionality to others. While Gates received patent rights for an art distribution system that would enable users to create playlists of images and play them back on electronic displays, without HDTV and broadband into the home, the pieces weren’t in place for the concept to go mainstream.

Since then, various companies have hoped to capitalize on using the flat-panel TV to bring art masterpieces from museums around the world, along with decorative art, into the average American home. What started as a luxury concept has evolved into an interior design necessity as 60 inches and larger TVs sit as an eyesore when powered off.

GalleryPlayer was one early digital art provider in the early days of smart TVs when the company negotiated with TV makers including Sony, Sharp, Mitsubishi and Samsung to have its app included on the TV makers’ platforms. GalleryPlayer folded when it couldn’t find a way to fund itself. In the custom electronics world, VisionArt attempts to convert a flat-panel TV into framed art using a different approach. It provides high-quality frames with rolling canvas artwork to create a “TV concealment system” that hides the black screen when a TV isn’t in use.

The latest attempt at digital art on TV comes from ArtKick, which launched earlier this year and has placed its app with Roku and most recently, with Google’s Chromecast, allowing anyone to enjoy famous art at home on a connected TV. ArtKick will also launch on 2014 connected Sharp TVs later this month and on models from Samsung and others, ArtKick CEO Sheldon Laube told Consumer Electronics Daily. Laube believes his company will succeed where others have failed because of timing, lower connected TV prices and higher penetration of Internet households.

There were no consumer HDTVs, and the Internet hadn’t reached the mainstream in 1989 when Gates first floated the idea, but “2014 is exactly the right time” to launch such a service, Laube told us. Today, the cost of connected flat-panel TVs is “really inexpensive,” and by 2015, he said, half of TVs sold will be connected, providing the necessary pipeline into the home for the service. Broadband households with existing flat-panel TVs can tap into the Internet for as little as $35 with devices such as Roku’s Streaming Stick and Chromecast, he added.

But the biggest piece is licensed content of images compelling enough for consumers to want to view them, and Laube said there has been a “sea change from museums and how they view themselves.” Museums have traditionally viewed themselves as “the protectors of art,” and if people wanted to view art they had to do so in the museum, he noted. But in the last year or so, the Rijksmuseum, whose founders include Philips, announced it would make available many of its works in digital form to anyone that wanted to use them for personal use, Laube said. In fact, the Rijksmuseum website encourages users to “collect all your favourite artworks and make your own creations,” from some 150,000 pieces of art, we found. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles also makes available, “without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose,” and no permission is required, the website says.

Calling the purpose of ArtKick “art for free on your TV,” Laube envisions an opportunity from “every man, woman and child” who “puts art up in their space. Its images today are all in the public domain. In the U.S. all art falls into public domain 70 years after the death of an artist and elsewhere the world that time is up to 100 years, Laube said.

ArtKick “curates the images,” including acquiring them, putting them into a “more easy to use form,” adding keywords, and providing bibliographic information, Laube said. Cross-navigation is part of the application Laube said. If a user is looking at a Monet water lily painting, he can choose to go from there to other Monet paintings based on keywords that could include “Louvre” and “Impressionism” that lead users to other works, he said.

Getting paid is ArtKick’s challenge, and it’s where GalleryPlayer fell short in the last decade. Martin Levine, vice president-business development for the now-defunct GalleryPlayer, said that company’s demise was a matter of “getting to the marketplace too early” and not having a way to monetize the application “in a sustainable way.”

Comcast used GalleryPlayer as a value-add service in its HD VOD offering in late 2006. A Nov. 13, 2006 news release announcing the partnership said “Holiday party hosts can transform their HDTVs into picture frames for great art, and make the sets unique, attention-getting conversation starters.” Image collections included works of Leonardo da Vinci, autumn scenes, “the world’s most lovable dogs” and “highlights” from the Museum of Modern Art. Research showed consumers exposed to the service “really enjoyed the concept” but after trying several business models, including subscriptions and paid downloads to a desktop PC, GalleryPlayer wasn’t able to develop a business model that worked, Levine said. Sharp had its connected TV platform that enabled owners of Sharp smart TVs to watch GalleryPlayer collections “but there was no payment gateway there or way to monetize.”

ArtKick is free to users and “we will always have a free version,” Laube said. He envisions a Spotify or Pandora-like business model with a free version supported by advertising and a premium version without ads. A commercial might run after every five or six images, for instance. The premium version will roll out later this year, he said. Determining what consumers will be willing to pay for is “part of the fun of being a startup,” Laube said. The company is experimenting with various premium models, he said.

One could be a 4K version to give UHD TV early adopters ultra-hi-res images to view while users wait for 4K content to ramp up. Images are digitized in 1920 x 1080 resolution, he said. But “nobody told DaVinci he had to paint in 16 x 9,” Laube said, so aspect ratios vary. “We're back to the world of black bars,” he said, because stretching a Rembrandt really isn’t an option. Another ArtKick option includes multi-screen support if users wanted to control images on, say, five screens simultaneously, he said. “We don’t know what consumers are willing to pay for,” he said.

Laube hopes to be able to charge users for licensed content from artists “who are not dead for 100 years.” A New York Yankee fan might want to rotate images of his favorite players taken by sports photographers on his flat-panel TV for $5 or $10 a month, he said.

ArtKick also lets users view images from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, SmugMug and Instagram via its iTunes and Android apps. The app lets users “create viewlists,” share art in their collection with friends through Twitter, Facebook or email and “mix and match. You can make mash-ups of great masterpieces,” he said.

Whether consumers are willing to pay for the service has yet to be proven, and Laube concedes connecting to the service is “still not as easy as we would like.” He said the company is working with OEMs on getting a separate button on a TV remote like the Netflix button found on certain Sony, Sharp and Toshiba TVs that would improve the navigation experience. Voice control is also a possibility via smartphone or tablet. “We could directly talk from an app to the TV,” he said.

In Laube’s pitches to TV makers, he calls ArtKick “mutually beneficial” because the app gives consumers “a reason to buy yet another screen to hang in your house.” At under $200 for a low-end connected TV today, the cost of viewing ArtKick images on TV is “cheaper than buying a poster and frame,” he said. “OEMs like it because they can sell five screens instead of one,” he said, suggesting that consumers might want to buy a TV for a room where there wasn’t one before because of the art display value.

Vishnu Rao, director-product technology development at Sharp, said “it’s going too far” to say a consumer would buy additional TVs to take advantage of an art app, but ArtKick “is a great add-on” that could be a “driving factor” in having a consumer choose a one of the 2014 TVs with SharpCentral 3.0. Sharp connected TVs ship with 75-80 apps, Rao said, saying the company doesn’t have its own app store as Samsung, Vizio and others do.

Sharp offers its own art-based “wallpaper” built into its connected TVs, which can display images when the TV is in standby to give customers the option to view an image versus a blank screen when the TV is off, Rao said. That’s especially important as TVs assume 60 inches and more of wall area, he said. “We truly believe in utilizing the display in the household not just for viewing video but for viewing imagery,” Rao said. “That brings out a lot of emotion and is very powerful to a lot of customers.”

When consumers “soft power off” a TV, artwork appears making the screen appear “like it’s a portrait on the wall,” Rao said, saying the TVs still meet Energy Star guidelines for power consumption. Wallpaper mode is not network-based, unlike ArtKick which requires the network connection, he said. Rao called ArtKick “an extension” of the wallpaper offering, which only includes just “three or four” images. Sharp purchases the content for the wallpaper and installs it on the TVs.

Consumers can upload content to the wallpaper section via USB on the Sharp TVs, Rao said. According to a YouTube training video on the Sharp website, users can also upload images to the TV that they've downloaded from the Internet, a capability that would enable users to go to museum sites themselves and bypass the ArtKick app. The Sharp spokeswoman in the video said users have to create a folder on a USB drive to be able to transfer images, a process many consumers aren’t likely to want to take on. Energy consumption of the TV in wallpaper mode is about the same as that of a 30-watt light bulb, according to the video. This year Sharp added a “dynamic” mode that changes according to season and has a clock built in, he said.