After smartphones, China has a cheap plan to commodify smart TVs in India

Since the iPhone changed the world of phones in 2007, we have seen tech companies take a stab at some of the other popular products, hoping to make them smart.

Google and Tesla - soon Apple will join them - are hoping to make cars smarter, turning them into gadgets.

Nest, which is owned by Google, is doing that to appliances. Samsung and LG are creating smart fridges and ACs.

And a lot of them are doing the same to televisions, churning out smaller TVs.

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Now, just the way it happened in the phone market, the Chinese are coming to the smart TV market and hoping to blast it open, the way they did for phones.

In China, companies like Xiaomi and the LeEco already sell some decent TVs at prices that are a fraction of what Samsung and Sony charge.

Last week LeEco entered the Indian market with three TVs and Xiaomi is expected to follow soon.

These companies will join local phone makers like Micromax and Intex that already sell TVs here.

This is not your regular a-new-company-starts-business kind of deal. In the TV market, the smarter TVs, which are powered by Android or similar software, and have high-performance hardware, are still very expensive.

Samsung's cheapest big television with Ultra High Definition - also called 4K - resolution costs above Rs 1 lakh.

This is a TV with a 48-inch screen. The price for TVs sold by Sony and LG, etc, are also similar.

Also, at these prices, the TVs that these traditional TV makers offer are bare-bones products. They lack jazzy design or features like high-end audio.

Companies like Xiaomi, LeEco and Micromax, meanwhile, work with razor thin margins and hope to make money through volumes.

They not only undercut traditional players in prices but also offer better hardware.

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For example, LeEco's cheapest TV has a price tag of Rs 59,750 (nearly half of what Samsung charges for its 48-inch 4K TV) and yet a bigger 55-inch screen.

Some of the 4K TVs sold by Micromax are even cheaper at prices that are lower than Rs 50,000.

The idea is simple: just the way phone has been commoditised, with manufacturing in China and software from Google, smarter TVs too can be transformed.

It does entail some pain for consumers - after-sales, quality, etc, from these companies are currently unknown - but more or less it is a welcome change.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)