Hands on with People of Lava's Scandinavia Android TV: a glimpse into the future of TV

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Posted on 2 Jun 2010 at 18:00

Little-known Swedish television manufacturer People of Lava is the first company to demonstrate a fully-interactive internet TV running Google’s Android operating system. We visited the company’s headquarters to get some hands-on time with a very early prototype of its new Scandinavia HDTV, which is the most convincing example that we’ve seen of what "the future of TV" might look like.

The Scandinavia will be available in three sizes – 42in initially, followed by 47in and 55in models – beginning in September, with prices expected to start around £1,800 to £2,000. That’s quite a lot for an HDTV, but as you’ll see, this isn’t just any old TV.

The biggest and most interesting part of the Scandinavia is that it’s a "connected" TV running a modified version of Google’s Android operating system. People of Lava’s CEO and co-founder, Christian Svantesson, said that this gives users "a Window to the World" and is the result of a three-year collaboration with Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology.

Svantesson said the two companies had been working together, researching how the PC could be integrated into the living room without the complexity or drawbacks associated with media centre PCs or media streamers. He described the custom-built operating system they’d been working on, which was designed to solve the PC-related problems, but he said they stopped in their tracks when Google announced Android in October 2008.

He explained that they realised that there were "certain characteristics" that could "blend" into what they were working on. During this chat, Svantesson discussed how media consumption was changing – we talked about everything from social networking, to piracy and DRM, right the way through to streaming programmes over the internet and the decline of optical formats like Blu-ray.

It was an inspiring discussion and we came away feeling that the Svantesson had a vision unlike any other TV manufacturer we’ve spoken to recently. He doesn’t just want to add widgets or overlays onto existing TVs, he wants to transform the TV into a very interactive and user-focused experience – something that Google appears to agree with in light of the announcements it made at Google I/O.