Soon you will be able to skype directly from your living room TV.
The Skype calling service will be incorporated into TVs from Panasonic and LG Electronics, and available in North America.
SAN FRANCISCO — There will soon be something new to watch on the living room TV: your relatives and friends in different parts of the world.
On Tuesday, Panasonic and LG Electronics, two of the top television makers, are to announce that they are integrating the free online calling service Skype into their Internet-connected high-definition televisions.
People who buy these TVs, along with an extra Web camera and microphone accessory designed for the living room, can conduct free, live video chats and phone calls from the couch.
The announcement is the first of many expected from TV manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Television makers are trying to give consumers reasons to begin replacing their high-definition TVs that they bought only in the last few years. TV makers are also trotting out ever-slimmer TVs, adding Internet connections and preparing to introduce 3-D technology.
“This is the year when Internet-connected TVs will start to take off, and there is no doubt that soon every TV that ships will have built in Wi-Fi, webcams and microphones,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, chief technology strategist of Skype. “This is our first step.”
The domestic TV market survived the recession in surprisingly good health, shipping 33.86 million units during 2009, up 17 percent from 2008, while retail sales were generally flat, according to the research firm iSuppli. But furious competition among manufacturers cut deeply into prices and profits, with the price of a 46-inch LCD TV, for example, falling under $1,000 for the first time.
Internet-enabled TV sets, though they have not yet proved a hit with consumers, can restore some of those shrunken profits. A 50-inch plasma, high-definition TV with a broadband connection from LG runs about $300 more on Amazon.com than a TV of the same size without the connection. In some cases, TV makers also get a slice of the revenue when customers make Web purchases from their TVs.
That is where Skype comes in. Until now, Web-connected TVs have accessed only a limited number of online services, like widgets from Yahoo that offer weather and news updates, or Netflix’s streaming movie service. By adding other services and making a television more like a PC, TV makers now want to change the very identity of the primary screen in the house.
“The TV is not just a one-way entertainment device, but a two-way communications device and a portal into other people’s lives,” said Bob Perry, a senior vice president at Panasonic.