Television has also changed with artificial intelligence

The IFA in Berlin used to be known as 'the TV fair' because all the big manufacturers waited for this September event to show the European market the best of their production. Things have changed a lot. The manufacturers are still here, but there are far fewer novelty announcements. The occasion, however, remains a good one to get a general idea of how the market is going and which products are particularly interesting, chatting with experts in the field and those who have a direct line to customers.

In a market that is not particularly lively in terms of units sold, but substantially stable year on year, according to what Nicola Micali - TCL's Marketing Manager - tells us, a fact shines through that makes Italy a unique case in Europe: the average sales price is significantly lower than in comparable countries such as Spain and France. In our country, in fact, the overall average price is around EUR 380-390, well below the EUR 430-440 of Spain and the more than EUR 500 of France.

Against this unpleasant fact for manufacturers, a positive factor emerges: the exponential growth of large screens. In the last three years, the demand for TVs of 75, 85, 98 inches and more (TCL also offers a 115-inch) has increased dramatically. Whereas in 2022 the market for TVs over 90 inches numbered around 90, today we are talking about thousands of units. As of August this year, the market has already reached 7,200 units, with a forecast according to Micali of at least 10,000 to 15,000 units by the end. Not to deny the first characteristic of our market, this growth is accompanied by a drastic reduction in entry prices for large formats. A good quality 85-inch, even QLED and with integrated audio, can now be purchased for around 800-900 euros.

From a technological point of view, there is not much new here at the fair, and TCL is focusing on the Mini LED. Micali calls it the 'best expression of LCD in a bright environment'.

From a technological point of view, the evolution of televisions has not stopped, however. Samsung, in fact, brought to the fair its 125-inch with Micro Led RGB technology, a candidate to become 'the future of televisions'. This technology is based on a very dense grid of incredibly small coloured LEDs (less than a tenth of a millimetre on the short side) that allow an extremely wide and realistic range of colours to be reproduced, better even than that reproduced by OLED screens. Combined with a screen treatment that drastically reduces reflections, this results in a TV that delivers beautiful images in all light conditions. For the time being, the only model is very expensive (around EUR 25,000), but this represents the future of picture quality. In addition, Samsung has launched its new AI system for its TVs. Called Vision AI Companion, it combines the capabilities of the voice assistant Bixby with contextual Click Search. This will allow you to ask voice queries both about the content you want to watch (such as "search for a film set at sea"), but also the typical multi-layered LLM queries, such as finding restaurants in Milan or recipes, thus opening up the TV's potential for much more tangible everyday use. Prices are within everyone's reach: "The entry price for a Vision AI Companion-enabled TV starts at around €500-600 for a 55-inch, making this technology accessible to a much wider audience." - says Alessio Cazzaniga, Head of Marketing & Retail AV at Samsung.