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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Earlier this month, the UK’s Comcast-owned pay TV operator Sky announced plans to pull the plug on one of its more ambitious hardware initiatives: Sky Live, a smart camera accessory for the company’s line of Sky Glass TVs, will stop working at the beginning of December.
“We’re proud of the ambition behind [Sky Live],” wrote a Sky representative in a forum post announcing the plans. “It’s given us valuable learnings that are helping to shape the future of our products. We have, however, made the difficult decision to discontinue it, in order to focus our investment on what matters most to customers.”
Launched in mid-2023, Sky Glass was supposed to transform smart TVs from passive media consumption devices into something a lot more social and interactive by bringing Zoom calls, workouts with body tracking, and Kinect-like motion games to the biggest screen in the house. Now all of that is coming to an end, with Sky bricking the camera and reimbursing consumers who bought it.
Sky’s discontinuation of the product comes as other TV makers seem to be rethinking the notion of cameras in the living room as well. LG’s Smart Cam, released in 2023, is out of stock at major retailers and appears to be discontinued, as is TCL’s smart TV camera. And while Samsung still ships such an external camera, it has stopped integrating cameras directly into its TVs.
All this made me wonder: Why have smart TV cameras fallen out of fashion so quickly? And what would it take to make cameras in the living room a success story? To get some answers, I caught up with Nex CEO David Lee, whose startup helped Sky with the Sky Live camera, and is now selling its own camera-equipped motion gaming device.
On its own, a camera adds nothing
Lee started Nex in 2017 to bring kid-friendly motion games to mobile devices, and got some early validation when Apple featured the startup on stage during an iPhone event in 2018. However, he quickly realized that smartphones simply weren’t the right form factor for games that used full-body tracking to let players shoot hoops, play whack-a-mole, or jump around with Peppa Pig.
When he looked for ways to make the leap to TV, he teamed up with Sky in 2021. “That was a deep technical collaboration,” Lee says. “I spent a lot of time personally with them.” Sky licensed some of Nex’s motion games for its Sky Live camera, but the two companies also worked on optimizing these games for the chipsets Sky had selected for the camera and its Sky Glass smart TVs to minimize latency.
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