Want to set off fireworks at any gathering of television set manufacturers? State that a television should just be a display.

Calling a TV a display isn’t a bad thing, as John Herrman from Gizmodo points out. Displays have a single purpose: to lovingly render video. Historically, displays have lasted much longer than most electronic products, and considering the amount of money spent on them, the lifespan of a TV is very important.

The problem these days is the resulting connotation: The term “display” screams “dumb,” and everyone is talking about how TVs need to be “smart.”

I understand that TV set makers need to add features to their units for the purposes of differentiation, but I would prefer they didn’t get into the business of making TVs into computers. If “smart” TVs accessed their intelligence via the cloud, they could spend all their engineering resources on improving picture quality and reliability, while lowering the price. The pace of today’s hyper-accelerated technological change will render these quasi-computers obsolete in a matter of two or three years anyway.

Herrman promotes putting this functionality into a separate box, because it would be less costly to replace than a TV. It’s a step in the right direction, but if that functionality is run from the cloud, I won’t need to keep replacing that box. Better yet, stream apps directly to the TV, and skip the box altogether.

I also wonder…do the TV manufacturers really want to handle “smart” TV tech support? The average consumer thinks of computer technical support with the same disdain reserved for people who talk on cell phones in a movie theater. TV manufacturers (and dealers) have never had to deal with these types of service calls. The reduced hardware requirements of a cloud-based app platform would assure optimal reliability, and reduce the possible points of failure.

With the cloud acting as the brain of a smart TV, manufacturers can effectively provide less expensive but still high-performance products that are gateways to a future of tantalizing revenue opportunities.

I’ve long advocated using the Internet cloud to store everything from the content to the application to the kitchen sink so you can wash up after watching what you thought was the latest and greatest application, only to be washed down the drain by the next latest and greatest app. The cloud’s smart, no doubt about it. The application providers are smart because they build applications that people want. Now it’s up to the device manufacturers to be smart and stop the time-consuming application fragmentation process before it even starts to take root. As those commercials say, “Kill it dead before it spreads.”

It can be done with a little fortitude and a lot of common sense. The BBC Trust gets a thumbs up in this regard for announcing that it will not build custom applications for every device manufacturer. It will build only standards-based versions of its programming that can be used by multiple devices.

BBC reasons that this will save money and time in developing these applications and make it easier for BBC to get to market. That makes perfect sense to me. Let the content producers spend time making great content; don’t waste their time jumping technical hurdles trying to get that content distributed.

This all sounds good in theory, but the CE manufacturers won’t likely agree anytime soon. It’s just not in their DNA. Their motto: Let’s fight it out in the marketplace, and let the best technology win. Unfortunately, these types of marketplace wars don’t always yield the best technological solution—anyone remember VHS? Not only that, but it can take years for a winner to be declared, and that’s often among just two competitors, as was the case with the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle. What happens when that war includes hundreds of warring factions?

So perhaps we can at least agree on certain platform attributes that would benefit the whole ecosystem.

1. If the backbone of Smart TVs is content and functionality provided by the Web, then Smart TV applications should be built using Web standards. This lets the developers concentrate on making great apps, and reduces the cost of creating interactive content.
2. Applications should not only pull in content from the Cloud, but the application itself should actually run in the Cloud. This keeps devices from becoming obsolete, and provides a unified environment that eases technological evolution and customer support.
3. Any software client that runs on the device should require minimal hardware requirements and be able to be easily ported, tested and certified on each device. Lower cost for the manufacturers means lower prices for the consumer, not to mention a lot less headaches for everyone.

So, let the innovation wars begin. I’m all for that, but if we can agree that innovation should be centered around a Cloud-based platform, then at least we’re all fighting for something worth winning.