With the holiday season coming up, a lot of us are thinking about how we should have kept up with our relatives better the rest of the year. One “excuse” for me not getting in touch with my older relatives more often is that I don’t use the phone for long-distance calls anymore. Getting in touch with my parents in the States, I used Facetime or iMessages, and occasionally I’ll drop some money into Skype to call the land-line phones of my grandparents.
It’s a pity that Skype isn’t more user friendly for our older relatives to use, but that opens up a market gap for Helsinki-based Tellybean, which now announces a strategic partnership with the new Phillips TVs running on Android – hopefully a better Smart TV solution than the laggy stuff that’s been out there.
So if yourself or your relatives have a Philips Smart TV, you’ll see that the Tellybean app is preinstalled, giving the company good market access. If the person you’re calling has the Tellybean app on their TV, you could call them from your connected TV, or through the Tellybean Facebook app found on Facebook. I did my last interview with Tellybean through that app, and the connection was sharp, clear, and fast – so much better than Skype to be honest. I imagine the video calling looks good on these 4k big screens as well.
With Skype stagnating over the years and as TVs get smarter, Tellybean might have something going for their thesis that your TV in the living room should be the easy, user friendly, way to make calls to your loved ones (as long as Android TV’s interface is easy enough for old people to use).
“For Tellybean, this first major partnership with a TV manufacturer is a key milestone towards Tellybean becoming THE solution for video calling on the TV. Tellybean has always been focused on easy video calling on the TV and Google’s launch of Android TVTM finally allows Tellybean to have a unified platform from which it can reach tens of millions of consumers.” Cami Hongell, Co-Founder of Tellybean.
