Art TVs are quietly making home entertainment worse

TV makers try just about anything to stand out at annual trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show — it’s hard to forget LG’s TV that rolls up like a rug — but CES is also where formerly experimental trends solidify into proper product categories that will exist for years to come. As far as recent trends go, there’s no better example than the “art TV.”

Popularized by Samsung’s The Frame, art TVs are designed to spend more time passively displaying art and photos than they are actually playing TV shows and movies. They’re an interesting reflection of how our relationship to media is changing, but they might also be warping our understanding of what both premium and affordable TVs should be. Because art TVs aren’t all that good at being TVs and, increasingly, few people seem to care.

Samsung built The Frame everyone is trying to fit in

The Frame TV is about aesthetics, not display specs

Samsung announced the first The Frame at CES 2017. The TV started as a concept for a new type of screen meant to fit more comfortably in people’s homes and lives. Many people own TVs, but most people would readily admit that when they do think about the giant screens in their living rooms and bedrooms, they don’t exactly think of them fondly. Having a big piece of glass that sits dark most of the day getting covered with dust isn’t all that appealing. Samsung’s solution was to create a class of “lifestyle TVs” that would be design objects in their own right, either blending into your already beautiful home, or standing out as a statement piece.

The Frame fit the former category, as a TV designed to look like a picture frame, with a relatively thin and flat shape, a single cable that connected to a breakout box to keep clutter away from the TV itself, and interchangeable magnetic bezels in a variety of finishes. Samsung paired that with an “Art Mode” that lets The Frame display your photos or a collection of licensed artworks (naturally, sold as an add-on subscription) when you aren’t watching TV. The original Frame was far from perfect, and screen quality was never its strong suit, but Samsung continued to iterate on the concept, introducing different screen sizes, and in 2022, a matte finish that made The Frame an even closer match for oil on canvas.

This combination of matte finish, low-power ambient mode for displaying art, lack of cable clutter, and interchangeable frames has become the standard for art TVs. It’s also convenient for Samsung: The display technology in The Frame line is often less advanced, and presumably cheaper to produce, than what the prices of the TV might reflect. And the recipe works. Not only did Samsung announce that it sold 1 million The Frame TVs in a single-year period in 2021, but the company followed up its popular TV with a more advanced model: the more evenly backlit The Frame Pro.

Other TV makers are getting in on the art TV game

TCL, Hisense, and LG all have their own take on the idea

Credit: LG

Samsung’s success didn’t go unnoticed. Both TCL and Hisense released their own Frame-inspired art TVs in 2024, as the NXTVISION A-300 and CanvasTV, respectively, with a similar set of features. Both companies have also iterated on their own art TVs and will presumably, like Samsung, incorporate them into their long-term lineup. The art TV concept has become so popular that LG, which typically prides itself on its premium display technology, announced its own version only a few days before CES started. The LG Gallery TV is designed to be thin, and uses a mini-LED display rather than the OLED of LG’s best TVs. It also, unsurprisingly, supports a subscription that delivers art directly to your TV.

Why art TVs have become popular can be pinned on many things, but the fact that The Frame took off during 2020 and 2021, when spending on electronics reached an all-time high and people were working from home provides ample dots to connect. People view TVs as an important appliance to have at home, but most of the time they’re watching videos on their phone first before heading to a larger screen. Art TVs make those larger screens less ugly when they’re not in use. But they might not actually solve the problem of people caring about TVs in general.

Changing strategies might sell more TVs, but there could be a cost

When bad, expensive, screens become the norm

Credit: Samsung

Global TV sales are down by 0.6 percent, according to data analytics firm Omdia, and art TVs and other unusual “lifestyle” experiments are an attempt to turn things around. But even if they make people happy, they’re not objectively good TVs. If anything, they allow companies like Samsung and LG to sell worse displays at a slight premium, ignoring the typical trickle down process that brings high-end display technology to smaller, more affordable screens as companies start making components at scale.

The structure is a lot less clear when people are willing to spend $1,500 on a TV that might offer a viewing experience that’s maybe worth $500 less. TV makers trying to compete with each other is a good thing, and customers interested in art TVs having multiple options to choose from could end up lowering prices. But it’s hard to not feel that focusing on making TVs that look good when they’re off is getting in the way of making cheap TVs that look good when you’re actually watching them.