LGE Selects Broadcom Bluetooth Innovations for Game Enabled TVs and Remote Controls

With very low-latency, low power, and proven ability to co-exist with other wireless technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth has been adopted by increasing numbers of CE makers as an alternative to infrared (IrDa) for connecting peripherals to their products. The adoption of Bluetooth for these applications will help drive richer TV user experiences, enabling gestural remotes for casual gaming and voice recognition for content selection and search. Competing RF options that offer less bandwidth, more interference with other radios, and no significant advantage in terms of power consumption can't support these types of features.

The LGE TVs and remotes each utilize a different Bluetooth chip, highlighting the breadth of Broadcom's product offering and flexibility of the Bluetooth standard to enable diverse use cases to transform the CE user experience.

Key Facts:
• The new LGE TVs and associated peripherals utilize multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chips, including the BCM20702 in the television set and the BCM20733 in the remote control.
• According to market analyst firm ABI Research, RF technologies like Bluetooth will continue to gain adoption in home electronics, growing to more than 217 million units per year by 2016 for remote controls alone.
• Makers of set-top boxes, who supply universal remote controls, represent the next area of growth for Bluetooth in home electronics, with vendors moving to align their remote RF technology with the winning technology in the TV market.
• The LGE televisions enabled with Broadcom Bluetooth are now shipping and available in the U.S. retail market.


J.J. Woo, Principal Engineer, TV Lab, LG Electronics
Bluetooth has reached a level of maturity and market ubiquity that its inclusion in our new range of digital televisions is a natural progression to enable a more advanced user interface. Broadcom Bluetooth technology provides the right combination of high performance, low power consumption and value to help drive our remote control into a broad range of our new television products.

Sam Rosen, Senior Analyst, ABI Research
With the recent television industry standardization on Bluetooth, it is expected to become the RF standard of choice for CE devices, displacing both legacy IR and other RF technologies. As evidenced by LGE, including Bluetooth in the TV makes use of Bluetooth remote controls a cost-effective choice enabling more natural user experiences, including motion-based controllers, non-line of sight positioning, and device-to-device / two-way communication.

Tom Ramsthaler, Sr. Director, Marketing, Wireless Personal Area Networks, Broadcom
With the major makers of digital televisions and remote controls now lining up behind the technology, Bluetooth is driving new user experiences into the mainstream market. The selection by LGE of our solutions for its new TVs demonstrates Broadcom's unique position as a leader in driving Bluetooth into a growing universe of new applications.