TAKEOVER CONTENT HERE

It's no secret that every major TV maker is racing to beat Apple to the punch on a voice-controlled TV. Samsung — the world leader in HDTVs — just showed off its brand new 2012 Smart TVs at its spring showcase in New York and we had a chance to experience its voice and gesture controls. Read on to find out if talking to your TV and waving your hand is more intuitive than using a remote control.

Still watching TV on that 16:9 "widescreen" TV? Unless you're rocking a 21:9 widescreen TV, you're not getting the full cinema experience, no matter how much you trust your home theater technician. Time to get a "cinema" TV.

CES starts next week, and already the hype machine has been turned to 11.

Earlier this week, LG proudly announced that it will be showing off "the future of TV technology," in "the world's largest OLED HDTV" at the company's CES booth.

Uh-huh. And Karolina Kurkova has promised me a date.

HDTV-based video telephony has always been a holy grail of sorts. It's such a natural milieu for video chatting — big screen to get a broad view of the whole fam damily and all that.

But no TV-based video telephony system has been taken off, for one reason: You always had to buy two gadgets to attach to your HDTV to video telephonate, one for you and one for whomever you wanted to video telephonate with.

What we want is to video telephonate as we do on our laptops and desktop PCs, with anyone anytime, regardless of the HDTV we own and regardless of the video telephony gadget we have connected to it (if any).

Several recent developments — and a future trend too long in the unveiling — may expand this limited HDTV video telephony landscape and jump-start our (I believe) latent desire to WANT to video telephonate via our HDTVs.