One of the announcements at Google I/O last wednesday was Android TV, the company’s latest attempt to create a product built for the TV. At the same time Google also announced a number of new features for the Chromecast, their media streaming stick revealed the year before. A few months before this Amazon announced the Amazon Fire TV, their new entrant into this field. In the meantime Microsoft has doubled down on it’s previous living room media ventures buy building the Xbox One to be a media provider as much as a game console, not only with access to media streaming services but also with the ability to use the machine to control your cable box directly. And of course looming over the horizon there are the endless rumors that Apple will soon announce a new type of TV product of their own. Devices to make your television smart appear to all the rage right now.

To be sure, this isn’t an entirely new thing. Products like Roku, the (current) Apple TV and smart TV’s in general have been around for several years now. The original idea is pretty simple, bring streaming services developed for the PC (like Netflix) to the TVs in peoples living rooms. And while usage of such products haven’t become mainstream yet, there appears does to be a strong market for these devices.

But how strong will it be exactly? There has been a lot of speculation that one of these companies (most people seem to be betting on Apple) will be able to create a disruptive product that will bring major innovations to way we watch TV, much in the same way that the iPhone has done to the world of mobile. And it’s hard to argue that a shakeup wouldn’t be desirable. Traditional cable companies charge a pretty hefty price in order to for you to have access to a huge bundle of programs, most of which you probably don’t want and would prefer not to pay for. Wouldn’t it be easier to just pay a smaller amount for individual channels like ESPN, HBO or Comedy Central? Or better yet, pay a tiny amount for individual shows. And wouldn’t it be great to have those shows streamed to you whenever you want. Or hell, forget all that and just bring the overall price down.

Of course traditional media companies don’t want any change to the status quo. They make a great deal of money with the current setup and have every incentive to keep things the way they are. But could one or more of the large tech companies be able to force them to change? Again, it seems to have worked in the mobile industry. Carriers have much less control over what services their users have access to ever since main gateway for those services became Apple and Google app stores. Could a similar product built for the TV be able to gain a similar amount of control away from traditional media companies? Well…maybe but I don’t think it’s a sure thing.

It’s worth thinking about why the smartphone revolution happened. Smartphones are less powerful than traditional computers, but their advantage is that they allow you to bring the capabilities of a computer wherever you go. This of course means that you can do many tasks traditionally done on computers while out and about, but it also opens up opportunities to do things which wouldn’t make sense to do on a PC or laptop (think about apps like Uber, Foursquare or Instagram for instance). Most importantly of all though, it changed the way we use many existing applications because it allows us near constant access to the internet. Going online isn’t something you do every so often any more but is semi-continuous state, and this has changed the nature of how we interact with computers in general. Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter, Yelp etc aren’t occasionally referred to references but constant companions. Having a computer in your pocket means you also have the internet in your pocket, and that changed everything.

Most of these media boxes bring the power that computing power to the TV, but strips out the mobility. And its not clear to me that there is much advantage to be gained by doing this. There is some gain as they bring applications designed originally for the PC to the living room (specifically media streaming of course). But I wouldn’t expect to see the same explosion of innovation that we’ve seen in the mobile landscape because any sort of smart TV setup is in principle just a computer with a really large screen. And since there is already a large (abet shrinking) and established market for traditional computers you would expect for most of that innovation to already be happening.

This is important because if these new types of devices can’t bring anything new to the table that excites consumers and brings in huge sales, then Apple, Google, Amazon or whoever will be in a much weaker position to push the traditional media companies to change the way that media is distributed. The old players won’t have an incentive to change the distribution models for their IPs until the tech upstarts can prove that they can already succeed without them.

This is not to say that streaming media boxes won’t remain a viable and growing market, especially with really good user interface and a large amount of advertising. But for me it’s hard to see them making anything like the same sort of impact that smartphones and tablets have had. I think any improvements in this area will come at best at a steady crawl because they will depend more on companies like Netflix creating popular new IPs (which they can distribute however they want) than on the introduction of new media hardware. The mobile operating systems that most of these new boxes are based on are great because they are…well, mobile. Take that away and they lose much of their power.