With its new smart TV, Xiaomi is redefining what ‘TV’ means

When you think about smart TVs – and it’s hard to buy any other kind of TV these days – you probably picture something that looks like the image above: a big rectangular screen with a speaker and a stand under it. But Xiaomi’s new Mi TV 3, announced on Monday, is bucking that trend. In fact, Xiaomi is doing away with the most fundamental part of what we call a television: the screen.

To be clear, you can still buy a Mi 3 TV from Xiaomi that comes with a screen – a gorgeous, 60-inch 4K LG screen, to be specific. But with this model, Xiaomi has decoupled the smart TV’s brain from its screen, dropping it into a bar-shaped speaker called the Mi TV Bar that can be connected to any television to turn it into a smart TV running Xiaomi’s MIUI system. The Mi 3 TV doesn’t actually go on sale until November, but any screen – TV, computer monitor, projector – that’s in your home right now could essentially become a Xiaomi smart TV once you buy the bar, which costs RMB 999 (US$157).

Although the Mi TV Bar might sound like just another set-top box, I’d argue that this is actually a significant change. First, by decoupling the smart TV “brains” from the screen, Xiaomi is looking to get its smart TV system in front of more users – even if those users are connecting it to smaller screens, or screens from other vendors. Second, by combining the Mi TV Bar’s smart brains with a powerful speaker, Xiaomi is offering a product that theoretically makes the smart TV experience portable (or at least more portable than a big TV). You can get a smart TV experience and big-screen-quality sound from any screen you plug the Mi TV Bar into.

That’s the theory, anyway. Whether the Mi TV Bar is actually worth the price of admission remains to be seen. If the speaker’s not impressive, then users might do just as well picking up any other set-top box that offers a smart TV experience (like Apple TV, which is right in the same price range, though it doesn’t include a speaker). But if the Mi TV Bar delivers on the promise of cinema-quality sound and a smart TV experience that can be quickly plugged into any screen, then Xiaomi could have a game-changer on its hands.