I bought my first smart TV in 2011. It wasn’t my first HDTV, but I was very excited about it. I liked the idea of having practically everything available on my TV without a separate box. That TV even had the “DIRECTV Ready” software in it so it looked like it would run pretty much everything I wanted in a nice clean installation.
The love didn’t last. By 2013 that TV had several extra boxes littered around it, and by 2016 I was on to another TV altogether. That new TV also had smart features, which I swiftly ignored.
Smart TVs have the best intentions
The idea of a smart TV is a good one. I mean, you should be able to have just the TV in the room and not have to worry about a forest of wires connecting things up. For those who do want a complete home theater experience, having inputs and outputs is great, but the average person should be able to simply use their TV to get everything they want including a live TV package like DIRECTV for Internet or Sling (both offered by Solid Signal, by the way… shameless plug). The only potential addon would be a sound bar since most TVs have truly abominable sound and there’s no good reason for that.
The problem is that manufacturers inevitably ignore their smart TV software after just a year or two. That 2011 TV was a Samsung, not some off-brand, and yet the apps didn’t get updated as quickly as they should. New apps weren’t added. Pretty soon, I was back to using a streaming box pretty routinely.
If the smart TV is actually updated, that can be just as bad. In 2018 or so I bought a Roku-enabled TV. I figured at least it would get app updates. I was right about that, but after five years of app updates it’s dog-slow. So slow it’s barely usable. Yet, here’s the funny thing. The Apple TV box I use with it is about the same age and it’s still nice and speedy. Something isn’t right about that.
Any hope for smart TVs?
I hate to be pessimistic about this, but I don’t see smart TV manufacturers doing anything to improve the situation. They would rather feel confident that you’ll want to throw their TV out the window and buy a new one in five years. Folks, the days of buying a TV and keeping it for 15 years are long gone, I get it. But I’d still rather upgrade on my schedule rather than be forced to do it because my TV’s gotten ridiculously slow.
If smart TV manufacturers really wanted, they would make the “smart” part of the TV a replaceable module that you could take off the back of the TV when it got really slow. I would imagine they might charge $50-60 for a new module and I know I’d pay it. I wonder if other people would.
In the past, PC makers did things like that. Even video game consoles were once upgradeable. Practically no one actually upgraded that way, though. In the interest of making things cheaper and smaller, the upgrade options were eventually removed.
Maybe, though, just maybe, with people having more of a focus on buying sustainably and recycling and all that, it might just be time to rethink that.
