Read more.Also Sky's Now TV has been added to PS4, will be available on the Xbox One soon.
Read more.Also Sky's Now TV has been added to PS4, will be available on the Xbox One soon.
I would say its pretty hard to buy a none smart TV if buying a new model.
Personally I am not interested and when buying my last TV saved money buying a model without smart functions.
I will say my dad has one and never uses it (smart functions that is), I do have a friend who has one and he streams movies form his PC etc and loves it.
In my case my HTPC makes the idea of a smart TV rather pointless.
Non-smart TV + NUC / Brix mini PC for us techies all the way, or Roku/Chromecast if you want to be cheap.
I thought they already were dominant - certainly if you go into the Currys, Lewis', etc it's the smart TV's that are offered unless you're down at the real "budget" end of the market. Last time I was in Asda even their "own brand" tv's were smarted.Smart TVs are set to dominate the television market by 2017
Personally I'd prefer a dumb TV and some upgradable box because the big problem with smart tv's - at least to my thinking - is that you don't get much in the way of feature updates. My three-year old Sony got the Amazon Prime update recently and that's about it.
I must admit that I loved the smart tv I used to have (end of relationship) and miss it greatly and would replace with one when I get my own place. However I can also say I'm a nerdy geek and enjoy the functions and can see that not everybody wants and/or needs them
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Hold on, you can still purchase a known brand decent TV that IS NOT a POS OMFG WTF "smart tv"?
That, pretty much.
I have two issues with Smart TVs. First, that you get whatever they decided you got when they made the TV, and you're lucky to get bug-fixes, never mind feature upgrades. If, on the other hand, you have a media centre capability and treat ths TV more or less as a big, dumb display panel, then YOU get far more control over the "Smart" bit, and can upgrade, or entirely change, the software at your whim.
The downsides are, first, it's another box to house somewhere, probably in the lounge. Second, it costs more (than the "Smart" bit, not the whole TV). Third, you need the expertise, and inclination, to set it up. SmartTV, on the other hand, is pretty much set it up and forget it.
So, there is a market for those that want "Smart" functions, but can't be bothered to set up a media centre. That'd probably include me.
My other issue with SmartTV is, as the owner, you aren't told, much less asked permission about, the extent of bi-directional infirmation flow, like what you watch, when you watch it, whether you series-link, whether you abandon in part-way through, and so on. And, more than once, big makers of SmartTVs have been caught "calling home". As far as I'm concerned, IF genuine, informed and most importantlg explicit consent is given to snoop on a user's watching habits, fine. But otherwise, it's none of their damn business what I watch, or when.
As a result, my SmartTV has been lobotomised .... no internet connection. So, it's a TV display, and a freeview tuner, and that's all it is. If I could have had the same TV without "Smart" functions, I would have.
When my TV can correctly answer every question on University Challenge, I'll call it smart. Until then, its just moderately clever.
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I have to agree a media PC is a box under the TV, but in my case it is 5 boxes in one as I don't need a freeview HD recorder, fressat HD recorder, Blu-ray Player, HD-DVD player and stereo.
I will say i wouldn't give one to my parents, the initial setup and tweaking took a while and as much as things don't go wrong often there is the occasional problem which they would end up calling me for.
I have a hard drive velcroed to the back of the TV for recording on, and the TV can record from freeview HD (if I had an aerial wired up) and HD satellite. The PS3 is also the blu-ray player, though some films are via the TV built in Netflix client. Quite a neat solution overall.
But mainly, Tesco want you to sign up for BlinkBox, so they are starting to push cheap smart TVs so they can push their streaming service. If cheap TVs from Tesco are smart, then they pretty much all have to be.
I love the concept of a "smart TV", but I'm still not completely sold on the execution at the moment. Perhaps if Android TV takes off as a "standardised" platform then that might do for me.
That is going on the assumption that a vanilla Android TV would be updated more often and have a decent selection of media streaming apps that I could use.
cptwhite_uk (25-07-2014)
I have really not been a fan of how smart TVs have been thus far, you get apps and much more functionality of course but it always feels clunky and unintuitive, I'd much rather connect somthing external yet still small such as an Apple TV that has a much slicker interface and apps that can be tailored to that piece of unified hardware.
I personally use my main PC as an HTPC also, the ability to stream 23.976fps films to my HDTV using software like XBMC (that's my software of choice) while using my phone as a wireless remote over my wifi is just too sweet to pass up. Of course for the mainstream user this is A too expensive and B behind an education wall as prebuilt solutions in tems of HTPC aren't exactly prevalent beyond whatever Android PC/TV boxes happen to be on eBay.
If one day the smart TV concept is taken to a level where you can slot in a piece of hardware with the same funtionality/standardised hardware as things like the Apple TV/ROKU devices/upcoming Android TV then I could see it potentially being something I'm interested in having, but if and only if I can swap out my hardware for the next iteration easily like can be done with the external media streaming devices.
Proper DLNA/Streaming support and an XBMC application would be awesome.
I think if a TV can ship with android Jelly bean (LG have done this) and gplay applications can be installed, rooting is possible etc then it may be fun for the enthusiast but to captivate mainstream users and also be excellent, I think it will take someone (maybe Apple, maybe Google, maybe Amazon, maybe someone completely new or even surprising like Monoprice) to take the plunge and design and produce a genuinely slick and responsive own brand television set incorporating their own smart TV technology and software. In my own opinion I do not believe that this combination yet exists.
My money is on Apple doing it right first, even if they aren't first to the table. I'm not always Apple's biggest fan but I will be first to acknowledge when they do something right, the Apple TV is a good device in need of a new model, Apple make (brand) displays, they also make an external media consumption solution, if they can one day come away from locking out codecs that aren't native to their ecosystem, and incorporate the concept into a branded television set it could be a winning combination and find its way into many many homes.
Last edited by Askew; 25-07-2014 at 02:02 AM.
+ 1 to this
Have two smart TV's in the house. One has iplayer, NOW TV etc but we still use the NOW TV box as its alot quicker for the bits it has on it. Although iplayer on LG TV's does show all shows in a series available while the NOW tv app doesn't.
The other one is 3 years old and is lacking updates. We use a smart bluray player to play back media and again a NOW TV box.
Like TV's with built in VHS/DVD's - it's sometimes better to have a TV do the job of the TV and the other item separate to give move flexibility.
All the manufactures need to stick to one or two operating systems in TV's - Like Google and Lg's new Os -
Whether you actually shop at Tesco is irrelevant. Many people seem to buy using simple tickbox comparison & brand rather than actually checking for product feel & overall quality. If Tesco will sell a smart TV for the same price as everyone else's non smart TV then they will pick up market share, and the other shops will "upgrade" their stock to smart models.
The other driver is that for years now even on low end TVs having a USB interface to play back media has been pretty standard. At that point the TV has an embedded Linux box to decode the USB and generally drive the user interface. Once the engineers at a TV company have made a smart TV UI for one of their range, the few dollars of cost for an ethernet port and a bigger RAM chip to update lower end models starts looking like an obvious move. After all in the electronics industry every single year you have to make your products either better or cheaper or both, otherwise competitors will overtake your range and you are out of business.
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 25-07-2014 at 07:49 AM.
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