Smart TVs are dumb

One reason to resent the pervasiveness of new technology -- not that it's inherently bad or that we're becoming luddites, but we don't want to deal with each company's separate and probably-shitty implementation of something we can do well on our computers.<p>My refrigerator does not need to tweet. My refrigerator is supposed to keep things cold. That's all I expect from it. I don't want a half-baked inventory management system or a TV.<p>My Blu-ray player should play movies. Not tweet, not download updates for a movie. The experience should not be inferior to VHS (by lacking the ability to fast-forward at will).<p>One example of a shitty experience in my recent memory: Last week I turned on my PS3 after it's been off for about a year. I wanted to play Gran Turismo (5, I think). Plugging it into Ethernet was a big mistake. First, the OS must be updated. That takes 5 minutes. Next, Gran Turismo must apply TWENTY updates before I can play. I took a picture of my screen because it was so ludicrous. I took another picture when it was installing the last update. Those two pictures are forty-five minutes apart! Finally I can play the game that worked just fine a year ago. The only thing that's new is that it asks me to sign into Playstation's network every time I load the game.<p>So, now, given the option to connect something to the Internet, I probably won't. The user experience matters.

In the last days of Chumby we were doing a lot of work with "Smart TV" platforms from Insignia[BestBuy]/Tivo, LG, Samsung, Vizio, etc, and this problem is (or was as of a year ago) pervasive among almost all the "Smart TV" platforms we developed for. It seemed ludicrous to me that they thought it was okay for your TV to have a 30 second to 2 minute bootup time.<p>The Samsung TV we had was the only one actually smart enough to be able to turn on and function as a dumb TV nearly instantly prior to the "Smart TV" functionality booting up. Based on various comments here it seems like not every Samsung TV does this, but the one I had access to (I forget the model number) did do this, which was very nice compared to all the others. On the down side, the Samsung's remote control was downright horrific to use and had these oddly modal states where it expected you to type lots of things in using a T9-style keypad despite the unit also having a qwerty keyboard (which only worked in some modes/apps) on the backside.<p>Developing apps for these things was enough to get me to decide I'd never buy a "Smart TV" as a consumer. It makes way more sense to get a good "Dumb TV" and enhance it via set-top boxes like consoles (The Wii U is quite a nice media player, if slower than it should be), or Roku or such. Not only is the out of the box experience way better this way, but you can much more easily upgrade the set-top box with new features every one or two years whereas there's very little reason to get a new TV less than once every 5-10 years.

It's time for Apple to step in and show everyone how it's done.<p>Of course, once this happens, a lot of people will develop selective amnesia, as it happened with phones.

My TV, which is fairly new and a well known brand, takes 30 seconds to boot up from a warm standby state, and several minutes from a cold state.<p>What's more annoying than that though is that it takes a full second to change channels due to the needed signal capture and buffering for DTV signals.<p>The interface is abysmal and even with a HDMI cable and the BluRay set to the right resolution (a chore in itself), I still have to manually change the aspect ratio for some DVDs, which takes around 20 button presses and 20 seconds or so to accomplish, and then needs to be reset when done watching.<p>As a result I watch TV maybe an hour a week if that. Which is fine by me, but I doubt I'm the only one that has given up.<p>I remember having a TV made in the 1950s that had a rack of vacuum tubes in the back. It took <i>less</i> time to "warm up" than modern TVs take for their OS to boot. People complained a lot about the warm up time. And changing channels always happened instantly.<p>This is before we even get to "smart TV" features.

With the whole 'built-in Plex' thing that LG TVs had, I was actually pretty interested in getting one. After seeing them in action, I've realized that these people obviously don't test their software in any real circumstances.<p>Companies building 'smart' devices need to ensure that the core interactions people are going to have with their devices are as good as or better than the alternatives.<p>What LG could easily have done is built a small, always-on device core which defaulted to a splash screen containing inputs on the left and favorites on the right. Powering on the TV would be just warming up the LCD display, a few seconds at most. If your current input is inactive, show the splash screen. Otherwise, go straight to your content.

I don't have a smart tv per se, but my TV does have a USB port, ostensibly to play back video, music, and pictures or something, all three of which it pretty much completely fails at if anything is the least bit atypical. Though it does mostly work with the pictures. I'm not sure why they even bothered.<p>Of course it wasn't even a smart TV and it took me ages to figure out that I needed to enable 'gaming' mode to make it display my PC's output over HDMI without zooming or making the colors really bizarre.<p>Count me in the camp who wants TVs to be more like monitors. In fact, if you could get a 40 or 42 inch monitor for the same price as my TV, I'd have gotten the monitor. However, a decent TV is often a half or a third of the price of an equivalently sized monitor, even at the same resolution.<p>Presumably TV IPS (or S-PVA, or PLS, etc.) panels are somehow cheaper than monitor IPS (or S-PVA, or PLS, etc.) panels? (Or maybe TV demand is higher enough volume for there to be meaningful economy of scale difference?)

I recently bought an LM558600 and my experience has been contrary to almost everyone elses here.<p>I've found that the remote is very sensitive and usable, and a large improvement over standard n/s/e/w remotes due to the nature of modern interfaces requiring more complex input. It makes entering alphanumeric input <i>far</i> easier too. It takes a little getting used to, but I didn't have the problems others mentioned, nor those in the article. I will admit that not putting an input change button on the wii-style remote was a big mistake - I often have to go into the input list program to change it.<p>By far the biggest plus of this TV over others is the integration of Plex, which can't be overstated. Plex has such a good experience out of the box that my initial idea of setting up an HTPC just wasn't necessary. It's on par with XBMC, and indeed can actually use several XBMC themes such as Aeon (I don't bother.) In comparing similar TV's from other brands, Sony's solution is called Homestream[1] which is just a transcoder. Other brands try to integrate interfaces similar to Plex, but unsurprisingly usually screw up the UI and are left with an unusable experience. LG has something similar out of the box, so thank god for Plex! The media server is excellent to use as well - as good if not better than XBMC for a server.<p>To address the problems others have mentioned, I do think that most of the 'premium' stuff that comes bundled is mostly useless and I don't use it, however ABC iView integration is amazing, as is Plex's channels which allow you to install video RSS-style feeds. There's more to explore as well, I haven't found the need to touch much else past Plex.<p>My TV has a startup time of about 15 seconds, which I don't find too bad at all, I have no idea why others experience worse times - it might be that there's only actually 1-2 LG owners in this thread.<p>One last thing to note is that since I bought it (~2 months), it has received 3 over the air updates which were installed only on prompt. It seems that LG is committed to improving them, which I greatly appreciate.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/1237485339460" rel="nofollow">http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/1237485339460</a>

I have a Sony Bravia which causes me rage on a weekly basis. It's nice to have YouTube, Hulu+, Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, and other streaming built in. You can show someone a video without monkeying around with a laptop or video cables.<p>Along with the big names there are a bunch of also-ran streaming apps with very little content. There's also things like a Facebook app but I have never tried to use it.<p>So what's the problem? The TV has to 'boot', like in the article. For the first 30 seconds after it's powered on, you can barely change the channels or volume. The interface will sometimes become unresponsive requiring a hard power off, or the TV will lock and reset itself completely. If you do a firmware update, which happens quite a bit, sometimes you have to re-enter all your account information for all your services.<p>Sometimes you have to quit and re-start viewing content to get the audio to sync up right. But the one thing that angers me the most about streaming content: you bump any button on the remote, and you exit back to the regular TV channels. It doesn't even have the sense to ask, "Are you sure you want to exit Netflix?". You can hit the home button, the volume buttons, and pause/fast forward. You even accidentally bump some other button, and bam. You're back navigating the glacially slow interface with a TV remote.

It's time to start calling these things what they are: monitors.<p>Nobody would touch a monitor with a 30-second startup time. Retailers should start listing startup as another statistic in the product info, along with screen size and the number of inputs.

A Samsung <i>Smart</i>TV is similar. I have often ranted aloud to my television about hardware developers considering Single Responsibility when designing. Most of the time I just need my screen to be a screen.

This horrible UI is true of most "smart devices" that are designed by companies whose primary proficiency isn't software. I own a PS3, Vita, and Nintendo 3DS which all have unimaginably shitty UIs with long loading screens. Prior to these devices, my video game machine was an XBox 360 and a PC. While we all like to poke fun at MS for the quality of their products, they have amazing UI compared to the majority of companies. The only companies that seem to be able to be able to create usable UIs for complex machines are Apple, MS, and Google (disclosure: I work for Google) who have been able to apply their skills at creating general software UIs to creating high quality device UIs. Any time I use the UI on my TV, cable box, car, video game machine, or other "smart" device, I always feel like bashing my head against the device to make it work faster.

I once worked on a project that had large hardware and software components. The project was clearly lead by the hardware team - historically the company was a hardware company. At weekly status meetings we would spend 55 minutes talking about the hardware, then there would be 5 minutes for the software.<p>I don't believe that this has to be inevitable, but I do believe that you can tell whether this is happening by simply using a product.

I configured an LG smart tv while over my girlfriend's uncle's house on easter. I found the user experience quite frustrating. My biggest peeve was the OSD keyboard. When using the number pad, numbers on the remote did not have any effect (gf's uncle's qualm. This is why people can't configure their own stuff. It's not their fault. It's bad design.) Then, the OSD keyboard was also super confusing for entering capital letters or punctuation. There was a three state mode key that was always set to one of (abc, ABC, or punctuation) so that at any given time, one of the three states was inaccessible without having to reason about the three way toggle key. I found this incredibly confusing, Since showing both of the other states as two keys would have required the same engineering effort, I was disappointed.<p>Finally, we found that it had a section of horrible OEM crapware under "apps", including an app called "Angry Ducks". Finally, we found netflix under another section outside of apps called "Premium"<p>:|

Why would anyone need a "smart TV"? I can use the internet better with my laptop. Everyone already has a personal computer, whether it's a laptop or a tablet. The usability is always worse. The only way it's useful to show the internet through a television is to transmit the image from a computer to the television. That's what I and my friends do.

LG has a remote control iOS app for its smart TVs that pairs via wifi. This gives slightly easier menu access and control over the cursor. The biggest WTF is for text entry. Instead of being able to use the iPad virtual keyboard, the keyboard in on the TV. You have to move the cursor over the desired letter and tap. Horrible.

I have the 60LM7200 and it is the same way. This and the stupid wii-like remote are the only two bad things I really have to say about this TV. You cannot fully control the TV with a universal remote since a lot of the features require the pointer to select. I've tried every LG code I can find with my Dish Network remote.

I get the impression that "Smart TV" has largely, to this point been treated as an incidental add-on, not a selling point. If buyers care primarily about price, which it seems they do [1] the half-assed features make a certain kind of sense. Add bare-minimum functionality while keeping prices down above all else.<p>If/when "smart" becomes an essential feature, I'd expect the experience to improve.<p>While an unresponsive UI and slow boot surely grates on many of <i>us</i>, I'd wager the average consumer doesn't notice/care. The millions of crappy Motorola cable boxes set the expectation and they're are at least as bad in all respects.<p>Personally, my TVs all get their smarts from a Roku 2/3.<p>1: <a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/03/06/survey-says-people-start-caring-about-internet-on-their-tvs-but-price-trumps-everything/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2013/03/06/survey-says-people-start-caring...</a>

I bought a TV with an ethernet port a few month ago, thinking "hey, I'll be able to stream stuff from my pc or something!". You cannot really stream, you only get some crappy media-center listing of files which fails like 90% of the time.<p>Now we have a laptop hooked with HDMI.

An Apple TV is a good device for me - especially if you just want a device that works simply, has Netflix etc. and has a fairly decent UI. Plus airplay and the music streaming stuff if you have iTunes match is pretty nice.<p>Would love to be able to plug my hdd in and play videos from it, but it's not that kind of device and jailbreaking seems like a bit of a hassle at this point. Plus, when the girlfriend wants to watch Netflix and it's running some strange Linux distro I might get a bit told off...<p>It doesn't fit all of our video needs (we have Sky, PS3 for dvds etc.) but it's worth it for netflix alone, imo.

What else would one expect from a commodity business? The manufacturers are desperate to differentiate themselves from each other and from their own previous year's models, but their strengths are most certainly not in software, still less in UX. The manufacturers see their margins shriveling and are casting about, but it's pointless. See Panasonic making noise about getting out of the panel business -- it doesn't matter that they make the best TV sets; they can't possibly compete against contract LCD OEMs.<p>Of course the future is TVs as monitors; but getting there will be painful.

Wouldn't it be so much simpler to have a good HTML5-capable browser and an extended URI scheme for the video tag to support live content?<p>Samsung TVs seem to be powered by a single Linux blob for the DSP functions and another for the "Smart" functions.<p>Ethernet/wifi in TV's is a great concept but the execution so far is sad, it can't pair with a cable DVR in another room, you can't down Roku as an app (or Plex) and have it run as a native full speed application on the TV cpu, and if even if you can, it won't run across different brands of television or even different models from the same company.

My buddy has a Samsung Smart TV featuring a large "smart" remote. On one side, there is your standard remote control layout. On the other side is a QWERTY keyboard and other buttons meant for controlling media apps like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and YouTube... perfect idea for working with search boxes. The problem is NONE OF THE APPS recognize the keyboard. Seriously... why did they bother?

For me the most important thing about a living room TV is that it delivers the best image quality possible for its price. Internet, content and "computery stuff" I get elsewhere and connect to the TV as needed.<p>The solution is not to improve the software here, it should not exist in the first place. If I could buy the most high end Panasonic plasma without smart TV "features" I would.

Samsung are just as bad. I've got the premium 8000 model. It can share its screen to a mobile device. Except it can't because Samsung don't include this feature on iPhone for whatever reason. So they are penalising me, who bought Samsung premium. Next time I won't repeat this mistake. I'll go for a simpler screen and an Apple TV.

Reminds me of early 'smart' phones.

I like my Samsung Smart TV.<p>Sure, the 'apps' and the ability to search youtube are mostly pointless, but the DLNA is great. What's more, DLNA (player/renderer profiles) is not something that the linux box behind the tv can do very well, so I'm glad of the tv for this.

I wish people wouldn't shoot video in that aspect.