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Comment by caractacus | Hacker News Reader

They're already hugely popular in China where a lot of the use is streaming tv and movies, via both legal and illegal means (the boundaries blur a lot over there anyway). I bought an Android-based stick from Alibaba a few years ago that plugged into HDMI and worked fantastically. Computing power and abilities have come on tremendously since so I can imagine how well this would work for high quality video.

The portability of computing continues. Take anywhere, do anything.

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Yet TVs still ship with crappy and slow interfaces for some reason.

They're getting better, but still a mixed bag. The menu interface on my new Vizio is perfectly fine, but the Netflix app is actually nicer than Apple TV. The Amazon app, however, is a UX nightmare, that looks like some kind of very old Android UI and it doesn't even work with the TV's keyboard remote.

I'd rather see less features, but more polished and faster interfaces. You'll be plugging your devices anyway.

It's like car stereos - just let me plug AUX cable and we are square for next 10 years.

The flatscreen producers would probably prefer you came back every 2 years to buy a new TV with updates to their OS, instead of just every 10 years.

Sure, but unless they stop supporting external hardware, nobody is going to. It's kind of like embedded GPS in cars; it's cool at first, but nobody actually pays Garmin and Tomtom the ridiculous fee for map updates, they just use the slightly crappier old ones.

I'm still hoping the smart TV thing will turn out to be a brief fad, and we can all get back to just buying a dumb screen that other things can be plugged into.

The software on TVs I've experienced is universally awful, my parent's one is particularly bad - you can go and make a cup of coffee in the time it takes for the Netflix app to start. When I heard that I bought them a FireTV stick and haven't looked back.

I'm surprised there isn't a Rockbox for TVs yet.

There are some projects making baby-steps but I'm not sure how far they got.

For Samsung TVs the SamyGO project can do some stuff - http://www.samygo.tv/ - but it's more about hacking the existing firmware than making an open replacement.

You hope? Why do you expect this to be a fad in the very end.

Oh I also think TV's should all be about we glamouring for the resolution. Seems 4K is here to win.

I hope the same.

TV, as pretty much every device, should be as dumb as cables .. must be reliable and work with pretty much anything that it's plugged to, no matter what that is

Stupid licensing will prevent this, I'm afraid.

I have a nVidia Shield TV plugged in to my 4K Smart TV that I do almost everything on, but I still have to use the smart TV app for Amazon Instant since Amazon stubbornly refuses to release it for stock Android.

In an upturn, everyone is collaborative. In a downturn, everyone builds silos...

You could by a little case to hold your Shield, Chromecast, Alexaplug, Applecore, etc, that connect to your TV.

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