Sony, LG, Samsung and w/e would love nothing more than to sell you only a panel with video input ports but that is not what people want to buy. People are constantly buying the most feature loaded TV's even at the expense of getting lesser panel quality, inch size and various other things.
And -all- of the interfaces built in to TVs for such things I've used are terrible. Hell, most TVs still can't make a remote/on-screen UI work reasonably. People can talk to their voice agents ("hello assistant, who is the president of the USA") on the toilet and generally expect a reasonable answer. And yet we still have to point some wand at an exact spot on our TVs, press buttons, and hope they register and change channels.
Digital recording is a great feature too, plug in a USB stick for storage then control and manage recordings with the remote. I actually like to have everything integrated, rather than having to fiddle with my OSMC, which, as an example, in the case of recording would need its own signal input.
My only (yet pretty big) issue with the Sony software is that it is slow to start up. From turning on the TV until it will respond to the remote is easily 40-50 seconds, long after the picture appears. You can't even change the channel or volume.
And, oh yeah, the YouTube app has been broken for years, but I use the OSMC for that.
Skype is the next thing that's going to disappear from that TV: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34642/is-the-skype-for-tv...
So can my XBox One :). I agree that this is a nice feature, but there is no reason why this can't be part of an external replaceable/upgradable peripheral. I'm also kind of surprised that Apple and Google didn't create an add-on for Apple TV/Chromecast yet, or we could give it to our daughters' grandparents as well ;).
The only smart feature I'm using of my LG TV is playing videos from USB sticks. It doesn't have some audio codecs common in MKV containers, but when it works 40" is better than a tablet screen. BTW, the LG is quick enough at starting up. I usually keep it completely off, not in standby. Switch on the power, push the remote, get the image: 9 seconds. Maybe on par with old analog CRTs.
I never enabled WiFi because of the terms of service. Even if they are not as invasive as other ToS I saw from other manufacturers, they are way more than they should. I should use the TV to watch things, not to be watched. I already have the PC, tablet and phone for that :-) and at least I can fight there with adblockers and the like.
I have a Raspberry 3 connected to the TV and I could do YouTube with that (it's quite OK). Still the tablet is much better. I could chromecast to the TV but it's not worth the trouble.
I imagine the same thing that happens when you get a call on your Desktop and want to move to another room. "Hey, let me call you back."
This same wisdom holds true for TV remotes that have full QWERTY keyboards! TV interfaces just plain suck. They are so slow as to be painful and they are perpetually out of date and always user-unfriendly.
I really hoped Apple would come out with a TV that set a baseline for what a TV interface should be just like the original iPhone did for smart phones (which weren't all that smart at the time).
Maybe so, but I never personally asked the TV manufacturers for a smart TV.
Who I think came up with the idea: TV manufacturers.
Selling hardware that has software/firmware, that will become obsolete in 4-8 years, will result in more TVs sold in 4-8 years than would have been.
We just got rid of a TV that we've had since the late 1990s- about 18 years. It was not smart. We just bought a smart TV and I'm betting we won't get more than 8 years out of it.
If I could have gotten the same TV without any smart features and an external Roku, that would have been better long-term, but almost all newer TVs now are smart.
Its important to remember that "TVs" are just "displays whose bundled additional features include at least a TV tuner".
Unless you absolutely need a TV tuner, you can get displays that include neither a TV tuner nor smart features, but they aren't sold as "TVs" because they aren't.
This is simply a fallacy the fact that the software would become obsolete doesn't make the TV obsolete as long as it can still receive a video input and display it - this has nothing to do with the "smart" features of the TV.
On my "dumb" TV that is not and never will be connected to the 'net, this feature works fine and has done so for years. On my friend's "smart" TV, the red button feature has been replaced by an "app" that we had to update and fiddle with to get it working, and it won't do anything at all without an internet connection despite the key feature just being a kind of switch between two sub-channels, both of which are served over the usual aerial/cable. You can't even turn this off to get the normal red button back.
I like the interface a lot, but I bought it knowing that at some point, it will not be as cool as it is now. It will probably get in the way, as I'll have to use the Roku remote to browse via the old Roku OS to the port with the box that is the new browseable streaming OS. Maybe the Roku one will get borked by a system update because my hardware is unsupported- I don't know; I hope that doesn't happen, and have had a good experience with my old Roku external box, but it is a possibility several years from now.
Years ago when I bought a TV, never did it cross my mind that "one day the user interface is going to be obsolete".
A TV manufactured today is very unlikely to last 18 years without some kind of hardware failure. There is a big difference in complexity/points of failure and cost-cutting between 1998 and 2016.
It's hard to believe that TV manufactures are shooting for an 18 year mean lifetime. They might work after 18 years, but it is unlikely.
I haven't been on the market for a TV for a few years but I'm not convinced that a lot of people see more apps on a TV as a critical selling point.
No they weren't. IMO it wasn't worth the extra money. After all, just how many times can someone re-watch Avatar? Most other 3D movies weren't actually shot in 3D, they were just faked in post production.
Here's a headline that shows just how dead 3D is:
With a bullet to the head from Samsung, 3D TV is now deader than ever
It may shamble forward zombie-style for a few more years, but without the world's No. 1 TV maker on board, 3D TV is doomed.
Saying that 3D is "doomed" because one manufacturer is not bringing out new 3D models this year is, IMO, ridiculous. Eventually of course it will get much better, with no glasses, head tracking setups that are already in development. So 3D as we know it now of course won't last forever. But it's not like it's going away. Look at the percentage of movies released in 3D today compared to 5 years ago.
To give one example, the Foley artist who makes footsteps and other sound effects not captured live.
Not necessarily a bad thing if it's done well
I've watched a few films that did a good job with it. But they're few and far between.
Sure you still have some viewing angle issues which might make some living/TV room setups not optimal for 3D and most TV's only came initially with 1-2 pairs of glasses and if it was a active 3D setup (had an active switching component inside of them) they could be somewhat expensive but if the content was there it wouldn't matter.
If there were more 3D blurays and DVD's out there and especially if Netflix or any other streaming service would have supported 3D content (3D streaming is still not a solved issue somewhat) the outcome would've been different.
Overall once 3D content is going to be easily streamable (and it's being worked on) and "glassesless" 3D/Stereoscopic panels become slightly cheaper it might make a comeback. Avatar was a nice experience but overall even in the cinema many people avoid 3D atm simply because it's still not there, these issues would be solved eventually and when every content would go through stereoscopic processing it would look pretty nice :)
If there's a 3D Bluray of a movie I genuinely want to watch, I'll pick it up but there are very few. Funnily enough, I've never bought Avatar as I saw it in Imax 3D in the theatre and was pretty much "That was an impressive experience but I don't really need to watch an echo of a not-so-great movie again at home."
In general, animated movies work very well, having watched the 3D versions of Frozen, Inside Out, and sundry others.
But I suspect after a year or two people would buy a new $35 Chromecast, rather than replacing their entire TV.
And they sell a TV with 5 HDMI ports because their competitors sell 4, this what happens when you have a features arms race, there are only what 2-3 panel makes so most TV's are pretty identical (like Cars that you only have a few chassis/wheelbase for each price range) so to have the advantage they load the TV's with other features like more ports, better WIFI, more this more that (just like cars which sell you BS things you don't need).
Of course, the TV manufacturers don't want to do that, because they profit when you have to upgrade the entire TV.
Sunny sells you dongles that take a port, buy symsyng and have all your ports for other devices.
If you are an advanced enough user that you can use a streamer/dongle/set top box or w/e it doesn't matter what the TV has as long as it comes with display input ports.
For the majority of the shopping channel BIG BOX mart consumers this isn't really an option and they want one box that does everything even if it's not the most optimal solution.
What you are asking for is simply something that the TV maker has no reason or interest to do not because they are greedy but because they don't want to deal with that. They aren't stopping you from buying whatever dongle you want so what exactly is the complaint? The majority of the cost of the TV is still the tuner, panel, and LED and optical assembly the 11$ SoC they use for the smart features won't make the TV's cheaper. If somehow removing those features would allow them to focus on more important things I would understand but in reality it doesn't add up to much if anything.
And that's the good news in all this.
I can buy and use the TVs of my choice and the reality is that I don't really need to pay a material premium because they have YouTube which may or may not continue to work after some day in the future. So I can choose to ignore those features if I want. It's not really a choice between buying SmartTV for $X and DumbTV (which is otherwise equivalent) for $X/2.
For example, I don't want a TV with its own network connection, a built-in camera and microphone, and hideously insecure firmware right in my living room.
Literally the only controls I ever use on my TV are power/standby, volume, and input selector. Everything else already comes from external sources like a set top box or PVR or Chromecast, and it's not like only A/V nerds have that arrangement.
I just want good video, good audio, and decent manufacturing quality and longevity. How on earth did we lose the plot as badly as we seem to have with the "smart" marketing?
And even still if you buy a smart TV you do not have to plug it into the network, a streamer will work regardless of what the TV can do.
Also, the next logical step for "smart" devices is to establish their own wireless connections via alternative channels if they aren't connected to a household network. Privacy is fast becoming a thing of the past if you let anything with sensors onto the premises, and short of wrapping their home or office in a Faraday cage, there is disturbingly little anyone can do about it as more manufacturers reach agreements with network providers to handle their phone-home data needs.
If you want to make it really foolproof, make a mounting bracket for the dongle on the TV itself, such that it would require mucking around with screws to remove.
A few generations in, he doesn't even have to do that soldering; the functionality will be integrated with something else on a single chip.
That makes the integrated TV set cheaper to produce. Guy A pays more.
Margins are paper-thin for televisions, so that takes most of the market. Eventually, guy A can't even buy that set.
With the Xbox, I simply mapped a Samba share (something like \\NAS\XBMC\) full of content and it brought it up without issue and simply played it
DLNA meanwhile every time something changed, I'd have to restart the whole thing to regenerate the "index". It also played maybe half the file formats XBMC did, despite being newer and an order of magnitude more powerful
Things have finally more or less come full circle again, these days I can run "Plex" on my NAS to just spew out media to everything, as long as it runs the Plex app anyway (which covers my Xbox One and Phone, at least). The only downside is having to pay for it, of course
My experience was that cross brand interop is not quite there, but the experience is so inconsistent it doesn't matter. If configured to do it, turning on the blu ray player would consistent turn on the tv, but only sometimes set the right input. That kind of thing.
Do they though?
I mean, everyone I've asked just wants their Microwave to have two dials, Power and Time, yet no such thing exists on the market. Instead it's a sea of bullshit Microwaves with bullshit "value add" features.
I'd wager the same is true of TVs, and myriad other consumer products. The end-users just want simple tech that works for years on end, while Product Managers and Designers want to boost their own status by sheparding these mindless "improvements" into production.
It's branded as a "commercial microwave oven" or something.
Yes, I brought this fridge model because of "features". I even did a feature comparison while searching for a model. The caveat is that all the features I looked for were related to chilling things, or easy maintenance.
I would pay extra for getting rid of the clock - and more yet for just some different software that displayed temperature instead of time.
Well, you and I might buy the Samsung, but most consumers aren't as informed or as savvy with a Chromecast.
I'm not a big fan of smart devices, but I'm not going to pay more for a display with "meh" connectivity that doesn't really seem to be optimized as a home entertainment device. Although annoying, it makes more sense to buy the smart TV and ignore the extra features.