Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

If you were OK with a TV for 18 years you would be OK with another TV for 18 years.

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.

View on HN

Here in the UK, the BBC has something they call the "red button" feature - most of the time, it just brings up "teletext 2.0" with some news headlines etc. but when there's something like the olympics on, you can use it to switch between coverage of different events.

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 On my friend's "smart" TV, the red button feature has been replaced by an "app" that we had to update and fiddle with to get it working, and it won't do anything at all without an internet connection despite the key feature just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.

Looks like smart TVs may have Red Button+ which gets its data differently than dumb TVs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button

That works on FreeView by broadcasting extra channels. They have something like 2 to 4 slots I think. It's nothing more than smoke and mirrors really, and there is still an element of software getting in there - it just switches you to the appropriate channel in the background.

There's not much smoke even. The red button channels are normal channels at 600 and 601. If the red button is broken you can switch to them directly. And switching directly is usually quicker than navigating the red button nonsense.

I have one of the "newer generation" smart TVs driven by Roku's interface- completely. In other words, you turn the TV on with a Roku remote and when the TV comes on, you see the Roku interface which you must use to choose which HDMI or game port to use, etc.

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".

>If you were OK with a TV for 18 years you would be OK with another TV for 18 years.

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.

This is wrong. Modern TV follow standard 'bathtub' curve for failures. If the TV hasn't had any faults when new, it's not very likely to develop any new ones as it hasn't got any moving parts and things that wear and tear. The exceptions are capacitors quality and pixel burn-in, but even after 18 years they might work, you just won't like the picture quality.

Anything manufactured with some process control should follow a bathtub curve for failures. It's the width of the tub that matters. I don't know if LCDs have been on the market long enough to have much data for end-of-life failures (probably not 18 years?) and that data probably wouldn't be publicly available.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com