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I really don't understand how TVs are so bad. You can spend thousands of pounds on one and the interface will be incredibly slow, buggy and take ages to change channels. A £5 raspberry pi is capable of running a faster interface and my old DVB-t cards for PCs were able to switch muxes almost instantly. What is so difficult about putting this capability inside a television?

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Because it's rare for hardware manufacturers to be good at software and also that those hardware manufacturers don't want to spend to license something better that 95% of their customers wouldn't really care about.

To be fair in the current situation, it's not worth buying a TV for it's smart capabilities because they'll rapidly fall out of date. It makes more sense to buy something like the Nvidia Shield which can be swapped out without replacing the panel should it be needed

Even a cheap external digital tuner has a more features and a more usable interface than (dumb) TVs with builtin tuner.

Samsung TV (2010): takes longer than a CRT to "warm up", remote died within 4years

Sony TV (2008): half the screen gets covered by program info popup for some seconds every time some decoding error happens, remote died within 4years

Telefunken TV (early 90's) + external tuner: original remote still works, screen turns on automatically when decoder is turned on and it also has built-in DVR and tetris

This is a market I've daydreamed about trying to enter. Build a high quality, dumb-as-shit TV and couple it with a small line of high quality receivers with beefy ARM processors and well written software. How hard can this possibly be?

you would be surprised. For how many languages do you plan to localize? How many date-formats for the built-in clock? What about a virtual keyboards and input methods? do you support EPG? hbbtv? a rudimentary browser and everything that goes along with that? So you want to support netflix, are you ready to be certified by them, including system security and are you ready to give up everything lpglv3/gplv2 because of the anti tivoization clause?

Will you support multi-tasking? wayland, x11 or something entirely different? You will want to make it usable from some kind of remote.

Do you have QA to test all of that and are they knowledgeable about all the internationalization issues?

You will need a specialist on tuning and decoding of ATSC, DVB, hdmi inputs, upsampling (motion interpolation) to 100hz, 120hz and above. color enhancements, dynamic brightness, the list goes on and on.

Well, the receiver would also be pretty dumb. Definitely no networking. You'd hook a Chromecast (PS4, Xbox, etc.) into it to actually stream stuff. The receiver would provide UI for TV tuner switching, arbitrary audio/video routing, an equalizer, that kind of stuff.

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