I have come the same conclusion after the YouTube app on my smart tv of 4 years old was bricked. I still don’t know the best way to avoid this issue going forward (chromecast, roku, other).
The Chromecast could be discontinued tomorrow, but it only cost £30, so I'll just replace it with whatever. Relying on your expensive TV's probably terrible and badly supported software is madness, but it's what most people seem happy to do. It's getting harder and harder to buy TVs that are not smart, and I find it maddening.
I take the same approach with Speakers.
I think a dumb screen option will always be available because it's always going to be a value player in a world of Sony and Samsungs. The question is will the screen be a nice enough panel.
But I could have saved a lot of money by going with a conventional Smart TV, and it would have been easier to shop for it. Commercial displays aren't hanging on the wall at your local Best Buy, although they might be hanging on the wall at your local bar, restaurant, bank, etc.
As soon as you do you'll get nagged for software updates, you'll get told the privacy policy or the terms of service have changed (which you have to acknowledge) and apps for things like Youtube and Netflix tend to be inferior to those in boxes (eg Roku, AppleTV).
I buy my TV to be a dumb screen. Then I plug a Roku into it. If at some point I decide the Roku isn't working I throw it away and get something else. Worst case I'm out $120.
Non-smart TVs basically don't exist anymore (Sceptre is the only brand I can find). You can usually get a smart TV and keep it off the internet, but I've seen horror stories of some TVs not working at all until being "updated" after unboxing.
A similar pet peeve of mine is that the huge infotainment screens on modern cars cannot be turned off the majority of the time. Only in the VW Golf I rented did it actually have a way to shut the whole thing down.
If it's never connected to the network....
Of all the television sets I have owned since 1985, the native tuner included inside the device has been used maybe 2% of the time. The only advantage I have ever seen from buying a display screen as a television set is that it comes with speakers loud enough to hear from across a large room, and has as many as six different input ports. None of the screens I now own currently decode their own NTSC/ATSC/QAM signals.
My first "smart" TV was also my last, because LG made it obsolete within months of me buying it. Now it also functions only as a dumb screen, and is not allowed on my home network. Never again.
You don't need a smart television now. You don't even need a television. You need a monitor with HDMI inputs and speakers.
And if you want a DisplayPort input in lieu of one of the HDMI sockets, that seems to add at least $30 to an otherwise identical monitor, even though DisplayPort is royalty-free. There does seem to be an attempt to segment the market to charge more for displays connected to a computer than for displays connected to a home entertainment appliance.
At larger sizes, I think the assumption is that if you don't have a TV tuner, you're attaching it to a computer, and if you do, you're not. And that breaks down at smaller sizes, where resolution and pixel pitch become an issue for computing, but less so for consoles and DVD players.
I haven't done much digging on this, since 40" is plenty for the longest line-of-sight possible in my house.
I'm using an NEC E-series 55" commercial display as my TV and gaming monitor. It's not a great TV, but it is solid and it's way better than the one it replaced.
It is not possible to buy a high-end panel without it anymore.
AS long as you just use it as a dumb screen, physically disconnected from the network, it'll keep doing it's job for year and years.
My TV is a Smart TV. I've never use that part of it. In fact, it came with a second remote control for managing the Smart features and I've never even put batteries in it let alone given the panel network access.
It's been happily humming along in dumb mode for about 4 years I think. Just plug a cheap accessory of your choice in (Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, self built HTPC etc) and enjoy!
But in many other cases of smart devices where the core function relies on external services, they'll be entirely useless.
The manufacturer then sells the smart tv at a $25-50 premium over the dumb version and it's a decent profit for them.
FWIW - I was always skeptical of the onboard TV smart features, but the Samsung TV that I use a computer monitor actually is actually surprisingly decent.
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-UN55MU6500-Curved...
As an aside, I absolutely love using it as a monitor hooked up to a MBP.
Aside from privacy, I like to think of it similar to musical keyboards. Back when synths were primitive, it made sense to buy a keyboard that had builtin speakers, synthesizer software/hardware - a smart keyboard if you will. Nowadays, the only thing you would want is a good set of keys. That means a midi controller with a baby grand/grand like keybed. [1] Best of all, it should be a lot cheaper than an all in one. And itll be just as good in 20 years as it is now - youll just run a different synth on your computer. All in ones dont make sense for many things. It may be a trend but its an overzealous and oversold one. Ill stick with my dumb midi instruments and my dumb projector. And hopefully theyll still be with me in 5 or more years.
Anyhow, you are all wrong to disagree with me. There were just CVEs for radio chip exploits a couple of days ago! These have been coming out quite often lately. The layer at which these exploits can be done does not require the TV to be on any network. Not even ad-hoc. Just the fact that it has a listening radio chip that has old firmware is enough to make it extremely dangerous [digitally.] That TV can literally became a wifi enabled worm distribution center, infecting everything in your home. Not worth the risk IMO. I would stick with a dumb TV.
"targets didn't have to connect to the attacker's Wi-Fi network. Simply having Wi-Fi turned on was sufficient to being hacked."
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-tec...
Dumb TV's with sufficient quality are becoming harder and harder to find. I prefer to plug in my own smarts to TV's since they evolve quicker than the years I'll own a TV.
This type of behavior was the cause of new Apple Watches that couldn’t access the net over 3G (they were trapped on captive WiFi networks with no UI to disconnect). If this happened with one device, it could happen with others.
edit: split a run on sentence
It will forever try to login into that wifi network, even if you disabled the wifi in the tv ui.
Sure, all TVs will probably not do that, but before this one it wouldn't occur to me, that it could do that.
Lesson learned.
To go with the music world, the best parallel would be the increasingly annoying tendency for music software to move to "cloud" based offerings or other Internet authorization techniques. For instance Roland, with their "cloud plugins", apparently thinks all music venues have super spiffy wifi, as they require network authorization every time the plugin loads in the DAW. (https://www.rolandcloud.com/faq#FAQLink17) If Roland ever pulled this authorization scheme, poof, your plugins no longer work.
I have a 16 year old keyboard (Alesis Andromeda) and a synth that is a bit over a quarter of a century old (Roland D-50), and they both work fine more or less (a few issues here and there but nothing that stops me from using it). They don't need an Internet connection just to work. The companies can discontinue support (or even go bankrupt, in Alesis's case), and the synths still work.
Personally, I certainly do not have great confidence that the Roland Cloud authorization service will last a quarter century.
Hardware that requires the Internet to work is no different than software that requires the Internet to work, it honestly is a risky prospect for longevity. The Harmony Link from what I see was released in 2011. Maybe 7 years is a long time in this current disposable electronics world, but it doesn't feel like that to me.
I volunteered to set it up, and what do you know -- the "OS" was gated by a registration / sign in screen. So, no way to access core functionality (including external inputs, settings menu, etc.) without an internet connection. Even if there was some strange ritual that would let me get through (there wasn't), the average user is fucked.
Then there are the complications DRM adds, e.g. it's often not possible to get the best quality from Netflix on your PC in the browser, you only get that with the native Windows 10 app (and then not 4K unless you have some very specific GPU and drivers). The Apps on a smart TV or a FireTV/whatever don't have these restrictions.
With Netflix you at least get an app and the possibility to stream with highest quality (4K, HDR, multichannel sound), but the app is extremely basic and clearly only optimized for touch - it doesn't even offer basic keyboard shortcuts beyond start/stop.
You can get a somewhat near-HTPC using Chrome (at least shortcuts work there) and some customizing, but you're stuck with stereo (I'm not sure about 4K/HDR, but the latter is no-go enough for me to not have tried).
The same goes for Amazon Video, except that they don't even have an app outside Android/iOS, so you're stuck with stereo anyway. And so on. It would be downright embarassing, if it weren't so obvious this is intentional...
First, price. I think this is the biggest factor. You need a computer (for each TV). I don't think there are too many computers (if any) in the $35-$150 range that can handle smoothly playing HD video and pushing it to an external display. Assuming the machine isn't dedicated and you already own it, it breaks point 2 below.
Second, I haven't seen a good setup for controlling a computer connected to a TV. Granted, I stopped looking a few years ago. For me (and I'd assume most people), "good setup" means ability to turn system on and control it remotely, at a minimum. I'm sure one exists, but it would definitely require even more hardware (cuts into price) and more custom setup.
Third, some people might not have the technical know-how to set up something that meets the above two things. Sure, plenty of us technical people can do it, but it's not hard to understand that we are the minority.
tl;dr there's nothing "wrong" with using a computer and an HDMI cable, but there are plenty of compelling reasons these days to use one of the ultra cheap boxes. They are basically cheap purpose-specific computers, anyway. Ultimately, different people have different needs and priorities.
I have a mini-keyboard with touch pad, but it is still inferior to a roku remote or my harmony remote. My wife won't use it.