Hacker News Reader

> I refuse to say "smart TV". It is a "sly TV"

I call them telescreens, comrade.

Although I agree with you on points 1-3, point 4 is no longer the case as of this last year or two. Most people are only interested in the main apps such as YouTube, Netflix, Disney+ etc. My 2019 Samsung TV OS is not only fast and smooth but those apps are as good, if not better than the same ones found on an Apple TV. Compared to a crappy Android box the experience is far better.

Why have a seperate device and two remotes when you don't have to? I'm convinced that the marketshare for these external media devices will flatline and steadily decline. In the case of Apple, the only way they can try to compete in the future is releasing their own standalone TV panel. I suppose they saw the writing on the wall which is why AirPlay and Apple TV are now available on Samsungs TV OS

I'm surprised to hear that. The LG we bought earlier this year has a Netflix app that can barely keep up with the display. It looks much better streamed from the Apple TV than from the TV's own app.

I think it'll be a long time before any TV has a native app store as decent as Apple's (and probably Amazon's, but I don't have personal experience with that so can't vouch for it).

Was this a LG C9 OLED tv? Just curious in how much better and in what way is the Apple TV to the native app. I haven't had any issues afaik. But I haven't used the Apple TV 4k before either, so I guess I wouldn't know if I'm experiencing subpar quality.

It's at home and I'm at work so I can't look at it right now, but it's one of their newer 4K UHD TVs with webOS. I tried it on the guest wifi for a couple of days to see what it would be like, and while it wasn't bad (like I couldn't look you in the eye and say "this sucks, don't use it!"), it just wasn't as good as an external video source. There's no reason it couldn't have a perfectly fine hardware video decoder that's as nice as one you'd find in an external player. Still, its SoC and other support hardware just isn't going to be as nice as what you'd find in a dedicated box. Maybe the network stack isn't as optimized because the CPU has to handle a lot of stuff in software. Or maybe its OS's memory allocator isn't as quick. Or insert a thousand other things that might make a TV's dirt-cheap-as-possible SoC handle all the housekeeping around keeping the decoder fed with data as efficient and smooth as possible.

And as others have pointed out, you're pretty much stuck with what it ships with. If my Apple TV breaks or gets old and unsupported, I can trivially switch to a Roku. If the SoC in my TV gets old and unsupported, there isn't jack I can reasonably do about it other than throw out the whole TV and get a new one.

In my case i've got a flagship panel, the Samsung Q90R (which cost me about $2500) which has a quad core Qualcomm chip with almost instant responsiveness. My Apple TV now sits in a drawer. From the reviews i've seen all the flagship brands like the LG, Sony are all super fast and quite good. I suppose for people buying entry level panels they aren't going to be springing an extra $200 on an Apple TV so they'll put up with a slower experience because it comes included - and that's what consumers appear to be doing.

This might be true for some apps, from the biggest developers. But even there, it only holds for a given point in time.

It's been shown time and again that developer support of past products is atrocious. You just can't count on getting your apps updated through the whole lifecycle of the device. This is partly understandable, as older hardware just isn't going to be able to handle some things (say, H.265). But even so, the developers seem to be doing little more than paying lip service.

The best strategy is to have a dumb monitor, and a device like Roku that you can upgrade very cheaply every year or two.

> Although I agree with you on points 1-3, point 4 is no longer the case as of this last year or two. Most people are only interested in the main apps such as YouTube, Netflix, Disney+ etc. My 2019 Samsung TV OS is not only fast and smooth but those apps are as good, if not better than the same ones found on an Apple TV. Compared to a crappy Android box the experience is far better.

That's more a criticism of "crappy Android boxes" rather than a praise of builtin TV applications. The latter are still barely usable and quickly become obsolete (with updates stopping 1-2 years down the line), compare that to a good Android box like Nvidia Shield.

> Why have a seperate device and two remotes when you don't have to? I'm convinced that the marketshare for these external media devices will flatline and steadily decline.

You may be right long term but it's been years since we've had "Smart TVs" and they are still far from being as good as decent media boxes. That to me means there's an underlying reason, probably a misalignment of incentives.

And btw, depending on your needs you can use a single remote just fine (I use an Fire TV stick bluetooth remote, connected to the Nvidia Shield, for controlling the Shield, the Sony TV and the Yamaha amplifier through HDMI-CEC). With such a combination of different parts from different manufacturers I'm surprised how well it all works.

> That's more a criticism of "crappy Android boxes" rather than a praise of builtin TV applications. The latter are still barely usable and quickly become obsolete (with updates stopping 1-2 years down the line), compare that to a good Android box like Nvidia Shield.

Sorry, but this is just no longer the case. Even my neighbour doesn't turn on his Nvidia shield anymore because his Samsung TV OS is good enough and the Youtube/Netflix apps are fantastic. Samsungs OS is where the dominant marketshare is so the apps are great.

I have a 2014 Bravia TV, and I would still much rather use the Netflix app on that than the one in the PS4. I press one button on the remote, the app starts within seconds, it's smooth and it works. Why would I need anything else? And it's a 5 year old TV at this point!

> If I must give one access because it needs a firmware update to fix a bug or something, I temporarily set my guest wifi network's password to something random, configure the TV to use that, apply the fix, then reset the guest wifi password back to the old value.

I use USB based updating for the TV to avoid ever having to give it Internet access. Since it's never connected to the Internet I don't need to care much if it's running the latest version or not, for all I care it could be running the same version until it stops working as long as the current version is good enough.

Regarding point 4:

My TV runs RokuOS. I've recommended it to everyone I know in the TV market and none have been disappointed so far. They treat the 'smart tv' aspects as first class rather than a buggy afterthought. I'm much more optimistic about it being updated for a long time as well.

Wasn't there an article on here the other day saying that you literally can't use a RokuOS-equipped TV without creating an account first? Or have I imagined this?

> 2. Sly TVs never get Internet access in my house. I don't plug Ethernet into them, and I don't set configure their wifi. If I must give one access because it needs a firmware update to fix a bug or something, I temporarily set my guest wifi network's password to something random, configure the TV to use that, apply the fix, then reset the guest wifi password back to the old value.

Are there any negatives to doing this? I'm running into issues with a Vizio soundbar working with a Vizio V Series tv and was contemplating connecting to the internet to see if there's any updates but was holding out on finding a fix. I may have to try your method though.

> 2. Sly TVs never get Internet access in my house ....

I'm with you. The challenge is or is going to be when (unless they already do) TVs start embedding 4G/5G SIM cards into the TV to bypass such requirements.

My only hope is that enough people use the Smart TVs as designed, with Internet configured, that TV manufacturers never see ROI in going the SIM card route. fingers crossed

I hope you're right. I'm also fortunately in a position to have access to radio gear that would let me sniff that out and apply copper foil tape until it's fixed.

Care to share more on the copper foil tape thing?

Did you mean wrap the antenna or something like that? I don't have radio equipment but would love to know more.

It's used a lot in ham radio for grounding and such, but it's also great for making an impromptu Faraday cage around an antenna. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Bertech-Copper-Conductive-Yards-Thick...

Note: that's expensive AF. I probably wouldn't literally use it to block the signal when a thin steel piece would probably work just as well. But it's an example of something you absolutely could do: find out where the antenna is, then severely interrupt its signal.

>The challenge is or is going to be when (unless they already do) TVs start embedding 4G/5G SIM cards into the TV to bypass such requirements.

Are the cellular providers going to give free cellular access to these manufacturers or something? Consumers aren't going to pay for that. No one's going to buy a TV that requires an additional $30/month for a data plan.

> Are the cellular providers going to give free cellular access to these manufacturers or something? Consumers aren't going to pay for that. No one's going to buy a TV that requires an additional $30/month for a data plan.

I actually wouldn't be surprised in the least if this became commonplace down the road. Just open up your new telescreen and bam it seemlessly connects to the 5G/wireless network without issue. You'll get every update, ad, tracking, software automatically pushed to the machine without the need for the user to intervene.

My problem with this idea is that there's limited data bandwidth on the cellular network, even with 5G (5G has especially poor range, as I understand, so you have to have a tower very close by). If the TV makers can keep the overall data usage very low, it could work, but the stuff you're talking about seems like it'll require a pretty large data budget, and I just don't see how all this surveillance is going to be so profitable that it would pay for the cellular service and still net a handsome profit for the TV maker.

Consumers won't have to pay, just like consumers today don't pay for various web based services such as email, search, social media and others. It is subsidized by the revenue the TV companies make from selling your data.

Today that revenue subsidizes the cost of the TV itself, the additional cost of 4G/5G based service for small bits of data is not much. Other options can be LoRaWAN, NB-IoT or other such services since the data transferred is going to be small, primarily analytics. All of these are pretty cheap both to embed in the TV as well as the service, especially at scale.

I guess I'm assuming here that the amount of data needing to be passed over-the-air will be quite large, since people are talking about these devices listening to your conversations and such. Some simple analytics data like what channel you're watching doesn't require any bandwidth, but sending microphone stream to a server to be analyzed and run through a voice-recognition program will add up.

I mean, I have a TomTom satnav that has a built-in sim to download latest traffic updates and sync with my TomTom account. The device was about £250 when I got it 5 years ago and there is no subscription to pay at all, it has "lifetime"* always-on connection. So I can't be that expensive, or TomTom would be losing money by now.

*lifetime - defined as "lifetime of the device", whatever that means. 5 years in and it still works fine.

The mfgr must have negotiated something with one of the cellular carriers to give them unlimited access for a fee, with the stipulation that it's only used for these occasional OTA updates which really don't use much data.

However, I must point out that a satnav device's occasional updates, as I said, don't use much data: just a multi-megabyte download every few months at most. But streaming constant surveillance data from a TV to the "mother ship" is going to require far more data than that. Multiply this by an average of 1-3 TVs per household, and this seems like a big load on the cellular system.

#2 now they piggyback on any open network they find

I mean how common is an open network anymore? I live in a relatively suburban area and each of my neighbors networks are password protected. Unless I'm in an office park, doctors office, mall I rarely encounter an open network. Maybe apart from something like a Optimum/Verizon/Comcast wifi hotspot.