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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Smart TV apps are largely terrible to start with. The $30 on-sale ($50 retail) Fire TV 4K Stick has been one of my highest bang-for-the-buck consumer purchases in a long time.

It's a great Plex client, YouTube client, Netflix client, Prime Video client (of course), and quickly took over primary video source duties as soon as I installed it.

The prior version (the not 4K one) struggled with even 1080p H265 decoding, but the 4K version handles H265 and all the other formats I've thrown at it just fine.

Even when the TV was brand new, the apps on the TV were terrible (sluggish, disjointed UI, TV remote not comfortable to use as primary remote). 4 years later, they're not going to be any better, while the HDMI input sources can be easily and cheaply upgraded.

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I agree. I use a roku instead, but same result. I used the apps on my TV for a bit when I got it, but they would fail, like it had a memory leak if I watched something for over 3 hours. I don't trust telling the TV to disable wifi, so I just changed the wifi credentials on the TV to be incorrect. No problems anymore.

Only a matter of time before they start downloading ads via OTA datastream. Could do rough geolocation by differential signal strengths/timing. TV could run code to infer gender/age/etc or just link it to the serial number of the purchaser and their address.

Of course you didn’t get your 65” TV delivered to your own house, right?

If it’s strictly one-way, ad purchasers may not know precisely how many “hits” they got, but could be inferred from the online TVs.

To be determined if it’s worthwhile if almost everyone puts the TV online anyway, but if there’s a world where people don’t, you’ll still be almost as screwed.

I’m surprised they haven’t paid google to serve long term ads to offline TVs from their street view cars... or Tesla, or any car manufacturer probably parked in a close by garage and able to receive data ota

At least TCL and Hisense manufacture TVs with Roku built in, which seems like a big benefit, streaming services don't need to make and maintain another app specifically for your budget brand.

Depends on the TVs obviously. The C9/CX OLEDs have pretty powerful processors and are snappier in my experience in comparison to the cheaper streaming sticks.

From a tracking perspective, I'd assume a Fire TV stick is even worse than any TV OS. It's Amazon after all!

Probably half of what we watch on it is YouTube, so Amazon is in the #2 spot of big tech that I'm worried about.

The apps on LG TVs work surprisingly well. I would avoid them for the advertising and tracking concerns, but I just want to point out that the quality has vastly improved since the earliest smart TVs.

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