This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
That way you can completely use it like a monitor instead of a TV.