I have a basic HD tv (a samsung), it's not smart. It will play media from USB, and it plays a lot of formats - only it suffers with a few annoying quirks. I have sizing issues with the picture, and the media player doesn't let me turn the screen off. It almost works. DVD playback is pretty poor too with a separate LG player.
I don't want to run a separate media centre machine or NAS, all I want to do, is plug a drive into the TV. I don't even care for the IMDB stuff. Just the basics, easily locate file quickly, play it, play it from where I last paused etc. A Pi sounds promising - though I wonder how good the actual picture would be. Everytime I've tried XBMC or some such on a computer, the picture never appears that smooth.
Not everyone has a smart phone either. What I'd like is something like a Tablet, with HDMI out, and an SD card, and/or USB port - that I could quickly attach to the TV.
The basics feel neglected.