These days, there are a lot of things that have unnecessary smart features built into
them, but you'd think the familiar television would be a good candidate for a smart device.
With as many streaming services as we use today, it's a good idea to have them all built
into your TV, right? Unfortunately, smart TVs are actually about as smart as the common garden slug, with clunky
user interfaces, poor responsiveness, and even instability in some cases.
And this isn't restricted to the bargain-basement models that you found at an abandoned Kmart.
My favorite childhood haunt. Even on some premium four-figure TVs, you'll see no shortage of people complaining about
the built-in operating system. So why are these nice TVs coming with such slow interfaces to begin with?
Well, it helps to understand the business model of the average TV manufacturer.
Some of them are companies who primarily manufacture TVs, such as Vizio, while other companies
like Samsung might make tons of different products, but their TV division might be left
more or less to its own devices. These companies and divisions don't focus very much on either software development or
powerful hardware the same way a phone manufacturer would.
Even though many of the same video streaming apps we find on smart TVs are also on our
phones, phone manufacturers know that their products rely heavily on app-driven experiences
and laggy, unstable behavior on modern smartphones would quickly put off consumers.
Many manufacturers don't have the same set of concerns. Their primary objective, as it's been for a very long time, has been to make a TV with
good or at least acceptable picture quality at a competitive price.
Having a good software experience is not only something they aren't focused on, but it's
also something they haven't had to worry about until recently.
It was only around a decade ago that it was very easy to get a dumb TV that had on-screen
digital menus and HDMI ports, but lacked any kind of fancier operating system that supported
apps or web connectivity. Now something else to consider is the fact that the TVs themselves are rather low margin
items, meaning they don't typically make a whole lot of profit for the manufacturer,
especially at the low end. As it's become easier to manufacture TVs over the years, there's lots of supply to
go with increased competition, driving prices down.
And the fact that smart TV manufacturers get revenue from all the ads their sets contain
means prices have dwindled even further, to the point that it's not hard to find smart
TVs for below 200 US dollars. But why does this necessarily mean that your TV has to insult you by being so slow and
laggy? It doesn't care about your time. Well, a big part of the reason is that smart TVs often use low end processors, as better
hardware would cut even further into their already thin margins.
Besides, when customers go into a store or even browse for televisions online, they're
mostly still shopping based on size and picture quality, meaning there just isn't very much
incentive for manufacturers to improve the user experience.
Especially when you consider these TVs all have HDMI ports that mostly allow the user
to bypass the smart features and just plug in their own Chromecast or whatever.
Indeed, small streaming sticks or boxes from companies like Roku, Google, NVIDIA and Apple
tend to offer much better performance. Since so many streaming devices offer a similar suite of apps, including many apps you can
already get built into a smart TV, there's a bigger incentive for them to provide a solid
user experience, not to mention these companies focus more on well designed software and incorporating
hardware that can run it properly to begin with.
Many people have switched to using external streaming devices for just this reason, even
though they can get the same content directly through their smart TV.
Now, the situation might get a little better as time goes on, as there's been a trend
for TV manufacturers to replace their own proprietary and bad operating systems with Android TV
or the new Google TV, which are typically a lot more stable.
But again, standardization only helps if the hardware is up to scratch.
So let's hope that over time it ends up making more economic sense for TV manufacturers to
use better chips, unless you just really love dongles.
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