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Is Smart tv just a money wasting gimick?


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Old 29-04-2012, 21:42
The Wizard
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My dad took receipt of a new tv last week after having to spend an extra £49 on equipment to get internet to the tv as there's no built in wifi, it turns out that the only thing he can use it for is BBC iplayer.

The built in aps are a total joke. Just cheap useless pointless things that some software developer couldn't possibly even give away for free and are just a vessel for advertising. All of the movie services are subscription only which other than Love Film don't even work properly. Blinkbox for example and a couple of other movie sites constantly buffer and sometimes crash which has nothing to do with the setup as iplayer works fine, even in HD. Some of the services charge you to watch really old 80's films which aren't even in decent quality. One of the movie services (i forget which one) was trying to charge me to watch Back to the Future. When I clicked on the preview for it, it was in 4:3 format and it looked and sounded just like it had been taken off a really worn out VHS tape. As if i'd pay for that! Love Film seemed to be the only decent movie service which worked pretty well but you have to remember to cancel your subscription before the 30 days trial or they'll carry on charging you. It was the only movie service worth bothering with. I think if you're into watching a lot of films then it's probably well worth it but other than that, what's the point in smart tv?

YouTube is really not very good and takes forever to navigate with the on screen keyboard. Photos, videos and music stored on a memory stick take forever to load if they happen to be big files or high resolution images and there are far easier ways to listen to music than navigating an awkward on screen file system with a fiddley remote control only to listen to it through your tv.

In order to get Skype to work I have to buy a special webcam that's specific to my tv which they want to charge me about £40 for. There's no 4od, no ITV player and no 5 on demand, very disappointing. All of this I can get on my existing laptop without having to spend money on extra equipment not to mention you have to spend more to get a tv with smart capability in the first place. I can already get bbc iplayer, YouTube and Opera web browser built into my Nintendo wii which already has built in wi-fi so no need to buy expensive dongles or homeplugs. Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a second hand games consol instead? People are selling them all the time in the local paper.

Just seems a total waste of money for what seems to be a gimick and novelty and a way to get more money out of people for something which is mostly rubbish.

IMO, Smart tv doesn't appear to all that smart.
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Old 29-04-2012, 22:05
Peter the Great
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My dad took receipt of a new tv last week after having to spend an extra £49 on equipment to get internet to the tv as there's no built in wifi, it turns out that the only thing he can use it for is BBC iplayer. The built in aps are a total joke. Just cheap useless pointless things that some software developer couldn't possibly even give away for free let alone charge for. All of the movie services are subscription only which other than Love Film don't even work. Blinkbox for example and a couple of other movie sites constantly buffer and crash which has nothing to do with the setup as iplayer works fine even in HD. Some of the services charge you to watch really old 80's films which aren't even in decent quality. One of the movie services was trying to charge me to watch Back to the Future. When I clicked on the preview for it, it was in 4:3 format and it looked and sounded just like it had been taken off a really worn out VHS tape. As if i'd pay for that! Love Film seemed to be the only decent movie service which worked pretty well from the preview I watched and was the only one worth bothering with. I think if you're into watching a lot of films then it's probably well worth it but other than that, what's the point in smart tv? YouTube is really not very good and takes forever to navigate with the on screen keyboard and photos, videos and music stored on a memory stick take forever to load if they happen to be big files or high resolution images and there are far easier ways to listen to music than navigating an awkward on screen file system with a remote control only to listen to it through your tv.

In order to get Skype to work I have to buy a special webcam that's specific to my tv which they want to charge me about £40 for. There's no 4od, no ITV player and no 5 on demand. All of this I can get on my existing laptop without having to spend money on extra equipment not to mention you have to spend more to get a tv with smart capability in the first place. I can already get bbc iplayer, YouTube and web browser built into my Nintendo wii which already has built in wi-fi. Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a second hand games consol instead?

Just seems a total waste of money for what seems to be a novelty and a way to get more money out of people for something which is mostly rubbish.
What is the make and model of your TV? I have a Samsung and I don't have the problems you have. Blinkbox works fine (sure the picture is a bit rubbish). As for others well I find MUZU, Lovefilm, BBC i player and you tube videos work very well. I also find Absolute radio and a world radio APP very useful. As for catch up services other than i player well I know that 5 on Demand is available on Sony TV's but ITV player and 4OD sadly isn't available on any Smart TV.
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Old 29-04-2012, 22:36
noise747
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I don't even know why they are called smart TVs anyway as they are not smart.
I would not buy one to be honest, but then I got a PS3 which does what I want video wise online.

i know I don't use my TV as a Tv at the moment anyway, but i really don't want a TV that can throw targeted adverts at me if I ever did use it as a TV.

May have to think of getting a Tv in the next 6 months, then I expect I will have the TVL on at me again.
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Old 29-04-2012, 22:41
The Wizard
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The tv is a Samsung. It's not one of the ones with built in wifi or web browser which is something that my Nintendo wii has had for the last 4 years so not very up to date is it? Or perhaps it's just a way to get more money out of you.

After spending £49 on a set of homeplugs to hard wire the tv to the router, we found out that the only catch up service available was iplayer. Something which in our opinion wasn't worth spending £49 just to get. The aps are pointless and are filled with adverts so are really just an excuse to sell advertising space disguised as a free game or something.

I couldn't get Blinkbox to work at all. Every time it stops and buffers it plays an advert before resuming playback which you can't skip. As you can imagine this becomes very annoying when it stops and buffers every few seconds. In the end I gave up and turned it off as it was too frustrating to watch. My dad has 10mb broadband and everything else seemed to work just fine. It had no problem streaming hd content off iplayer so I can only assume it was the service not his setup.

I checked out the other movie services and a couple offered free stuff but it was all stuff you wouldn't want to watch like really bad quality 50 year old cartoons or really obscure films you've never heard of. They were even charging you to watch really old tv shows like Blackadder. When I checked out this one site it took me to a list of films which were really old and in order to watch them you had to sign up and pay a subscription for stuff which are regularly shown on itv2. Not only that but the quality sucked big time and a lot of the films I clicked on hadn't even been converted to widescreen. It was just as if they were being streamed off someone's old betamax video recorder.

Youtube is as you'd expect but it was the on screen navigation which made the experience very slow and painful.

The tv has a vga input so you can output video from a laptop so apart from the benefit of being able to watch high definition iplayer content, kind of seems like a waste of money paying for a dongle when that's pretty much all it's good for.

He'd have been far better off buying a second hand Nintendo wii with built in wifi, iplayer, youtube and opera browser and connecting that to the tv rather than paying the extra money for a smart tv which you then have to fork out extra just to get it connected to the internet. Altogether i'm highly disappointed.

On the blurb it said, 'watch catchup on demand tv like bbc iplayer.' which led me to believe that iplayer wasn't the only catchup or on demand service available. Turns out that it's the ONLY catch up service so rather misleading. Not only that but if you try to fast forward iplayer programmes it doesn't work properly and is very slow and jumpy and a few times i've tried this it's failed to resume playback so i've had to go back and start it over again. The built in iplayer service also has it's own volume control which overrides your tv volume on the remote. It's either too loud or not loud enough and I can't understand why you can't adjust the volume like you do on the tv. Instead you have 6 volume settings which go up in quite big jumps so you can never get the volume exactly how you like it. Again, if i'd connected a pc or games consol to my tv I wouldn't have this issue.

My advice for anyone looking to buy a new tv is simply just get a good quality tv and leave it at that. If you want online services then use external consol or pc and don't waste extra money paying for this built in rubbish.
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Old 29-04-2012, 23:25
Kodaz
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As far as I know, the modern flat-screen TV business is very competitive with many manufacturers hurting. You can understand why *they* would be keen on pushing gimmicky add-ons that differentiates them and looks nice on the spec sheet- and for which they can charge a premium (when the sort of electronics letting them do this are quite cheap nowadays).

Except that in practice they're not as good as they sound- as has been indicated here already- and there's often a limited selection of crappy services. (Talking of which, do the manufacturers get a cut of the proceeds from pay services accessed through their TVs? It wouldn't surprise me if they did- another way to make up the wafer-thin bottom line).

And even if this stuff works today, it's probably going to look very out-of-date within a couple of years. Is the company going to upgrade the integrated software (which they probably could if they wanted to)? Going by experience, I doubt it- I'm sure they'd rather you bought a new telly.

Stuff that- if I was bothered about all this, I'd rather have a nice, clean, no-nonsense telly and an external box that probably does it a lot better and can be easily replaced.
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Old 29-04-2012, 23:46
Winston_1
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After spending £49 on a set of homeplugs to hard wire the tv to the router, we found out that the only catch up service available was iplayer. Something which in our opinion wasn't worth spending £49 just to get.
If you are so dissatisfied take the homeplugs back. They are terrible things anyway that can cause interference to other radio users.
You could use this as a reason for the return as I bet they did tell you this.
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Old 30-04-2012, 00:14
The Wizard
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If you are so dissatisfied take the homeplugs back. They are terrible things anyway that can cause interference to other radio users.
You could use this as a reason for the return as I bet they did tell you this.
My dad thought about returning them but he's moving house in a few months and the house he's moving to doesn't have a phone socket in the spare bedroom so he's thinking of using them instead of paying to get a phone extension put in for his broadband so he's decided to keep them instead.

Homeplugs use your house's internal wireing to carry a wired signal from one plug to the next and can suffer from electrical interference and disrupt your internet signal but as far as i'm aware they don't CAUSE interference as they don't transmit a wireless signal because the signal is carried through the wires on your ringmain circuit.

I've never heard of them causing interference before.
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Old 30-04-2012, 01:08
Kodaz
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Homeplugs use your house's internal wireing to carry a wired signal from one plug to the next and can suffer from electrical interference and disrupt your internet signal but as far as i'm aware they don't CAUSE interference as they don't transmit a wireless signal because the signal is carried through the wires on your ringmain circuit.

I've never heard of them causing interference before.
Radio frequency interference has been a known issue for *years* in relation to power line networking. I don't know the exact mechanism (my physics knowledge is poor) but sending lots of high frequency signals down a power line like that causes it to radiate interference as a side effect, even if that isn't its intended purpose.

Another link:- scroll down to "Interfering with people" (*cough*)
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Old 30-04-2012, 07:53
XxBlaKOuTZxX
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I too own a Samsung smart. I certainly don't see it as a waste of £ but I like many others find it awkward to use the remote for inputting letters and numbers when using the web. That's the downside of it imo.

I don't use the apps that much either but at least with having BBC iPlayer, I now don't have to use my Humax to watch it so only have to have the tv switched on instead of both.

Perhaps, in the future, all large screen (40" and over) will be smart and have 3D capability.
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Old 30-04-2012, 12:35
ironjade
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Yes, a waste of time and money.
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Old 30-04-2012, 12:57
Lurch
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My dad thought about returning them but he's moving house in a few months and the house he's moving to doesn't have a phone socket in the spare bedroom so he's thinking of using them instead of paying to get a phone extension put in for his broadband so he's decided to keep them instead.
A phone extension would be cheaper than a set of homeplugs.

As for "smart" TV's, they're not. Maybe you should have used the internet before buying all this crap and actually researched what you were buying into rather than just stupidly believing the sales idiot in Currys. A stupid TV and a laptop would be better than the crippled and limited crap on smart TV's.
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Old 30-04-2012, 13:11
nvingo
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They're not worth it IMO there's far too much duplication of function now; Bluray players with iPlayer /youtube etc, Media streamers, HD PVRs/STBs, consoles etc.

Better for the screen to be just a dumb monitor with a single cord to a master tuner box with amplifier for the speakers and leave the individual functions to the connected devices.
Of course I'm describing a system Philips trialled 30 years ago (Matchline).
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Old 30-04-2012, 13:51
noise747
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They're not worth it IMO there's far too much duplication of function now; Bluray players with iPlayer /youtube etc, Media streamers, HD PVRs/STBs, consoles etc.

Better for the screen to be just a dumb monitor with a single cord to a master tuner box with amplifier for the speakers and leave the individual functions to the connected devices.
Of course I'm describing a system Philips trialled 30 years ago (Matchline).
That is what I want, a large screen monitor type thing without the price tag and with some semi decent speakers.

At the moment i got a Philips 42inch plasma, which I don't use as a TV now, just use it for my wii and PS3 to watch Netfliks and do what you normally do with the Wii and PS3.

My idea was to buy a nice large monitor at some point about the same size, if i decided to go back to watching TV, then I can stick the PVR back in place, I got two of them after all.

But the prices if you can find them are around the £800 mark or more.

if I go out and buy another TV when mine goes belly up I am going to have to tell them my name and address again just so they can send the info to the TVL who will once again come around to check.
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Old 30-04-2012, 21:11
neo_wales
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TV speakers are never are very good in my experience, whether its the cheapo 42" Bush in the bedroom or 60" Sony in the lounge. I've got the Sony plugged into an old but very good quality Quad brand amp and speakers, just stereo as the room layout is no good for anything fancy.
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Old 30-04-2012, 23:56
noise747
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TV speakers are never are very good in my experience, whether its the cheapo 42" Bush in the bedroom or 60" Sony in the lounge. I've got the Sony plugged into an old but very good quality Quad brand amp and speakers, just stereo as the room layout is no good for anything fancy.
The speakers in my Philips are very good indeed, maybe because there is enough room in the case to get a bit of base. A lot of LCD sets seems to be so thin and the speakers just got no space inside for the air to move.

My monitor speakers are useless mind you, a total waste of time.
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Old 01-05-2012, 11:20
Glawster2002
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As for "smart" TV's, they're not. Maybe you should have used the internet before buying all this crap and actually researched what you were buying into rather than just stupidly believing the sales idiot in Currys. A stupid TV and a laptop would be better than the crippled and limited crap on smart TV's.
I agree.

I think if you want to buy a TV buy a TV, if you want to surf the web buy a tablet or a laptop.

A TV is never going to replicate the online functionality of a laptop no matter how much the salesperson tells you it will.
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Old 01-05-2012, 11:37
stud u like
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I agree.

I think if you want to buy a TV buy a TV, if you want to surf the web buy a tablet or a laptop.

A TV is never going to replicate the online functionality of a laptop no matter how much the salesperson tells you it will.
I find internet television useful for showing more than one person a website.
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Old 01-05-2012, 11:40
Lurch
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I find internet television useful for showing more than one person a website.
Assuming the website works properly in the limited functionality browser in the TV. Again, laptop and HDMI\VGA cable.

Not saying you can;t show a website on an internet TV, just that that is not a reason to buy one or actually put this feature in a TV in the first place.
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Old 01-05-2012, 11:47
stafs
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I suppose the question is, would a TV without the smart stuff be any cheaper? When I bought my Sony Bravia a year ago, I couldn't really find an alternative that was much cheaper anyway so I don't feel I actually paid any extra for it. I can stream Love Film movies, watch iPlayer, YouTube and it also supports DLNA so I am able to stream movies from my computer to the TV, which is great for my kids especially for my Harry Potter mad daughter. There is also a lot of rubbish on it which I never really look at, but I don't feel I've wasted my money.

However, I then bought a Sony bluray player which also could do almost everything the TV could which does seem a little ridiculous but again, I'm not sure how much the extra features really add to the price.

In short, if smart TVs did not exist, I would bet the standard price of a TV would be about the same so you might as well treat it as a bonus which you can ignore if you want.
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Old 01-05-2012, 12:01
Glawster2002
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I find internet television useful for showing more than one person a website.
I have a notebook PC connected via HDMI cable to my AV Amp with my TV as the monitor, so I have full PC functionality which I find much more useful.
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Old 01-05-2012, 12:14
Lurch
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I suppose the question is, would a TV without the smart stuff be any cheaper? When I bought my Sony Bravia a year ago, I couldn't really find an alternative that was much cheaper anyway so I don't feel I actually paid any extra for it.
You're not specifically paying for the extra services, but you are paying. These things aren;t developed and fitted for free by the manufacturers. Yes you would be hard pushed to find a TV without some degree of value added crap these days for much more than one without but that doesn;t mean the cost isn;t in there somewhere.
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Old 01-05-2012, 13:35
bobcar
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You're not specifically paying for the extra services, but you are paying. These things aren;t developed and fitted for free by the manufacturers. Yes you would be hard pushed to find a TV without some degree of value added crap these days for much more than one without but that doesn;t mean the cost isn;t in there somewhere.
The hardware for this all exists in the TV or Blu-ray player anyway so does not add cost (maybe the TV wouldn't have Ethernet but that is cheap). What is extra is the software development cost but that is averaged over a lot of sets and so is not very much.

There will be a slight premium in adding these extras but it is small and once they are there it is much cheaper just to have them as standard than have some sets without them so specifically excluding them would cost more.
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Old 02-05-2012, 14:43
slyfox51
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Smart TV's are a waste of money and a gimmick that will soon die out hopefully.
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Old 02-05-2012, 14:55
skinj
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Smart TVs are not a gimmick, nor were TVs with Teletext, Nicam sound, Widescreen etc.
If you are buying TV, & paying extra specifically for the Smart TV, you should check exactly what it can do first. If it doesn't do what you want it to do, either don't buy it, or accept that as it's a higher end model it will probably be higher spec on the pq too.
There are features on all smart TV's that some people will ask "what's the point" where as others will say "exactly what I wanted my TV to do".
Skype, iPlayer,You Tube, Netflix & Love Film seem to be the features that excite most people as they are suited to big screen viewing from the comfort of your sofa.
At the end of the day it's here and will stay here and improve over time. If you don't want to use the services, or have them covered by another device so be it, just don't say they are pointless and shouldn't be there when a lot of people get a lot of use and pleasure from them.
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Old 02-05-2012, 16:07
David (2)
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I wrote this on another tread, kinda backs up what the OP has found out.

indeed, a very crippled pc built into a Smart tv is no more than the heart of a mobile phone scaled up a bit.

You will likely own the tv far longer than the built in tech remains current. My thinking is that new web features to come after you buy a Smart tv could easily make them incompatible with the tv.

There will as it stands now, no way to upgrade the built in pc, though with *card slots* this could change in the future. The best built in system would have all its Smart stuff on a user card which you could swap out for a newer version later on for say £99.

I also would be quite concerned about the auto-updates nature, resulting in some sort of 10min wait after starting up the tv as posted above.

When you look at the cost of such a tv, say £600, only a fraction is spent on the Smart part.

A STB would be better - at least the system is then modular. So if it becomes obsolete or breaks down, you can simply replace it and you are not left without tv for 2 weeks. A STB should have better specification out the box too, as the whole purchase price of it is spent on the tech (apart from plastics etc), so i would expect a better user experience as a result of faster speeds, more memory, more features, etc. Apart from replacing said STB, i would hope that in the future upgrade cards can be used to boost speeds and memory of outgoing models etc, but i doubt this will happen.

A variation on the STB route is to built it into new digital-tv boxes, like for sky, freeview, fresat, & cable. We already have a few bits like BBC iPlayer, but even at this early stage it is well known that the PC version is far better. And building Smart tv into a digital tv box means less money is being spent on the Smart part (unless they charge a foruture for it, in which case nobody will buy it), and its built in. If one part becomes obsolete or fails, it takes the other part with it.

With a Smart tv or STB device you are limited to the input method, for typing you need a proper keyboard and mouse (or at min a trackpad). TXT type input or virtual visual keyboards are slow to use. I certainly wouldnt consider such methods in a web site such as this one.

The best experience is from a pc connected to a tv. It is the fastest, most modular, most upgradeable, and has a keyboard and mouse. It is designed for all aspects of the internet which makes it the clear winner in my mind.
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