However, I disagree that there is fundamental value in built-in TV software supplanting third-party devices. That is, unless a software company is making the software.

I have a Roku, and built-in software from Sony on a blu-ray player (on separate TVs). The Roku is so much better that it's painful to use the TV without it:

- The buffering is much worse on the Sony. When it switches between ads and the video it takes several seconds to rebuffer.

- The delay between menus is measured in seconds, while the Roku is almost instantaneous

- It's almost like Sony didn't even have one UX designer working on their project. It will do idiotic things like when Hulu opens, create a modal dialog that says "The internet content is ready" and I must click OK to proceed.

- The remote and other menus are slow and hard to decipher just like you'd expect from built-in software.

The point is that building the user experience of a video client is not trivial. I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company will never do a good job at that kind of thing.

The Roku is a world of difference and until a company like that is building the built-in software, the mainstream of the market will be in third-party devices.

No, but "Sony" have done it before and it's been fine. PS3. (I've not tried the PS4's media player.)

>I can't even blame Sony, really -- a non-software company

Sony Vegas? ACID? Sound Forge? Sony is not short of software production, "Sony Creative Software" makes a few software products most people here would have heard of. Not to mention SCE, they've made quite a bit of software and no-doubt have some UI engineers.

They bought every single one of those, from Vegas and from Sonic Foundry, Sony was not responsible for their design or creation. The UIs were AFAIK fully in place before Sony ever owned them, though I am sure some changes have been made.

It might even surprise you that Belkin and Dlink don't design or manufacture their own hardware or software.

This really sounds like a design failure + rushed development. It sounds like the sort of thing that you would throw in during rapid development with the idea to replace it later, only it never ends up on a TODO list, and there is no one looking at the 'big picture' to make sure that these things are caught.

For example, you can pair your TV with your phone or computer, and then use the device to navigate Youtube but the TV to display videos.

This is also what Netflix increasingly does (Hulu Plus and Pandora too).

If a smart TV or set top box has a good version of WebKit embedding in it and uses html5 rather than embedded versions of code, they can stay up to date much better. Samsung's newest TVs are designed this way, but there might be a provision check for the Samsung website as was the case in this thread, which is just bs.

The problem was the first two generations of "smart TV"software were highly proprietary embedded systems with custom apps from a service. It took 7 years, but most have moved to html5.

You do still run into hybrid solutions. Even the Roku3 and TiVo Roamio have html5 for some apps and custom old-ass shit for others.

For the fire TV, Amazon uses html5 for its own apps but android apps for other services (except YouTube, who doesn't offer its app outside of google play, so it's the html5 version Roku and some of the TVs use). In that case, I wish for companies with great html5 solutions for those with them (pandora, Netflix, Hulu Plus)

The problem with "smart TV" is that it's inherently a conflict of interest. It would be great if Samsung sold a TV with SamsungOS on it and if I don't like it or they stop supporting it I could easily replace it with Android or Ubuntu, but they don't sell that. Because they want to spam your TV with ads and force you to buy a new one on their schedule.

It's obvious why they want to sell it that way. It's not obvious why anyone should want to buy it that way.

The same is true of AppleTV, playstation, xbox and every game console in existence. Some of this is obviously hardware based, but a lot of it is about differentiation. CableCard has existed for at least a decade now, but good luck trying to get your cable company to admit it. Every single one of these guys wants you to stay in their particular ecosystem, and "smart" TV is just another ecosystem Samsung wants you to buy into with the associated limitations -- either introduced by Samsung or the other vendors (lockout).

What people really need is better integration between all the devices they hook to their TV. It's bizarre (but like I said, not totally unexpected) that a consumer electronics device is so hard to use that way compared to a radically more complex personal computer (plug most usb devices from a big box store into a mac or pc and it'll just work for its intended purposes without a hassle nowadays).

One way to accomplish that is to shove all the functionality into one device, but as I mentioned above, it doesn't actually work except for a few limited cases. Honestly, the closest you get to a true "smart" experience is a top-end harmony remote -- and that's obviously not that close at all.

My basic objection to smart tv is that I have the same experience using a harmony remote, it adds nothing. And the smart features are virtually guaranteed to whither away long before the actual tv outlives its usefulness. It's like the digital channel tuner on the same set -- useful in odd circumstances, but practically useless having long been long surpassed by cable tv.

That may or may not be the case depending on the company and/or the strategy the person in charge at the time is pursuing. One CEO might completely agree with your strategy and make sure all old models are supported, another might just care about how many new TVs sold he can tell the shareholders. Then there are companies going out of business or being acquired and the acquiring company not caring about supporting any models made by the acquired company.

4 year old Sony TVs have internet services that still work fine, I like not turning on the PS3 with fan noise and power consumption, I like not buying an extra box and needing to manage an extra remote and interface. I record TV on a MythTV box and I like watching it over DLNA using the TV's decoder and scaler which are better than those provided out of the box by MythFrontend. Yes it may fail at some time in the future but for the $13 or so added to the BOM (for Wifi which I don't actually use) it is a definite win for me even if it stops working tomorrow and I need to get an extra box or rely on the PS3.

(Shrug) They could always focus on making the best TV display they possibly can, and see how that works out for them. Nobody asked them to build the next-generation WebTV.