Barry Collins reveals the truth about smart TVs and why they’re a waste of money
Smart television. It’s a phrase as incongruous as “nutritious Big Mac” or “charismatic Piers Morgan”. There’s nothing smart about a television, no matter what the likes of Samsung, Philips or LG tell you. At least, not for long.
These days it’s actually pretty tough to buy a big, living-room flat screen that doesn’t claim to be smarter than Stephen Hawking. They come with apps, browsers, voice recognition and more ports than an off licence in the Algarve. Unbox the telly, and the first thing it demands is your Wi-Fi password and three hours to download the latest updates. You didn’t want to watch Coronation Street now, did you?
Once you’ve got the latest firmware, it’s all gravy for the first year or so. You can watch BBC iPlayer without reaching for the laptop, and watch YouTube videos of cats falling off skateboards on the big screen. Then, one day, things start to fall apart. The manufacturer gets bored of your television – it’s made another 234 models since that one landed on the shelves at John Lewis, so it stops updating the software and its apps stop working.
Last month, Google pulled the plug on an “old” API (technical term for a software protocol) that was used to power the YouTube apps on untold millions of smart televisions sold before 2013. Just killed it dead. If you now go to the YouTube app on one of those sets, all you’ll see is the internet equivalent of the Test Card. There’s almost no chance of your manufacturer upgrading a three-, four- or five-year-old telly to the latest version of YouTube, not least because the TV’s probably not powerful enough to cope with it. In the space of a couple of years, your state-of-the-art smart TV has become dumber than taking a bath with your toaster.
Paying extra for smart features on a television is like setting fire to your wallet. It’s far wiser to get the “smart” features for your TV from plug-in dongles or set-top boxes. The recently launched Amazon Fire TV Stick gives you iPlayer, Netflix, YouTube, and a basic set of games for only £35 on a tiny dongle that you probably won’t even see sticking out of your TV. Google’s £30 Chromecast does likewise, and you can stream content to it from your Android or iOS phone or tablet. Yes, these devices will also stop being updated eventually and shuffle towards obsolescence, but they only cost a few quid and when something better comes along, you can replace it. Unless you’ve got a Master’s degree in electronics and are handy with a soldering iron, you won’t be replacing the “smart” components inside your TV screen anytime soon.
Then only thing you should be looking for when buying a new television is getting the best possible picture quality for your budget. The clever bits can be plugged into the HDMI ports, whether it’s a Sky+ box, an Apple TV or the cheap Amazon and Google dongles. Televisions have become too clever for their own good. And ours.