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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

100% disagree.

The difference is that a Roku or Fire Stick is $50 or less. If I need to upgrade my device to support a new compression standard or something, it's only $50 to replace, rather than needing to buy a whole new TV.

It's definitely more practical to buy a dumb TV and connect a streaming device, especially when smart TVs value their smart functionality at a couple hundred dollars.

I'd far rather buy a dumb OLED for $1500 and connect a $50 Fire Stick than buy a $2000 OLED with smart features, if it was an option.

Seriously, what's the benefit for having all that built into your TV?

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The benefit should be completely obvious. Having a single integrated system is always going to be more reliable than running 2 separate machines that need to cooperate. Otherwise every issue needs to be isolated to the TV, the streaming device, or the connection between the two.

Also hand waving about "new codecs" doesn't hold any weight. A Roku/Fire/Google TV is a Linux computer with hardware acceleration for all modern codecs. By the time AV1/VP9/H265 are being replaced in the 2030s, you're going to need a new TV anyway to support 8K and whatever other features are de rigueur then. Same goes for audio codecs and Wifi support.

> 2 separate machines that need to cooperate

It's just a simple display cable like HDMI. Not really a lot of cooperation needed.

> Also hand waving about "new codecs" doesn't hold any weight

Fair, but trying to watch a streaming service on a smart TV and being told "This device will not support X service after Y date" has happened.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/these-old-devices-are-about-t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hulu/comments/xvaqqm/this_device_no...

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00006zSxAMSA0/sm...

> "This device will not support X service after Y date" has happened.

Again, that's a symptom of shitty manufacturer firmware, it's a burden on streaming services to support these devices because they are the ones that have to maintain software packages for hundreds of different TV models.

In contrast, Fire/GoogleTV OS are built on Android, so streaming networks don't need to support individual TV models, they just have to target supported versions of Fire/GoogleTV OS. Android has APIs to handle Smart TV functionality.

> Again, that's a symptom of shitty manufacturer firmware, it's a burden on streaming services to support these devices because they are the ones that have to maintain software packages for hundreds of different TV models.

That's exactly my point.

I operate under the assumption that my TV will have shitty firmware. Always has been shitty, always will be shitty.

So rather than relegate the shittiness to a $1500+ device that will be very expensive to replace if/when the software becomes obsolete, I'd put the burden of shittiness to a $50 device that I don't mind upgrading as necessary.

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