Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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