A family history of smart TV.

A survey of my loft reveals a story from more TV to smart TV. blog.mindrocketnow.com

In my last post, I came to the not really surprising conclusion that the intervening years between Mum’s last TV and her current has brought vast improvements. It’s a feature of technology that it advances at a breakneck speed. But it’s also a feature of technology, that the rapid pace of advancement isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how to use it. Let me illustrate with a personal history of smart TV.

My history with smartening TV probably starts with TiVo. Once you realise that you aren’t tied to a schedule, there’s no going back. TiVo showed that not only could I watch what I wanted whenever I wanted, thanks to its accurate recommendations service, I could also watch things I didn’t know I wanted to watch too.

However, TiVo in the UK was hamstrung by lack of channels, at least on good-old analogue terrestrial. So I got cable. I also chose a cable box with a hard drive to reduce the box count, but no TiVo recommendations meant that I had to choose what to record myself. This turned out to be limited by my own experiences, with little discovery of new content.

When iPlayer came along, with its presentation of a range of BBC programming, this made content discovery a bit easier. However, I could only watch on a computer, which could be hooked into the TV with the right cable, but was far from an integrated experience.

The Wii was my first under-TV device to enable smart TV functions through its implementation of the Opera browser, and BBC’s TV-resolution iPlayer site. The picture was soft, and there was some buffer lag, but I could now control iPlayer with a wiimote, albeit a different remote from the TV. Once booted, it was now simple enough for DD1 to navigate at the age of 3. However, the quality was unsatisfying, and couldn’t compete with PVR recordings.

When we upgraded TVs to an HD panel, smart functions still weren’t built in, so I installed a Mac Mini as my do-it-all under-TV box.  It almost did everything: iPlayer, YouTube, DVDs (Apple still doesn’t believe in blu ray). The only thing it didn’t do was to receive and record Freeview HD, for which I’d have to wait for a USB DVB-T2 tuner stick.

In the interim we decided to ditch cable and switch to Freeview. I got a Freeview HD box, chosen because it was upgradeable via software update. And upgrade I did, adding a hard drive when PVR functionality was enabled, and hooking up to the home cinema amp when Dolby Digital PCM output was enabled through another software update. And a third update brought iPlayer and YouTube to its portal feature. This was a much more satisfying experience than the Wii version from many years back, and so I actually used it.

Over the last few years, I’ve amassed quite the collection of little boxes that deliver TV via the Internet. Apple TV, Now TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV all sit under my TV and I’ve run out of HDMI sockets. The Mac Mini has been displaced and has now become a desktop computer for actual work. This has revolutionised what I watch – I hardly every bother to walk the length of the lounge to get a blu ray any more.

The current generation of smart TVs do all of the things that my setup does, but instead of 6 boxes under the TV, it’s all within the smart TV. The TV industry feels like it’s finally matured from early adopter to mainstream, by increasing functionality yet decreasing complexity. Consequently, the loft of the early adopter is littered with discarded, but ever improving little boxes.

A survey of my loft reveals a story from more TV to smart TV. blog.mindrocketnow.com

In my last post, I came to the not really surprising conclusion that the intervening years between Mum’s last TV and her current has brought vast improvements. It’s a feature of technology that it advances at a breakneck speed. But it’s also a feature of technology, that the rapid pace of advancement isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how to use it. Let me illustrate with a personal history of smart TV.

My history with smartening TV probably starts with TiVo. Once you realise that you aren’t tied to a schedule, there’s no going back. TiVo showed that not only could I watch what I wanted whenever I wanted, thanks to its accurate recommendations service, I could also watch things I didn’t know I wanted to watch too.

However, TiVo in the UK was hamstrung by lack of channels, at least on good-old analogue terrestrial. So I got cable. I also chose a cable box with a hard drive to reduce the box count, but no TiVo recommendations meant that I had to choose what to record myself. This turned out to be limited by my own experiences, with little discovery of new content.

When iPlayer came along, with its presentation of a range of BBC programming, this made content discovery a bit easier. However, I could only watch on a computer, which could be hooked into the TV with the right cable, but was far from an integrated experience.

The Wii was my first under-TV device to enable smart TV functions through its implementation of the Opera browser, and BBC’s TV-resolution iPlayer site. The picture was soft, and there was some buffer lag, but I could now control iPlayer with a wiimote, albeit a different remote from the TV. Once booted, it was now simple enough for DD1 to navigate at the age of 3. However, the quality was unsatisfying, and couldn’t compete with PVR recordings.

When we upgraded TVs to an HD panel, smart functions still weren’t built in, so I installed a Mac Mini as my do-it-all under-TV box.  It almost did everything: iPlayer, YouTube, DVDs (Apple still doesn’t believe in blu ray). The only thing it didn’t do was to receive and record Freeview HD, for which I’d have to wait for a USB DVB-T2 tuner stick.

In the interim we decided to ditch cable and switch to Freeview. I got a Freeview HD box, chosen because it was upgradeable via software update. And upgrade I did, adding a hard drive when PVR functionality was enabled, and hooking up to the home cinema amp when Dolby Digital PCM output was enabled through another software update. And a third update brought iPlayer and YouTube to its portal feature. This was a much more satisfying experience than the Wii version from many years back, and so I actually used it.

Over the last few years, I’ve amassed quite the collection of little boxes that deliver TV via the Internet. Apple TV, Now TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV all sit under my TV and I’ve run out of HDMI sockets. The Mac Mini has been displaced and has now become a desktop computer for actual work. This has revolutionised what I watch – I hardly every bother to walk the length of the lounge to get a blu ray any more.

The current generation of smart TVs do all of the things that my setup does, but instead of 6 boxes under the TV, it’s all within the smart TV. The TV industry feels like it’s finally matured from early adopter to mainstream, by increasing functionality yet decreasing complexity. Consequently, the loft of the early adopter is littered with discarded, but ever improving little boxes.

The price of early adoption is hidden behind the TV