smart tv

A What Hi-Fi writer just went public with the argument we have all had here for years: he let his Bravia 8 II take an automatic firmware update and now half his system is out of action. The symptom is oddly specific. Anything arriving through an external source, his Apple TV 4K or a Sky Stream...

There is a piece at ecoustics arguing the television is absorbing work that used to belong to the receiver, and I think it is right about who it actually affects. Nobody running an Anthem with seven passive speakers and four ceiling channels is unplugging anything this year. The person being...

The Dolby Vision 2 update has actually started landing on Hisense sets. The 6 August announcement lists UX, UR9, UR8 and U7, and it works whether your set runs Google TV or VIDAA, which is not nothing given Hisense uses different platforms in different regions. Rollout runs for weeks by region...

Since the redesign started rolling out in late May this keeps coming up, so here is the short answer: Roku does not give you a way back. Once the new home screen lands on your set or player, the old app grid is gone. What you do get is a handful of settings that let you switch off most of what...

Australia's ABC has pushed four free ad-supported channels into LG Channels on webOS this week, no account and no subscription needed. Which ones you get depends entirely on where you live. The UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Singapore get the full set: ABC...

Roku OS 15.3 has started landing on some Roku TVs even though Roku still lists the release as a developer beta under NDA, with no public release note and no timeline for the wider rollout. It surfaced through a reader tip rather than any announcement, which is a strange way to ship software to...

Epson has said select Lifestudio projectors running MediaTek's smart platform will pick up Google TV with Gemini through a firmware update, with the Lifestudio Grand first in the coming months and other models following through 2026. The pitch is conversational search instead of menu diving, one...

Someone over on AVForums is stuck in a loop I have seen a few times now. New LG 50UA8550, ThinQ installed on a Samsung S21 Ultra, TV and phone both registered to the same LG account, all working. Then something small went wrong, they reinstalled the app, and now selecting that same LG account at...

The Hisense update went out today and it covers the UX, UR9, UR8 and the U7 - U7 Pro if you are in Europe - running either Google TV or VIDAA. North America, Europe and APAC all at once, over the air. Hisense beat TCL to it, and TCL plus European Philips are supposed to follow later this year...

Engadget ran a reminder piece on this and it is worth repeating here because it catches people every single year. New televisions frequently ship with store or demo mode already enabled, including sets bought online that never sat on a shelf under a single fluorescent tube. The mode cranks the...

A date has landed for Gears of War: E-Day, October 6, and every time a big console exclusive gets a hard date the same threads start up about whether the TV needs replacing first. I have been through this cycle enough times to have a view on it. The features that actually change how a game like...

FlatpanelsHD has updated its QMS support list again and the only note is that more brands now support it. Nobody is shouting about this, manufacturers included, which is a shame, because QMS is one of the few HDMI 2.1 features that changes something you run into every single evening. Quick...

LG has put out a release saying LG Channels is past 5,000 channels globally and into a 37th country after the Poland rollout. Two of the ones that pushed it over the line in the US are called All Chewed Up and World Pup, which tells you roughly what the 5,000th channel looks like. Channel count...

The detail that got me in the Mnemonic write-up isn't that Samsung TV apps were reselling residential bandwidth. It's which app. A Pac-Man game that Samsung itself had put in the Editor's Choice row. Not something sideloaded, not a sketchy IPTV player you had to go hunting for. The store's own...

Magnat's Monitor Reference 5A is a pair of powered stereo floorstanders with HDMI ARC on board, pitched at GBP 759, and the review frames it as the question I keep coming back to: why is a soundbar the default answer for TV audio when a pair of active speakers costs about the same and actually...

July 24 marked thirteen years since the original Chromecast landed, which sent me rummaging for mine. Thirty five dollars, a stick about the size of a USB drive, micro-USB for power, 1080p ceiling, and no remote at all - your phone was the remote. That last part was the actual idea, and it is...

KrebsOnSecurity ran a piece this week that I have not stopped thinking about. Security firm Spur went through the LG webOS app store and found that more than 42 percent of the apps there ship with an SDK that quietly turns the TV into a residential proxy node. Not obscure sideloaded junk either...

The other half of Google's CES pitch for Google TV is generative work running on the television itself. Gemini searching your Google Photos library for a specific person or moment, Photos Remix applying artistic styles to your pictures, memories turned into what Google calls cinematic immersive...

Buried in Google's CES announcement is the thing I actually want to argue about. You'll be able to tell Gemini that the screen is too dim, or that the dialogue is lost, and it will adjust picture and sound for you without opening a settings menu. Those two phrases are Google's own examples...

Google is bolting sports briefs onto Gemini on Google TV. The pitch is narrated catch-up on whatever league you follow, starting with the NBA, NCAA basketball, NHL, MLB, MLS and NWSL, sitting in the Gemini tab on the home screen. It builds on the news briefs they added last year, and it landed...