Comment by tete

Turn on TV: 3 seconds

Roku boots: 10 seconds

Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds

Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)

Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds

Select profile: 3 seconds

Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in

Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)

Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds

Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)

And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.

At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).

I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway. What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that. So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).

That sounds like you have an overly shitty ‘smart’ TV. Plenty of external devices (I’m partial to AppleTV) have no significant lag.

Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.

This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...

I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.

The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.

I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).

And not always anything to do with the TV.

I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.

Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).

I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).

I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.

I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.

As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.

I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.

When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.

These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.

This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs as well for me.

Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.

This is definitely due to the age/quality/model of the TV. I have 4 LG TVs across the house and the newest/biggest is 100x faster than the oldest.

Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.

Do you remember analog TVs? Switching channels was a sub second affair.

Hey, trying to change the source of my monitor from HDMI-1 to DisplayPort takes 30 seconds.

10-20 seconds? What TV are you using?

I uninstalled google launcher and shitty Xiaomi apps in my Mi TV stick using ADB and switched to F-Launcher. Can't be happier with the performance.

Modern TV, yeah. TVs from 15 years ago were waaaay faster than smart TVs. Ridiculous.

When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem, I called and threatened to cancel.

Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure out the rest, thank you.

Our Samsung running Tizen has the obnoxious need to check if antenna-based broadcasting is available, every single time you open the settings menu.

It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.

Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.

It is time for a new TV!

People are replying that OP must own an old TV, but that's missing the point: with very old non-smart TVs, menu commands were always instantaneous!

Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?

The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.

They read it but vice versa.

When Logitech announced they were stopping making them, I bought 3 new Logitech Harmony remotes. I'm on my last one! I don't know what I am going to do after that one dies :-(

I always find it amusing when I see a toddler knows to press skip ad on YouTube.

This kid is only 3. I doubt that he is old enough to navigate the complex on-screen menus, while taking the delays and other puzzling behaviors into account. This is not to say that young kids are stupid. But the modern device interfaces often feel like a pile of random hacks, rather than something based on the sane and well established design principles that were formulated on the basis of experience and human psychology.

When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.

The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.

I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.

To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.

This, 100%.

I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).

Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.

With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.

UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.

When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.

It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.

My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays). I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and channel down a damned TV any more.

Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-CEC) you can control everything with one remote.

From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection.

Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".

I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.

If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).

[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).

For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.

> you need their box.

This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.