A dumb TV that is just a monitor and your choice of STB. Our house has an AppleTV as HDMI1 on all devices and a HD HomeRun in the server rack to broadcast LiveTV over the network.
Other people have similar setups using Raspberry Pi’s running various HTPC packages, which I can recommend for those people who aren’t interested in Apple products.
No one should ever need to purchase a FireStick, Roku or Google Home thingy and no one should ever connect their TV directly to their Home Network.
JokeDeity, Thankyou for your support, despite our idealogical differences. This is why I love Lemmy and Mastodon over Reddit and others.
I personally don’t hate Apple, I do see a lot of things that are wrong with their platforms, but I don’t see solutions to these problems in other commercial platforms either , except for the open platforms.
The broadcast freeTV electronic program guide (EPG) on my current TV is trash. It’s clear they only cared about big corporate apps (that paid to get dedicated branded buttons on the remote).
Squint to see the tiny text (probably because it was designed & tested on a non-4K tv)
You have to visit the channels first for the EPG to populate for them.
There is no line to denote your current position in time on the chart. Instead you have to read the (tiny) time at the top right, then guesstimate its position on the chart, then look down.
My decade+ old Samsung plasma is so much better; but it wasn’t a “smart” tv, so broadcast TV was its tea.
(Of course this still doesn’t fix the fact the “apps” are buggy and slow. Already had the TV warrantied and parts replaced once because of some of them going black and white. I have no idea how such as weird problem could manifest OR how the solution was to exchange hardware components)
You’re probably using the FreeTV/pbbtv guide. Turn that shit off.
You have to visit the channels first for the EPG to populate for them.
Unless your tv has dual tuners, which most don’t because $, or use an internet connection to populate the TV guide, that’s how digital TV guides work. Remember the analog TV guides? Yeah. You had to go and buy a paper…
Alternatively, you can visit any of dozens of online tv guide websites and get heaps more info with links to imdb etc for info and ratings. I don’t even know why TV epgs are a thing…
Unless your tv has dual tuners, which most don’t because $, or use an internet connection to populate the TV guide, that’s how digital TV guides work.
Some TVs will sweep through the channels populating the EPG while the TV is ‘off’ or store EPG data it received earlier, so as long as it’s been plugged in recently it’ll have a reasonably up to date EPG data right away.
I guess the argument is if your TV is going to come preloaded with subscription crap to provide easier access, then taxpayer funded “local” content should be just as easy to access. I think it’s a fair decision to have ABC iView, maybe SBS. God, can you imagine SkyNews coming preinstalled. Ugh.
However, the order of tiles is left up to the manufacturer – and, importantly, users are free to delete or move the tiles as they wish. So ultimate control of the device still rests with the user.
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