(Image credit: Shutterstock / Tero Vesalainen)
Once upon a time, you turned on a TV and it was just… on. If you watched an episode of “Seinfeld” the night before, you might've found your TV still tuned to NBC the following morning. There was no home screen between you and your shows, and if you were confronted with an advertisement, it was because NBC happened to be running a commercial at that moment.I’ve been testing and reviewing TVs for over 12 years, and while I’m not that old, my memories of a time before smart TVs are starting to fade. I’ve watched my tiny living room ecosystem accumulate litter — like a bug in a jar with a leaf, stick and increasingly bigger piles of discarded candy wrappers. Worse, it seems like the folks in charge of the jar are watching my every move and selling off the data to a bug-squashing company.It’s not just the cheap TVs, either — the worst aspects of the best TVs I review usually relate to the user experience. Can anything be done about this? Are we destined to be forever bummed out by our TVs?The internet is (mostly) to blame
(Image credit: Future)Ask yourself this: What percentage of my movie- and show-watching experience is made possible by the web? For me, the answer is close to 100%.I’m a big-time advocate for indoor antennas and over-the-air broadcasting. Plenty of people still pipe-in TV shows by way of a cable box. But in 2026, internet-based streaming dominates, and brands are acutely aware of how this all shakes out.Why would LG, Samsung or any TV manufacturer move away from the smart TV business model? Viewers want to watch “The Bear” on Hulu and “The Mandalorian” on Disney Plus. “Seinfeld” is on Netflix now and NBC puts its newest slate of programming on Peacock (starting at $7.99 with ads).And then there’s the data collection. As is the case with seemingly every other aspect of our lives, we — the viewers — are just as much of a product as the TVs themselves.Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.Want to learn more?Streaming apps catalogue what we watch, what we skip and when we skip it. Netflix is anything but transparent about how it measures viewership, but its — ahem — somewhat lofty figures are nevertheless bandied about in business earnings calls.If you own a relatively new Samsung TV, you're probably sick and tired of the brand's free streaming service automatically booting up every time you turn on the TV. When I yearn to return to the halcyon days of a TV powering on, being forced to stomach Samsung TV Plus is not what I had in mind, but what incentive is there for Samsung not to immediately funnel the viewer into an experience they very likely stand to profit from?In other words, we're stuck. Smart TVs have made streaming more accessible than ever and the era of streaming has made it critical for brands to cater to the streaming lifestyle.More software = more slowdown
