Brought to you by Primus - a smart choice for your Internet and Home Phone services.
The vast majority of TVs sold in the North American market are now smart TVs. In fact, it’s becoming sort of pointless to say smart TV, since it can be fairly assumed that when you say TV, you mean a smart TV. But TVs without any of the smart TV functionality -- dumb TVs -- still exist, and you may even want one. Here’s why.
What Exactly Is a Dumb TV?
Well, if a smart TV connects to the internet and has an operating system and onboard features that let you stream, then a dumb TV has none of that. There’s no home screen, there’s no operating system that looks like your phone, there are no apps, you don’t have to hook it up to the internet, you couldn’t hook it up to the internet even if you wanted to, and you never have to update it. A dumb TV is what TVs were before the advent of smart TVs, but now that’s notable enough that they get their own word.
So that leaves the question: why would you want one?
Everything Else Is Smart
Believe it or not, we’d wager most people buying dumb TVs aren’t technology-averse. The reality is, most of the other devices you use with your TV are already smart, so why bother paying extra money for features you already have? We know people who stream via their game consoles, Chromecast, Firestick, AppleTV, and more. So why pay more money for a smart TV that lets you run the Netflix app on its home screen—and has a special little Netflix button on its remote—if you were just going to run Netflix from your PS5 anyway?
Privacy
Your TV isn’t spying on you in the sense that it’s sending transcripts of your conversations to your government, but it is monitoring your usage and selling that data. If you don’t want your habits to be sold, you might not want a smart TV (but realistically, companies will find data about you in other ways).
Advertising
Are you sick of your TV home screen advertising to you? Ads are a big part of most digital ecosystems, so if you’d like to avoid them, you might have to opt for a TV that doesn’t have digital display ads.
Security
Smart TVs aren’t inherently insecure or anything, but every additional device you add to your network is another potential point of failure. So, you might want to cut down on your devices if you’re worried about security.
Network Stability
We’ve written about how Wi-Fi 6 is very cool in that it allows eight simultaneous transmissions at a time to eight devices (versus four for Wi-Fi 5) and has hundreds of subcarriers so it can connect to dozens of devices. But why does newer Wi-Fi do that? Because our networks are growing. Households have more and more devices connecting at the same time. This is one (of many) causes of latency and jitter, and if you don’t have enough bandwidth for all these devices, your internet usage suffers.
This is a small point, but why add a smart TV to the network if you don’t have to? If you’re already streaming off another device connected to your TV, why add a smart TV to the network too, regularly shaking hands with your router and occasionally requiring updates?
Obsolete Software
If you had a 2011 Samsung TV, you got a rude surprise in 2019 when Netflix was no longer supported on your TV. Why? Well, like anything else that runs on software, smart TVs need to be updated, and sometimes companies stop updating them. Perhaps you’ve had an old computer that required you to install a new OS because your applications wouldn’t work on the old one. Well, the same thing happens to old smart TVs—except that you sometimes can’t just upgrade the OS. You’re stuck with a TV that no longer does the thing you want.
Why bother going through that, especially if there are more convenient ways to stream?
Can You Even Buy a Dumb TV?
Yes. There are actually plenty of dumb TVs on the market—big 55-inch 4K TVs that have everything you want from a TV, just no software. If you do your streaming from another device, and if you care about things like privacy and advertising, you just might want a dumb TV in your life.
