by gyulai | 2025-10-03 13:32:12+00:00
> What's better?

I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible.

I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day.

I put desktop Linux on the PC with KDE plasma (avoiding Kodi, which, somehow, consistently attracts me but then annoys and frustrates me whenever I actually use it) and Brave.

I cranked up the scaling factor in KDE, and made a tiny tweak so KDE won't ask for superuser passwords and passwords on wallet access.

The browser is the only app I ever use on that thing, although it also has a DVD drive and VLC, and I copied my film collection onto the local disk of that thing.

I logged into all the media platforms I pay for (and the free ones I frequently use) and made an HTML file that links to all of them, using a huge font size, and setting it as home in the browser.

It cost me $0 (considering all the recycling), and it's a better experience than anything that money will buy.

I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.

Last time I tried, I found that the VOD platforms I care about have their respective best implementations in their Desktop/Web-versions. Android Apps were not always available, and to the extent that they were, half of them were on Amazon/Fire, half of them on Android TV/Google Play. I remember, in one case (Masterclass), they used the Android App to upsell me on their "Premium" subscription (or maybe it was the download-feature on the Android App).

So I would have had to pay more, switch between multiple HDMI sources to switch to the platform with the app I wanted to consume, and would still have had to use my desktop PC for some of the content I was paying for.

And then, I could never get the apps I actually cared about to occupy most of the screen real estate (or at least be suitably prominently placed). Most of the real estate was dedicated to dark patterns trying to get me to pay for stuff I didn't want to pay for, even though I was already a happy paying customer for more than enough stuff and there wasn't a “give it a rest, already” setting anywhere to be found.

I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age.

It's just such a sad and sorry state of affairs. How did we get here?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_W1dqRuljI