I purposely bought a Philips smart TV this year as the only stuff I really watch is Netflix, iPlayer, YouTube and my own ripped content. This TV advertised apps for all of that and DLNA support, so I figured I wouldn't need any other boxes. I have used XBMC before and that worked great, except there is still no Netflix support, so I figured I'd try something with it built in.

Netflix works perfectly, and I really can't complain about it. The interface is very user friendly and it is very responsive. I guess it's pretty much the same as you get on an Apple TV or Amazon whatever-its-called box, but it's nice to have it built in.

YouTube works pretty well. It's sometimes a bit slow to skip to the next video, but being able to use my phone or laptop as a remote to queue up content is pretty nice.

iPlayer is pretty hopeless. If I play a SD video it plays in the wrong aspect ratio, and HD video just keeps buffering (Netflix 720p is fine though...). The interface is nice though.

DLNA started off well, the browser is pretty basic but even over wifi I was able to stream 1080p which was impressive. Then some videos I tried just crashed the player randomly after 10 minutes, so I gave up on that.

I've now got a Raspberry Pi with XBMC/Kodi running. It's a bit slow (seems to be inefficiencies of the software, as even idle in the menu it uses 80% of the CPU), but 1080p movies play back fine even over wifi. I use that in place of the DLNA on my TV and use get_iplayer to fix that. They both support HDMI CEC which means I can use just the TV remote to control the Raspberry Pi without any addons.

There are a few other things I should mention too:

The whole interface of the TV is HTML and Javascript (it runs Opera 9 under the hood) and it isn't very optimised. This means even simple things such as pressing the 'Source' button to view the source list (you can't just press it to switch, you need to press this then select the new source from the menu) takes 30 seconds to load.

I specifically bought this TV and an amplifier (both Philips) that support HDMI ARC, this means that audio can be sent from the TV (or peripherals) to the amplifier via just the HDMI cable. When it works it works great, but most of the time for whatever reason it just doesn't. I ended up buying a $3 optical S/PDIF cable from eBay which works as expected (i.e. it just works) and achieves the same end goal. If I'd known it would have been this flakey, I would have just gone that route in the first place and I could have got a cheaper amplifier.

The TV also has Skype built in, and an optional camera for $100. I'm glad I didn't buy that at the same time as the TV...

So what's the purpose of a smart TV? I have no idea. I would prefer a 'dumb' TV, but it seems pretty much everything is a smart TV now.

Edit:

I also looked into building my own interface for it. The 'Smart TV' home screen has ads on it loaded over HTTP, so I setup my router to sent that traffic to my own server and served up a JavaScript redirect. It worked well, but I never got around to taking it further. According to the spec [0] the TV supports 1080p60 x264 at 25 Mbit/s.

[0] http://www.yourappontv.com/documentation/smart-tv-versions-s... (free signup required)