The UI is (almost) just like any other on a Smart TV. Okay. Strikes me as somewhat unimaginative.

Also, the Dashboard is a separate app. Like, um, in a car, right? Just like the radio and temperature controls are away from the user, so they have to look away from the road (their focus) to access it, right? Right.

What this UX actually needs, instead of being an app menu that can access TV or whatever, is TV-centric design. It needs a focus. Provide a viewport that apps can draw to, and allow switching of apps without having to "look away" from the content.

Folder tabs? Search? (Please don't add a) favorites menu? They're all acceptable ways to provide apps to users, but this is none of them.

You must be forgetting that most people use TVs for the video content. I'm not saying "oh, get rid of YouTube and Netflix," I'm saying "constrain yourself to video output because no one really cares about the web on a TV box." Yeah, cool, you can go to webpages that have totally broken design and are totally illegible on TV (hi, HN!). I mean, an RSS reader makes sense, because then the TV (and thus, the user) has control of how the content's displayed. But "FF on TV" sounds like a really bad idea to me, because the Web sucks on anything that isn't a computer.

> The usage of applications on smart TV is getting huge, and it needs an re-framing of the UI structure to make the application as important as TV channels, and as input sources.

No, it isn't. No, it doesn't. Unless you mean you're going to make my Netflix another channel just like Fox News, which would be pretty nice. But that differs in the fact that Netflix is a video focused application that acts a lot like a channel or something. But that means you had better add a unified UI for video playback. Netflix and YouTube and everything should share the same UI widgets.

A dashboard that can be activated on command is cute and can possibly be a good idea. Like, maybe show it for a moment during that period where the TV is adjusting to a new signal or something to allow the user to peek at it by default so they can see alerts ("hey, Hillary Clinton's running for Pres! I need to pull up the CNN Channel!"), and then allow them to later press a button to show a dashboard that doesn't force them out of their content. But if you push them out of the content, the illusion is broken. It's no longer a TV, it's a computer. A big, complicated computer, with lots of little nodes in its huge and complex menu. And only us nerds want that, because us nerds like intricate and complex things. (there's nothing wrong with catering to nerds, but I don't think that this is supposed to be directed towards them, because they could just as easily grab a Raspberry Pi and load up XBMC on it without having to invent their own new flavor of Linux)

PS: adding a focus means your UI will be necessarily shallow. It will force you to get creative when you want to get complex in writing a good UI. Snapchat, for example, has a focus on the camera. Swipe from the left, you get your incoming Snaps. Swipe from the right, you get your Stories. Swipe from the top to see stuff about you and your settings. And that's the extent to which anyone uses Snapchat.