3. It has the best versions of some apps
Well of course this is a statement up for debate, though mostly from app power-users who live on their tablets or at their PCs. But for our money, YouTube on a TV is YouTube as it was meant to be.
The implementation of YouTube differs between manufacturers, but some have gone to great lengths to make the interface work well with a standard-style TV remote, and most importantly make it really fast to choose different videos, which is of course what YouTube is all about.
There are lots of other apps which really lend themselves better to the big screen of the TV rather than any other format. Weather and news apps are obvious, but anything that relies on the passive consumption of large amounts of content is just more comfortable and simpler on a TV.
2. It makes managing your content much simpler
These days, you have lots of content to deal with. Movies, music, pictures, social media accounts, email and the rest of it. Subscriptions to various websites. Pay TV content. Rented movies, bought movies, the list goes on and on.
Without a smart TV, you need several devices in several different parts of the house to manage all this content. A PC for some, various HDMI-equipped boxes for others. Music has always been a completely separate thing, accessible via TVs for a few years now, but hardly fun to browse on a menu with hardly any features.
A smart TV, with its app-based interface, brings all of these things into the one device.
Of course you can still listen to music on your smartphone, but you can manage your home audio via your smart TV, with a clean interface that displays lots of information about the track you’re listening to.
Various movie apps let you hire movies and watch them right there, and let you keep track of your movie-watching habits or subscription services that offer unlimited content per month.
And as we mentioned, with a smart TV you can subscribe to those pay TV channels you actually want – though again this depends on the model you end up choosing.
1. A smart TV is the best TV
You might think that since a smart TV is in some ways a giant tablet with HD tuners in it, that a true videophile-grade TV will not be ‘smart’ and will instead concentrate on core features like picture quality.
But in fact manufacturers are putting all their best technology into their top-tier TVs, and that includes smart functionality.
The best smart TVs are 3D, have advanced picture quality features like localised dimming, plus all kinds of image-processing circuitry to increase the quality of dodgy signals (like DVD and YouTube), smooth motion on live TV, and make sure a Blu-ray movie plays at the frame rate its director intended.
A TV is not a mobile phone. There are TVs that ‘just receive TV’, but they are cheaper and less capable than their smart cousins – in every way.
When you buy a smart TV, you don’t just get apps and Twitter, you get the latest in display technology, the most powerful circuitry, the best image quality… you just get the best TV.
