@ccarmock
That’s a misjudgement that Sony and YouView made at the outset in 2015; it used to be that all you could do with a TV was watch channels coming in over a terrestrial aerial, but since the advent of ‘Smart’ TVs, terrestrial is just one of many things a TV can do, and often not even the primary thing it’s used for.
The UI design, and the feature set, of many Smart TVs still hasn’t entirely caught up with this; users want to be able to choose what the TV powers up as - last thing used, terrestrial TV, satellite TV, one of the AV inputs, the Smart menu so you can go straight into streaming - how many TVs still don’t offer you all those choices, and maybe even default you to one you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself?
But the (wrong) assumption that you don’t need live TV as an option on a Player on a TV is still rife. Even though Sony and YouView have been rowing back on their terrestrial TV assumptions ever since 2016, that one still holds sway.
LG aren’t always getting this right either, leaving it to Samsung to get closest.
Is there a Smart TV in the land, though, that hasn’t got a Roku or an Amazon Firestick hanging off an HDMI port to complete the Player functionality that we need, and going “What’s all the fuss about”?
But even with those, we still wait patiently for the Holy Grail; Freeview over the internet (Freestream?) instead of having to hop from Player to Player.
For BT, they and YouView have just about got a limited version of this working, sort of, on the newest BT Pro PVRs, for BT TV customers only.
Can’t wait for this to become mainstream; then and only then will the future have arrived.
My favourite bedtime reading is a Sony product manual…
