[hocuspocus]

Non-smart TVs from the major brands are reserved to their enterprise line-up, that's why they're more expensive.

I worked at Samsung and given how much they poured into Tizen and the various in-house services for SmartHub, I guarantee they aren't making any significant money from them. They have zero leverage with apps for services that people consider a given (like Netflix). And a lot of smaller partnerships don't end well (see Peel for instance).

I'm not sure about brands that went with Android TV, but Google is pretty smart in such partnerships and fully takes advantage of the fact that OEMs like Sony don't have the internal resources to come up even with a half-decent OS.

Questionable updates that push things like samba.tv are probably a (poor) afterthought.