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by karamanolev 506 days ago
[I used to previously work at Google on Android TV, all opinions my own]

There's a constant push for more and more features because consumers and cable operators shop based on that. There's also a constant push for ridiculous BOM reduction to the tune of individual cents being saved. Android TV is non-trivial to monetize so it's hard to dedicate a whole team for performance improvements. There's an imaginary bar for "good enough" (read not too shitty) and you get this result. I hate the result but I can't see what market dynamics might change it.

Unsubsidized "HDMI output" type TVs would cost so much that they would sell poorly, resulting in even higher prices, ad nauseam. I think we're stuck with this.

2 comments

It's not even that, it's that Android TV/Google TV devices even when not using smart features have slow and laggy basic features like volume control.

It just seems like it's software that was shoehorned into a place where it doesn't fit well IMO.

Roku never suffered from that.