I'm old enough to remember when TVs weighed half a ton (figuratively) and weren't always in color, and while I love nerding out about OLED and the various permutations of quantum dots that seem to be the next gen of display tech, one thing has soured my TV experience. Okay, two things, because 3D TVs were terrible, but I'm specifically talking about the hostile user experience on almost every smart TV you can buy.

It's not enough that anything less than the flagship models come with underpowered chipsets that barely run the image upscaling from broadcast to 4K, let alone any of the apps you want to use. Or that the discovery algorithm for your average streaming service is designed to keep you scrolling through pages of things you already decided not to watch last week, and yet you have to scroll through them again. But you're also at the mercy of the manufacturer, who keeps prices down by snooping on what you're watching and selling that data in aggregate to whoever has a couple of bucks to rub together.

I absolutely refuse to entertain this behavior, but it's also true that it's nearly impossible to buy a non-smart TV in this day and age (even with a business account, believe me, I've tried). But even then, that cheap smart TV can be improved with a few changes, or you can do what I do and skip the TV experience altogether for a more cinematic flair.

Smart TVs have a problem

Okay, they have problems, plural

That said, if you're using a smart TV in the US, automatic content recognition (ACR) is undoubtedly happening on your TV while you watch, whether you're streaming from the TV's OS or from an HDMI-connected device. This constant stream of snapshots is matched against a database of ads, and the most relevant ones are selected for you. Surely you've wondered why the ads that appear when you pause streaming services seem a little more targeted than most.

That's how companies can offer you incredible deals on smart TVs. They're subsidized heavily by the expected lifetime of advertising that you have to opt out of receiving, and it's not always clear how to do that. Sure, you can set up Pi-hole to block those adverts and tracking domains. It just sucks that we have to do extra steps to get a better viewing experience. Add in anemic TV chipsets, operating systems that barely get updates, and firmware bugs, and the average smart TV is starting to look much less clever.

My preferred viewing screen isn't a TV anymore. The quality and price of 4K LED and/or laser projectors have improved so much lately that I'd rather watch on a canvas that's measured in feet, not inches. I've used so many different models from different brands that the best advice is: they're all good enough if you're picking a 4K-capable model.

That's not to say they don't have some issues. The same underpowered chipsets run the Android TV OS that powers them, often with disappointingly little RAM, so you notice stutters while navigating menus. They tend to have fewer ads, though, possibly because they're designed for the worldwide market rather than just the US. But on the whole, they're a more immersive experience, and the lackluster chipset doesn't affect the image quality.

The only fix is to outsource their smarts

Streaming devices are almost essential now

If you've been following my articles, you might remember that I really dislike HDMI and the annoying HDMI Forum that controls the specification. This is the only time I'll use HDMI, because TVs, soundbars, projectors, and streaming boxes all have one thing in common. They don't support DisplayPort. And I'll begrudgingly agree that eARC for home theater speakers is a good thing, and I wish computers would support it.

And it's my most disliked cable to the rescue of my smart TV woes, because the best way to watch content on a smart TV is through a standalone streaming box. The Nvidia Shield TV range would have been my first recommendation. The current devices released in 2019 are still getting regular updates, but I have to confess I don't like Android TV's UI. They're still great devices, however, able to output HDR10 and Dolby Vision, and with HDMI 2.0b, and there's no sign of them being discontinued.

Now, whatever your feelings about Apple are, they're one of the only big tech companies that take user privacy seriously. Sure, it's probably to avoid lawsuits and antitrust investigations, but their loss is your gain, because the Apple TV 4K is the closest to the streaming device of my dreams. I've used HTPCs back when Windows Media Edition was a thing, almost any Android device you can name (and several that seem to have been named by throwing darts at the alphabet), and the abomination that is Fire TV's UI.

Apple's interface is clean, well laid out, doesn't push iTunes or Apple TV toward you that forcefully, and there are no ads. I don't count recommendations of things you might want to buy and watch as ads, or at least they're not in the same group as random pharmaceuticals that might be targeted at me because of my age and gender. If you still can't stomach Apple, there really is no good alternative other than the new Google TV dongle that looks like a bar of soap.

And to bring some control over my media

The other part of the equation is to get control back over my media. Running Jellyfin or other media server with digital files created from physical media I own is the only way to ensure that I'll always have access to the content I paid for, and that it'll be in the best possible format. It's also not that tricky to set up, although you will lose hours, days, and possibly weeks of your life to ripping DVDs to fill up your hard drives.

I'll happily take the subsidized cost of smart TVs, then use some of those perceived savings to buy a standalone streaming box that I can use on multiple TVs or projectors going forward. The cost of a "dumb" TV with only menus for settings is a barrier to that way of selling screens ever happening again outside enterprise settings. But I'll never buy a smart TV and let it connect to the internet longer than the time it takes to check for firmware updates, or let it watch my screen to serve me relevant ads.