How to Make Your Smart TV Dumber (and Why You Should)

When people want to illustrate how fast technology is advancing in the modern age, they often cite the (admittedly startling) fact that it only took us 66 years to go from the first manned flight to landing humans on the moon. While it is no doubt incredible to think that a person can witness both of these events in one lifetime, there are other ways to demonstrate the course of progress. For example: our TVs.

The first televisions were small and had no color. Today, our TVs are just huge and equipped with all sorts of incredible technologies, although many of these technologies are actually not needed by anyone. Things like Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) are so invasive that the first thing you should do when buying a new TV is turn it off . And the software built into your smart TV is almost certainly one of the worst interfaces you’ll ever come across. And as a final kick to the shins, even if you decide you don’t want or need a crappy, buggy, spy smart TV, it’s going to be hard for you to buy a “dumb” TV these days.

However, not all is lost. Since you’re pretty much stuck on buying a smart TV, if you’re not willing to make major compromises, you can at least take a few simple steps to make your smart TV less of a nightmare.

Don’t plug it in

The first way to make your smart TV work better is to simply never connect it to the internet, or if it insists on being connected initially for setup purposes, turn it off immediately afterwards. This makes all the black magic of modern television eavesdropping, spying and data gathering moot, as it will not be able to communicate with the mother ship and sell your sweet, sweet data to anonymous corporations.

go with the box

Of course, if you don’t connect your smart TV to the internet, none of the pre-installed apps like Netflix or Hulu will work, which defeats the purpose of a TV in the era of streaming. But you still don’t want to use a terrible TV interface or rely on the manufacturer to keep that software up to date, secure, and working. Anyone who has owned a smart TV for more than a few years almost certainly has at least one native streaming app that no longer works because a new version has been released that is incompatible with their TV’s ancient and fragile operating system.

Instead, leave your TV offline and connect your TV box. Roku, Apple, Google, and Amazon offer cheap streaming devices that offer everything a smart TV does, with the added benefit of being made by companies that put some real resources and thought into their technology. The software in these boxes will be updated much more frequently (and smartly) so you won’t be stuck with an outdated TV.

However, if you are choosing a set-top box to avoid the privacy hell of smart TVs, you should also consider the privacy implications of these devices. No wonder Apple products are generally considered the best when it comes to protecting your privacy and not gobbling up all your data. Somewhat surprisingly, Roku devices are generally considered the worst offenders . The good news is that you can change many of these settings much more easily than on a smart TV, and if you’re ambitious and a little tech-savvy, you can set up a virtual private network for your streaming devices , which can improve your privacy. even more.

Change settings

The only thing you really need is for your smart TV to display content well (after all, no one needs a web browser on a TV). And yet, for some reason, modern smart TVs tend to handle this very poorly due to some presets. It’s worth taking the time to go to your TV’s settings and change a few things, first of all:

• Noise suppression. This is usually only necessary when viewing outdated content on older media; your TV is probably processing a pure digital signal these days, so all of this makes everything look a bit slick and artificial.
• Sharpness control. This setting should be disabled or set to zero unless you consider the image quality to be “soft” in some way. Otherwise, it simply absorbs detail, degrading the image quality.
• Motion smoothing. If you’ve ever heard of the “soap opera effect,” the weird way new TVs can make everything look like it was captured on video on a TV, you can blame it on motion smoothing , which artificially adds extra frames to shows and films. Well, smooth out the movement. However, no matter what you watch with motion smoothing, it looks terrible because your content is not designed to be viewed in this way. Disable this setting. With no exceptions.
• Energy saving. This is another feature that is usually enabled by default, but in theory it’s not a bad idea. “Energy Saver” can save energy and lower your energy bills, and even extend the life of your TV by reducing brightness. But auto dimming can also reduce your viewing experience, so it’s worth experimenting with this setting to see a) if it actually affects your energy bills and b) if your shows and movies will look better without it. On the other hand, make sure the Vivid mode, which boosts brightness, is turned off as well.

Smart TVs are amazing technologies and make our lives better with them. But until we convince the powers that be to sell us stupid TVs again, you’ll have to put in some effort to make your new TV as good as it should be.