A handful of TV manufacturers are putting their smart TVs on a “simple” pedestal this year, as if some of them have realized that the platform is far too complex. Unfortunately, the product category seems to largely have changed for the worse, with little good to offset the things that are still wrong and with negatives that have been added.

Last year after CES, it was clear that smart TVs were not in any condition to be adopted by the general public, for lack of ease of use. I wrote an article asking whether the smart TV concept could actually work, given the difficulty of adapting the personal experience of a smartphone or tablet to the group experience of a TV.

While most of the manufacturers that I criticized last year for their overwrought interfaces haven’t changed much, there are a couple of newcomers this year who did aim for simplicity. Some of the smart TVs that will hit the shelves in the coming months are not simple, and others are maybe too simple. They all have problems.



Advertising rears its head

Only two TVs that I saw were placing ads on their dashboards: LG’s new webOS models and Panasonic’s “Life+ Screen” interface. Both supported animated ads, and LG’s ads were billed as “interactive.” In theory, Roku will also make its money from ad dollars on its new Roku TVs in one way or another.

The ad-free experience is rapidly disappearing everywhere, and our privacy is going along with it. Smart TVs are hardly alone, and TV is not a stranger to advertising. But in a dashboard where space for information is at a premium, ads come at a cost of usability, and usability is not something smart TVs have on lock.



Too simple to be smart?

Roku’s entry to the smart TV market has been mostly well-received, as set-top boxes like Roku are inexpensive and generally well-loved for their straightforward video delivery. It’s a smart move on Roku’s part to forego the box for partnerships with some of the scrappier TV manufacturers.

But in simply adding the interface to a television, I hesitate to even call it a smart TV. It has some of the hallmarks of a smart platform, namely apps (or “channels” in Roku’s lingo), though they are focused on watching and listening activities. There is no browser and there are only a smattering of apps in other product categories, at least in existing Rokus.

The Roku interface does make the TV hardware a little more usable—part of the interface is dedicated to managing inputs with buttons for “cable,” “game,” or “Blu-ray.” This could be a little too simplistic for some setups, but it’s better than cycling through inputs with a remote button.

Maybe Roku’s pared-down format will turn out to be the right direction for smart TV: stop trying to solve how to type a URL or ask what the weather will be tomorrow and just stick to playing visual and audio media, period. But I am still not convinced those problems can’t be solved.

Methods of interaction are still lacking

LG is also touting its webOS-based TVs as a simple answer to smart TV’s problems. LG’s TVs are a little better prepared in terms of functionality than Roku’s, but the way they are being shown at CES, it’s hard to understand what the final product will be like or to have confidence that it will be good.

The webOS interface is well-documented at this point, but what is less well-known is that LG plans on including gesture and voice input for the platform. At its CES booth, the company displayed these features in a demo separate from the rest of its webOS TVs. I took a look at the new TV in the video below, and it appears that it will suffer from the same communication confusion problems as smart TVs did last year. As a bonus, LG’s gesture control includes one motion that will make you look like Danny talking to the man who lives in his finger in The Shining.

LG's voice and gesture interactions. Note the single-finger inputs.

The fact that LG consolidated its gesture input is worth noting, but since the gestures duplicate the simplest buttons on the remote, it doesn’t add much to the experience, and it just confuses the user about what the optimal method of interaction is. The only advantage that the gestures add is that you can change the channel or volume without finding the remote.

Let them be dumb

TVs like Roku’s and LG’s (ignoring the voice/gesture input) may be best thought of not as smart TVs but as the antidote to the idea of smart TVs. Too many smart TVs scatter all of these features—browsers, note taking, social media—in front of the user with only a half-baked way of using them.

At least webOS-based TV and Roku TV focus on what TVs do best, which is displaying media, and they take it a step further by increasing visibility and access of newer Web-based platforms. Remotes still leave a lot to be desired as input mechanisms. But it’s better to find new, slightly better ways of putting them to use than to blow up a screen with apps and new input schemes that people can never be bothered to use because they require too much work.