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Got my parents a Skype camera that plugged into the Sony TV. The best way to stay in touch with them. They didn't even need to know to operate a smartphone. A f

Got my parents a Skype camera that plugged into the Sony TV. The best way to stay in touch with them. They didn't even need to know to operate a smartphone. A few years later - the TV app was disabled, Skype on the phone doesn't stay logged in, call drops, the interface is confusing and we have moved on to FaceTime and WhatsApp now. They took a great product and decimated it.

setquk 8y ago
To be fair this was probably Sony. I bought one of their smart TVs and they canned the YouTube app on it after six months. Plus it was slow as molasses. I’ve only owned a cheap ass dumb bottom end Samsung TV since and life is better.
- felipelemos 8y ago
  It was indeed Microsoft. They disabled for all brands. I had the same problem at the time with my Samsung TV. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart-tv-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart...
  - setquk 8y ago
    Gah. That's just horrible. There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.
    - alias_neo 8y ago
      I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon. I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box. At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.
    - CWuestefeld 8y ago
      This is a mega-tangent, but... Frankly, if you're dumb enough to buy a smart TV, this is what you deserve. It should be obvious that (a) the expected lifespan of the hardware investment in a TV is a pretty long time - 10 years, maybe? But (b) the expected lifespan of the "smart" part is obviously much smaller: for example, you know that codecs are going to change, and computational requirements for them will increase significantly (e.g., from MPEG2->DIVX->H264->H265) on a much faster scale, maybe 2-3 years. With the hardware for the display being on drastically different horizon than that for the computation, it should be obvious that the overall product design is flawed. And it's flawed in a way that updated software will eventually be unable to cover. EDIT: obviously we want to be able to do "smart" stuff with our TVs. But the right approach for this is with separate components (e.g., Roku, Fire, Apple TV) that we can swap out as they become obsolete while retaining the longer-term investment in the display.
      - setquk 8y ago
        Fair points and totally agree. I was dumb enough (I would use the same words!) to buy one the first time round so I agree with you.
      - TallGuyShort 8y ago
        First of all, it's not obvious to most lay people. Second, I wouldn't have a problem if that was the reason stuff stopped working, but if Smart TV makers / sellers explicitly advertise certain apps, those apps damn well better have a decent life. I bought mine and days later my favorite Roku app (Spotify) decided to shut down that app for something like a year. Nothing to do with hardware advancements, they just made an intentional decision to de-prioritize a device I had already been sold and it didn't keep up.
      - crysin 8y ago
        The problem is if you want a 4K tv from Sony, Samsung, LG, or Vizio you'd be hard pressed to find any that are not some variation of a "smart" tv. You could go back to 1080 and find some dumb TVs still but then you're losing out on the HDR support.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    Same here, although I got one of those webcams with a built-in Skype client, for my old parents. Now it's a useless prop. My phone (non-Android, non-Apple) came with a fully integrated Skype app, something I haven't seen anywhere else. That's dead too of course. Good job, MS. I'll buy your products.. not.
- jacobush 8y ago
  I have a high end QLED Samsung TV. Horrible, horrible. Audio over HDMI does not work. Had to use optical cable to receiver. Apps hang and have to be reinstalled to recover them, or power yanked at wall socket. It randomly switches from TV or Netflix/Plex app to "HDMI2" or whatever when watching a movie. Doesn't matter if using an external device like an Apple TV - so you can't even treat it like a dumb display, which was my fallback for my previous "Smart" Philips TV. (It only had horribly slow UI, but was stable.) The panel is top notch. QLED to me is a perfect balance between the over-saturated colors of OLED, and the gray blacks of LED. But Samsung and software... it never works. Sync photos from Android phone to PC? Oh, the PC software only does 1000 photos at a time. Then you must delete 1000 photos and start over, rinse repeat. That's 22 times if you are helping a friend backup a few years of photos. Each time I encounter a Samsung device with "smart" anything in it, I think, no it must be OK this time. It can't be that so disparate divisions all produce crappy code, over the more than a decade now I've been following them. But yes. Every. Fucking. Time.
  - alias_neo 8y ago
    This is the reason I went LG this time, my Samsung TV has all of the issues you're describing. The LG is marginally better but it still has issues with audio over ARC and figuring out when to switch on the surround amp and when not to. It'll also randomly switch back to the ARC input if something connected gives it a nudge, while I'm doing something else. I bought high-end in both cases and it really makes you grit your teeth to realise they can't get this right even at the prices you're paying.

setquk 8y ago

To be fair this was probably Sony. I bought one of their smart TVs and they canned the YouTube app on it after six months. Plus it was slow as molasses. I’ve only owned a cheap ass dumb bottom end Samsung TV since and life is better.

felipelemos 8y ago
It was indeed Microsoft. They disabled for all brands. I had the same problem at the time with my Samsung TV. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart-tv-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart...
- setquk 8y ago
  Gah. That's just horrible. There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.
  - alias_neo 8y ago
    I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon. I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box. At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    This is a mega-tangent, but... Frankly, if you're dumb enough to buy a smart TV, this is what you deserve. It should be obvious that (a) the expected lifespan of the hardware investment in a TV is a pretty long time - 10 years, maybe? But (b) the expected lifespan of the "smart" part is obviously much smaller: for example, you know that codecs are going to change, and computational requirements for them will increase significantly (e.g., from MPEG2->DIVX->H264->H265) on a much faster scale, maybe 2-3 years. With the hardware for the display being on drastically different horizon than that for the computation, it should be obvious that the overall product design is flawed. And it's flawed in a way that updated software will eventually be unable to cover. EDIT: obviously we want to be able to do "smart" stuff with our TVs. But the right approach for this is with separate components (e.g., Roku, Fire, Apple TV) that we can swap out as they become obsolete while retaining the longer-term investment in the display.
    - setquk 8y ago
      Fair points and totally agree. I was dumb enough (I would use the same words!) to buy one the first time round so I agree with you.
    - TallGuyShort 8y ago
      First of all, it's not obvious to most lay people. Second, I wouldn't have a problem if that was the reason stuff stopped working, but if Smart TV makers / sellers explicitly advertise certain apps, those apps damn well better have a decent life. I bought mine and days later my favorite Roku app (Spotify) decided to shut down that app for something like a year. Nothing to do with hardware advancements, they just made an intentional decision to de-prioritize a device I had already been sold and it didn't keep up.
    - crysin 8y ago
      The problem is if you want a 4K tv from Sony, Samsung, LG, or Vizio you'd be hard pressed to find any that are not some variation of a "smart" tv. You could go back to 1080 and find some dumb TVs still but then you're losing out on the HDR support.
- Tor3 8y ago
  Same here, although I got one of those webcams with a built-in Skype client, for my old parents. Now it's a useless prop. My phone (non-Android, non-Apple) came with a fully integrated Skype app, something I haven't seen anywhere else. That's dead too of course. Good job, MS. I'll buy your products.. not.
jacobush 8y ago
I have a high end QLED Samsung TV. Horrible, horrible. Audio over HDMI does not work. Had to use optical cable to receiver. Apps hang and have to be reinstalled to recover them, or power yanked at wall socket. It randomly switches from TV or Netflix/Plex app to "HDMI2" or whatever when watching a movie. Doesn't matter if using an external device like an Apple TV - so you can't even treat it like a dumb display, which was my fallback for my previous "Smart" Philips TV. (It only had horribly slow UI, but was stable.) The panel is top notch. QLED to me is a perfect balance between the over-saturated colors of OLED, and the gray blacks of LED. But Samsung and software... it never works. Sync photos from Android phone to PC? Oh, the PC software only does 1000 photos at a time. Then you must delete 1000 photos and start over, rinse repeat. That's 22 times if you are helping a friend backup a few years of photos. Each time I encounter a Samsung device with "smart" anything in it, I think, no it must be OK this time. It can't be that so disparate divisions all produce crappy code, over the more than a decade now I've been following them. But yes. Every. Fucking. Time.
- alias_neo 8y ago
  This is the reason I went LG this time, my Samsung TV has all of the issues you're describing. The LG is marginally better but it still has issues with audio over ARC and figuring out when to switch on the surround amp and when not to. It'll also randomly switch back to the ARC input if something connected gives it a nudge, while I'm doing something else. I bought high-end in both cases and it really makes you grit your teeth to realise they can't get this right even at the prices you're paying.