Stopping the smart TV from being used against you.

I recently bought a new TV and did some research to find the “least worst” TV with regard to internet connectivity and reliance on its “smart OS” navigation to just use an external HDMI port. I can report pretty good news for the Sony Bravia line of Android TVs.

• there was no requirement to connect it to the internet
• during setup there is a choice for “basic” which adds only a few default apps (which are uninstallable/disablable by the user)
• there is a setting called “Power on and remember last input port”. What this means is you last used HDMI1 port when you powered off the TV, when you power it back up again it automatically goes right back to that HDMI input port without any extra button presses or user interaction. In practice this means you see the Sony logo on the screen and just a fraction of a second the graphic circles of part of the AndroidTV interface before it switches to the HDMI1 input where we left off before powering off the tv prior.

Bonus feature we like:

• there is a setting you can enable/disable that if the TV is already powered on, when you power on a device on another HDMI port than the one you’re on, the TV will automatically switch to that HDMI input without prompting. So if we’re watching the AppleTV on HDMI1 and then want to watch a Blu-ray, simply powering on the Blu-ray player will also have the TV switch to that HDMI2 input.

I wish there was no AndroidTV OS on it at all, but the only time I’ve ever seen it was the one time when we went through the initial setup. We haven’t seen or interacted with it since.