alt Hacker NewsThat sounds like you have an overly shitty ‘smart’ TV. Plenty of external devices (I’m partial to AppleTV) have no significant lag.
Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.
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External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
It’s a matter of time before tv manufacturers start requiring an app to sync with the TV to set it up.
That would let them glean information about you every time you use said app.
You’re still getting around this with a 3rd party device like an Apple TV for the most part but if it’s required to even turn it off or on it’ll be enough to sync any metadata that it holds
My television has a > 5 second lag on bringing up the input device selection. The buttons don’t actually respond when the menu appears, it’s about a second after that before they work
Part of it is the displays themselves. Some have unbelievably bad response times. I've seen 2 seconds multiple times. Makes gaming impossible.
The AppleTV is best in class sure but by the standards of older, pre-internet technology the lag is noticeable. The UI itself is smooth, but any time it makes a network call (which it does for damn near everything) it can take some amount of time. And once you introduce receivers and HDMI-ARC and auto switching and frame-rate differences between applications the whole thing just fucking sucks. It’s constantly turning off and on and has sound cutting out and back on.
And that’s assuming the apps are well written, which they are not.
I’m using an AppleTV HD with Peacock and it’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t consider NBC a niche service. After an episode ends, I need to wait for the new one to start to be sure it marks the last one as watched. When going back to the main screen, it can take upwards of 30 seconds, maybe more (it feels like an eternity), for the “watch next” to update. If I don’t wait for it to update, it will start playing an old episode the next time I try to launch it. This lag also persists over app switching. So if I stop watching a show, switch to something else for a while, then go back to Peacock and quickly go into the series I was watching, it will play old stuff.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.