Paul’s Tech Makeover: TV Terribleness (Premium)

I couldn’t be less happy with our TV situation, which is the exact opposite of what I’m trying to achieve at the new house. And I don’t see this one having a satisfying conclusion.

Three months ago, I wrote about my decision to rethink the personal technology we use as part of the move to a new house in Pennsylvania. A big part of that original discussion was about television: We decided to experiment with cord cutting, using digital TV services rather than getting cable, and I wanted to consolidate the set-top boxes we use down to something more manageable.

Both of these initiatives can only be described as disasters. And the related addition of a soundbar to our television has likewise been unsatisfactory. This just isn’t going well.

I’ve written about cord-cutting twice since then, first to explain the goals and then, later, in September, to provide an update on my experiences thus far. My conclusion, which was unexpected, is that we might not actually need a TV service.

We’ve tried three services now: PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and Hulu with Live TV. Each has been unsatisfying for a number of reasons.

We’ve used PlayStation Vue the most so far. It is the only one of the three services to offer a traditional guide experience, where you navigate (in this case, from left to right) through a live channel listing that includes both local and cable channels. And when you select a channel, it just starts playing, live. Which is good.

But the Vue interface for watching recorded shows is convoluted and, on Apple TV 4K at least (see below), has terrible navigation. You can only skip through a recorded show in 30-second increments, so I find myself click-click-clicking on the remote to get through commercial blocks. And then because it’s so buggy, the video will freeze half the time and kick us out. And then we lose our progress in the show and have to start over. It’s beyond aggravating.

YouTube TV isn’t on Apple TV 4K (yet?) so I have to cast the service from a phone to the TV using a (4K/HDR-compatible) Chromecast Ultra. This is OK, but I’d prefer to navigate the UI using a real remote, and I am not a big fan of YouTube TV’s vertical guide navigation. Plus, there’s no HGTV. Google could make my life a lot better by providing an optional remote for its Chromecast devices.

Hulu with Live TV is the least satisfying. There’s no guide per se at all, no sense of a bunch of live channels you can watch at any time. It’s disconcerting, with a weird topic-based layout, and we just don’t like it. Worse, when you do find a live TV show to watch, it marks your location so that when you return later you go back to that time; it’s terrible for sports since there’s no obvious “Go to live view” option on the Apple TV 4K app (like there is on mobile). And the Hulu content has commercials, even though I’m paying so much extra for “with live TV.” That’s unacceptable, and I’ll be killing that one first.

Regardless of the service, though, we’re not getting enough use to justify the $30 to $45 they cost per month. We watch some House Hunters shows from HGTV at lunch, mostly, and that’s about it. In the future, when shows like The Walking Dead or Better Call Saul come back, we might need a service. But for now, not really.

But an even bigger aggravation is hardware-related: Two of those services—PlayStation Vue and Hulu with Live TV—work on Apple TV 4K, which we had expected to form the basis of our TV watching experience going forward. But the remote control that Apple forces on users is so terrible—I’ve called it a crime against humanity, which is accurate—that it’s almost reduced both my wife and me to tears on multiple occasions. It is unusable.

(And I swear to God, if anyone tries to argue otherwise, I’ll sick my wife on you. It is not sort of usable. Not OK, or even good. It is an abomination. It does not work.)

Which is too bad because the Apple TV user interface is attractive and simple enough. Most of the services—Netflix, Hulu, and so on—we want the most often are on there. And we have a ton of purchased content from Apple, and many of those movies are getting free 4K and HDR upgrades. So there’s that.

But the sheer terribleness of that remote has triggered a rethink. We could, of course, find some kind of a universal remote that works with Apple TV 4K. And I do have an older Apple TV remote that works mostly (some navigation stuff doesn’t work for some reason, for example in PlayStation Vue). And sometime in the past year, I purchased a third party Apple TV-compatible remote that partially works. (About half the buttons do something.)

Or we could use something else. For example, I have the new Amazon Fire TV with 4K/HDR support on order. It is expected to arrive in late October, and because it supports an HD antenna for live broadcasts, including sports, this could be an interesting option.

But the thing is, we’re never going to have just one set-top box. Right now, we have the Apple TV 4K, the Chromecast Ultra, and an Xbox One taking up three of the TV’s available four HDMI ports. And I suspect each of those ports will always be occupied with something. That simplification, that consolidation, just won’t be possible.

The Xbox One is the least-used device in there right now, but my wife uses it for watching fitness DVDs. A Fire TV or Chromecast may be good for many things, but they will never play Apple’s content. And so on. You get the idea.

Of course, I could sort of solve most issues by just using the TV. Last year, we purchased a 55-inch 4K/UHD/HDR Samsung Smart TV, and it has built-in apps for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and the like. They are OK, not great, but many do support 4K and HDR. And I could add an HD antenna directly to the TV. Or even get a low-cost basic cable package and just roll back the clock, and admit defeat.

The truth is, I just don’t know. We’ll see how it goes with the new Fire TV first. Hope springs eternal.

But there is one more possible defeat to discuss. After seeing rave reviews of the Polk Audio MagniFi Mini Home Theater Sound Bar System, I purchased one at Amazon, hoping to improve the sound quality of the TV at a low price. Even my wife, normally no technophile, was on board: She had actually been asking for a way to make it sound better but without putting speakers all over the place.

It hasn’t worked out well.

On paper, the soundbar looks simple enough: It supports ARC (audio return channel), optical audio, and basic line-in, and what I was hoping for was simplicity: Just connect it and it works. When you turn on the TV, the soundbar comes on and the sound always comes through the soundbar.

Oh, Paul. You and your cute expectations.

ARC is supposed to be a single cable solution: You connect the soundbar to an ARC-based HDMI port on TV (which I do have) and all sound that comes through the TV will go through the soundbar. That includes any connected set-top boxes, like the Apple TV 4K too.

Well, it should. As it turns out, we usually still needed to manually turn on the soundbar with its own remote. There was often a delay before it actually kicked in. And we kept frigging with it, trying to make it work. For me, it was incredibly aggravating. For my wife and daughter, it was simply unusable.

Then I experimented with optical audio. Same thing. OK, how about line-in? Actually, that sort of works. So much for technology.

I was just about to send it back when, in the course of writing this, I went over to go look at it again. When I turned on the TV, the soundbar came on. Sound came out of the soundbar, and not the TV. It worked with the Apple TV 4K too.

Sigh. So I don’t know. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything. Maybe it works next time, maybe not.

But what I do know is things actually working is the goal. And so far, the TV situation just isn’t working for us.