Comment by tantalor
Comment by tantalor a day ago
My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
Comment by tantalor a day ago
My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
Everybody complains about performance. Slow software feels like poison.
Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objectivity.
This has nothing to do with the frameworks though. Almost every listed step of delay there is due to specific software design choices, not JS level stuff. For example search - why isn't every possible next letter prefetched before you even select it? It's trivially cacheable at local nodes anyway. Why isn't the first few seconds buffered by the time you open movie description? How is the UI even possible to be laggy - there are way larger services using react without issues.
Non-constructive reply: Developers have been burned too many times by snake oil vendors and "solutions" that only work for toy examples. Also, I've never seen being slow to be encouraged anywhere. Most consider it an acceptable tradeoff though.
Constructive reply: What would be an approach to writing a large web frontend (large as in, many pages and controls) without using a large framework?
I'm asking this because I know how to do it in React but also how to do it "the old jQuery way" (or equivalently, using today's standardized builtins). Productivity is easily 100x larger with React.
edit: Ideally, together with a link to an example open-source application that does it that way, to understand how it works and feels at (code) scale.
> without using a large framework?
I have explained this countless times. It rarely sinks in and quite often is met with hostility, so I don't bother any more. The problem is simple: its where people stake their career. Do they build their career upon writing original applications or upon using a tool? This difference is rather extreme.
By the way, without React shouldn't default to jQuery. If that is your perspective of reality you are already at the maxim of your potential.
> link to an example open-source application that does it that way
My experience is with this: https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr (what I currently work on is quite similar, but it's not open source).
It works fine. Clients don't complain about the interface. The project has been going on for 20 years or so now, and doesn't need big refactors every time a dependency gets updated because it avoids dependencies.
That is a rather generous comment. As a former JavaScript developer I can tell you the qualities of concern are not the business concerns of delivery. Delivery will increase just as dramatically by reducing the tech debt imposed from unnecessary code. All that really matters is solving for developer anxiety.
Your Roku had to "boot" for 10s - why? Would resume from standby in a couple of seconds, so you've chosen to slow yourself down.
My TCL TV runs Android/Google TV, wakes from standby in 2s while also waking the surround in ~3s via HDMI CEC (and I don't need to hear anything until I've chosen something to play) so really it only take me 2s before I can start to open a streaming app (via a button on my remote) vs your 16s to get to the same point.
It's the choosing what to play that's the slow bit for me - every app puts what you were last watching in a different place, and not all apps notify Google TV so its own attempt at letting you resume is incomplete...
It also frustrates me that profiles streaming apps don't link to profiles for the OS (e.g. Google TV) - seems obvious to me that by now they should all be seamlessly linked together in a way that delivers the most personalised experience, instead of muddling up everyone's profiles and watch history!
I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway. What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that. So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).
I use an Amazon FireTV Stick on my old non-smart LG TV. And the advantage is that the FireTV has a simple cute little remote control device. There is a nifty Setting in the Amazon FireTV UI to allow its remote to turn on/off the TV too.
So it's been a long time since I had to wrestle with the TV's built-in OS.
I just use the pleasant UI of the FireTV Stick to watch Netflix, Prime, Disney+, etc. on that decade+ old TV. That FireTV becomes sluggish if I keep multiple apps open, so I have learnt to exit out of an app before switching to the new one.
I may get a new FireTV stick this year, rather than splurging for a new TV, since the old TV is still doing well.
As the Americans say: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
I have this setup, and the Firestick UI is horribly slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for it to give any response to a button press. It's worst when I'm trying to watch something on Amazon Prime, to the point that I hardly watch that anymore because the UI is so annoying.
Wait people on hackernews actually use the embedded software on "Smart" TVs? That stuff is terrible not to mention a privacy nightmare.
I thought that smart tv native usage was for gen. pop. only. Its been an ongoing conversation on this site for years at this point.
> The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that
Actually it is very much needed to say that. Manufacturers get away with crappy unbearably slow UIs even on expensive TVs because it's not something that gets enough consideration by reviewers or indeed buyers.
That 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.
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.
Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly written.
The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
The issue here is that the app developers design & test for the latest Apple TV 4K models, which have about 10X the performance (and 2-4X the RAM) compared to the old HD models.
Apple left a large generational gap because they kept selling the HD for many years (until 2022) as an entry-level device alongside much more capable 4K models.
> ”it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection”
Yes, based on my observation this seems to be one of the biggest challenges people face with the AppleTV interface, along with accidentally changing the selection when they try to select it (because of the sensitive touch controls on the remote).
I have never noticed this issue. Buttons get highlighted in contrasting colours. Things like episode thumbnails get a different colour highlight border and sometimes even drop shadow. What I find harder to do is to see when going to the left means going to the menu on that side or just the previous tile.
> it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection
I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple seemed to start this and other devs followed their example.
I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center of the select button, or just slightly move it back and forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with me.
Sounds just like a poorly written app. I'm surprised Apple doesn't enforce stricter performance guidelines.
On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple TV performance.
Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be very fast
If you think Peackock is bad, try Paramount+, it's an impressively bad app that, along with being very laggy, will crash fairly regularly too.
If you have a pihole or something that blocks ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from crashing daily to no crashes in many months.
Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.
When there's a Star Trek running, I subscribe to Paramount+ via the Apple TV+ channel instead of directly, despite it costing a touch more, just to avoid having to use Paramount's official app (instead, one uses the Apple TV app and plays media with the stock tvOS player). It's absurd how much that improves the experience.
It really is. I cancelled my subscription recently because streaming in the app rarely worked. The only way to watch anything is either download it first if I'm watching on my tablet or use Chromecast to cast via the app on my phone. It was the same bad experience across Google TV, Android and iOS devices.
Paramount plus is one of the worst apps I've ever used. It's so bad that I can only assume they tried as hard as possible to be is unusable. Unstable, slow, and lots of things just don't work right.
Pretty much every streaming app I use (not just on AppleTV) has a hard time remembering where I left off. I now have the habit of skipping through the credits and letting the app play the last 8 seconds and close the episode itself, in the perhaps misguided hope that then it will remember I've played the episode.
Exactly. The issue of marking as played is not unique to Peacock, but Peacock’s lag makes it take even longer to get confirmation that some of the other apps I’ve used. Netflix has the same issue and some lag to it, but it’s less lag.
It sounds like an older version of the app. I used to see all kinds of similar issues with Peacock on my Apple 4k device. NBC has put work in to make the app better over the years unlike say, Paramount+. I would check to see if you can manually update the app or try the 4k device and see if it works better. It could be the older chip and more limited memory of the HD device are hitting up against their limits too.
External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet.
I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Sony TVs are some of the most sane options in the TV market right now. Generally decent, and they don't fight you if you want to use them without connecting them to the internet. Still not perfect and they'll cost you more, but it's a worthwhile trade to me.
When you watch the Samsung traffic that goes out, it’s grim. It bypasses local dns too.
I Piholed mine with an edge router and redirected port 53 traffic that didn’t come from the Pihole, back to the Pihole with a script.
However I’ve upgraded to a Dream machine pro, and haven’t worked out how to do that so just removed it from having any network access.
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 LG does just that.
The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
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.
> sound cutting out and back on.
Absolutely kills me.
No one else in the house notices when sound is from the shitbox tv speakers rather than the soundbar. It’s a high end Sony, and it’s sound quality is shameful.
Can we sacrifice a few cm of thinness and have some sound?
This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
but the markup is quite high
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
Dumb TVs really don’t exist anymore. You just have to buy a smart one and treat it like it’s dumb.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
This is what I do, I'm a little confused by the issue. If you have a device that outputs HDMI just never connect the TV to your wifi. It's not like you need or want firmware updates if there's no internet connection.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
I'm sure sooner or later TVs will demand to connect to an "activation server" before they start working. And soon after that continuous internet access.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
If you never connect it to the internet, all TVs are dumb. I have an airgapped Panasonic powered by Nvidia Shield for years.
The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
True, but when you want to change any of the TV settings you have to deal with the sluggish UI. I have memorized the key presses to toggle between two different brightness presets, including the amount of time I have to pause between each keypress. If I press the buttons without waiting sufficiently long, it goes sideways.
Keep in mind: "Is your android TV streaming box part of a botnet?"
The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
"I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight."
Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48 years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has never needed maintenance).
Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.
My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's something terribly wrong with domestic electronic appliances.
When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
And not always anything to do with the TV.
I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
Do you remember analog TVs? Switching channels was a sub second affair.
I uninstalled google launcher and shitty Xiaomi apps in my Mi TV stick using ADB and switched to F-Launcher. Can't be happier with the performance.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs as well for me.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
This is always the top reply and it's not particularly useful. I want the ease and convenience of having a single device both play and display content, there's no reason that should be so hard. Of course I know I could Buy More Things but that sucks as a suggestion.
This is how most people use their TVs these days (despite the issues with it). It's reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience.
I have two LG oleds. I turned off a bunch off settings and blocked the LG update url in pihole, set pihole as dns. I just use the tv, without any connected devices. It is pretty responsive, I get 0 ads. The only inconvenient part is going fully through their god awful settings menu and turning off a bunch of them once.
I tried the smart tv, but then the app devs stopped updating the apps for that model or version of the OS. there's nothing wrong with the picture, but to be able to keep using apps would require a new tv. That's when I switched to devices connected to the TV, and stopped using the TV's apps. Devs will always update for devices like Roku, AppleTV, etc as there's enough users. I can only imagine the number of users for specific model of tv's OS will get smaller and no longer worth effort on the dev's time.
its a double edged sword, better hardware and experience = more expensive (see Sonys higher end stuff) 90% of would much rather drop the money on the less expensive BIG TV with a cpu that cant even transcode properly and harvests your data to offset the price. ive got a lot of family and friends that use my plex server and i pretty much force them to get a dedicated streaming device for it or warn them that unfortunately i cant help them if the content doesnt want to play.
Well, you say it's not particularly useful, but do you want a TV that runs like a bag of spanners or not?
Because if the answer is "not" then complaining about how your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly refusing to buy one additional device (like an Apple TV or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don't you think? Ornery even?
I agree that it is reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience but TV manufacturers have already made it abundantly clear, over the last decade and a half of smart TVs, that they don't give a damn what people like you and I think about how our TVs work, or that we get pissed off when they slow them down with bloatware and ads.
So the logical choice is to Not. Bloody. Let Them.
Literally, buy one other device - whatever suits your needs best (and they're all compact little things, not like the big ugly set top boxes of years gone by) - and your TV experience will immediately be significantly better.
Once you've set it up you won't even need two remotes: your Apple TV, or whatever, will turn the TV on and off for you, and control the volume, so you'll only need the remote for your it (or whatever device you've chosen).
The only time you'd need a second remote is if you have a cable or satellite box, or you're the kind of person who also has 7 games consoles of varying vintages and a bluray player plugged into your TV as well (which it doesn't sound like you have). We only watch on demand services so, if I weren't a fan of retrogames, we could get away with just the Apple TV and one remote. (The Bluray player barely sees any use, but I keep it around because we do still have some Blurays and DVDs for stuff that we really like and don't want to be beholden to streaming services for.)
(I should say, another alternative is to set up something like Pihole to filter the ads out, but that still doesn't help with crappy updates that slow your TV down. And if you use apps on your TV and don't keep them up to date, eventually they'll stop working, which isn't ideal either. Hence, again, back to the idea of a device to "drive" the TV, which runs the apps you want.)
> complaining about how your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly refusing to buy one additional device (like an Apple TV or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don't you think? Ornery even?
No, I have plenty of other devices that update and remain useable. So do you.
I would describe your attitude that way though.
Modern TV, yeah. TVs from 15 years ago were waaaay faster than smart TVs. Ridiculous.
This is definitely due to the age/quality/model of the TV. I have 4 LG TVs across the house and the newest/biggest is 100x faster than the oldest.
Within a few days it appeared that the update was recalled.
It was the bad update that made videos start playing as soon as you selected them, instead of going to the information page. I get the impression I wasn't the only person who complained; I suspect that any manager who sat down to watch TV that night probably twisted a few arms.
The monitor I use for work is 43” and can double as a TV. It also has 4 HDMI inputs, which can act as 4 displays. I could, in theory, watch TV via a streaming box, play a console, and still have the equivalent of 2 21” monitors going at the same time. I’d love this kind of flexibility on my primary TV in the living room.
Is this something you're actually able to do with this monitor, or that you think it should be able to do it? If it can actually display all 4 inputs at the same time, I'd be interested in knowing the model and price of that monitor. That's a feature that tends to require special equipment that's not cheap.
This is something it is actually able to do. I would like it to be more of a standard feature on monitors and TVs. When it came out it seemed like a unicorn, it still kind of does.
It's an LG 43UD79-B. According to LG's site[0], it's discontinued. I got it from Costco in 2017 for $550, but it was sold many places at the time.
Doing a quick glance at LG's current lineup, there isn't an obvious successor.
It looks like Amazon has 1 person selling it used[1], but in 6/10 condition and no remote, for double the price of new... While it looks the remote is also being sold places, it's pretty useless without the remote. The seller has sketchy ratings as well, I'd stay away.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-43UD79-B-4k-uhd-led-monito...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-LED-lit-Monitor-43UD79...
Being able to multiplex seems like an obvious feature to someone like me, but most people would probably just prefer picture-in-picture. I can see why it wasn't a feature that lived very long. Sounds like a great idea in design/feature meetings until the users tell you they don't care about it.
Our Samsung running Tizen has the obnoxious need to check if antenna-based broadcasting is available, every single time you open the settings menu.
It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.
Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
Yeah, I don't understand why everyone is trying to invalidate their experience or suggest workarounds (implying that they are the problem); this isn't stackoverflow.
Every TV I have interacted with in recent years is slow and terrible, except for really old ones. The TVs are the problem, and we shouldn't be making excuses for that.
Turn on TV: 3 seconds
Roku boots: 10 seconds
Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds
Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)
Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds
Select profile: 3 seconds
Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in
Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).