Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs Owners of Panasonic smart TVs say their sets have been unable to access applications – including video-streaming apps – because backend servers keep falling over. The Panasonic UK Twitter feed has been beset by folks demanding answers and refunds after their expensive Firefox OS-based tellies refused to work properly. The TVs …
What with their inability to work if they can't phone home, the manufacturer's inability to support network services, the data slurping, and 3rd parties getting bored and pulling apps (e.g. Skype) which may make expensive additional hardware worthless (e.g. Skype), the smart money is on a dumb TV with a cheap Chinese Android stick.
It's why the IoT is doomed to fail, at least as a domestic idea. Everything needs to be connected to some remote server, and even if the servers work they'll be decommissioned in < 5 years as the devices they serve are declared obsolete (even when they're still in use) and replaced with "new improved" ones. People won't tolerate being asked to replace a TV every few years, and will soon get fed up even with replacing gadgets. One new chinese Android stick every 5 years is one thing, but when it's a TV this year, remote next year, two TV sticks the year after, set-top box every 3 years, etc. it all adds up to "I've had enough of this crap".
"People won't tolerate being asked to replace a TV every few years, and will soon get fed up even with replacing gadgets"
This is the thing. They're buying a gadget along with a (seemingly) free lifetime subscription to various services. It's not reasonable to assume that this lifetime subscription is in no way cost effective and consumers should be taking everything with a pinch of salt.
Although you could quite easily argue that the sale of such products is dubiously misleading - the manufacturers must surely know they can't keep providing these services forever as newer services will inevitably replace them. Expecting a consumer to know/realise this too, is rather unfair.
I bought a Panasonic wifi chip for my Panasonic plasma TV and it never worked so I sent it back and got another one and that didn't work so I sent it back and...the third one didn't work either, so I tested it in a chum's TV and it didn't work there.
And the 'smart' features in my TV don't work. And some of them which did work stopped working (eg Youtube, iPlayer) after they were decreed obsolete
And the 'smart' features of my set top box / blu ray player barely ever work properly, and they're slow and buggy, and it doesn't stream media very well.
So I won't be buying any more Panasonic gear and it looks like I'm not the only one!
Agree with every word. Been a long term Panasonic fan too, probably because my Uncle was a dealer when I was a kid. The smart features of my plasma are very basic but the network software is buggy and apps slow. Had a wireless stick, took it out as it used to cause my TV to reboot randomly with a big clunk.
Second cheaper smart Panasonic TV responds maddeningly slowly to the remote, after switching on you have to wait a minute or two before it will respond, it even buffers up commands which is more annoying, same happens sometimes when you change channel.
Blu ray player home cinema works well, pvr is dreadful and has a mind of its own.
Had loads of issues with things rebooting, refusing to work together until I purchased expensive HDMI cables.
Love the plasma but not Panasonic. Love Amazon fire stick, Panasonc smart features suck.
smart Panasonic TV responds maddeningly slowly to the remote, after switching on you have to wait a minute or two before it will respond">
Funny, I have a little LG set upstairs which exhibits that very same behaviour, but the Panasonic smart TV downstairs runs like hot snot. That said, the selection of apps in the Panasonic store is pretty poor, so when it comes to replacement time I don't think I'll be buying Panasonic again.
That's not unique to Panasonic. The Skype for TV app has just been discontinued too - anyone with that app on their TV, no matter what brand, won't be able to use it soon.
This is part of the reason I deliberately avoided "smart" TV's - I don't want to have to update, upgrade, manage and secure yet-another-PC in the house. I bought a 32" dumb Samsung display instead. Into that we plug all our content-producing devices that can be removed or updated individually. But, to be honest, apart from the VM box, we don't really have to ever touch much. When the Wii we had was declared obsolete, we still had YouTube and even Amazon Instant Video apps on the Blu-Ray, or via the Chromecast, or even the cheap satellite box we had.
A TV is a display device. The more junk you expect it to do, the quicker it will obsolete some part of itself. But if you just buy a TV with however-many HDMI ports on the back, you can plug in whatever you like. And then whatever-content doesn't work, the big TV that you are used to the look and operation of, sitting bolted to your wall, doesn't have to move or change at all. You just swap out the box producing the content and use an alternative.
The people I know with Smart TV's all stopped using the apps on them within a year or so. They basically wasted the extra money. Whereas I've gone through two Chromecasts, (mainly because the new one runs on 5GHz and my 5GHz channels are much quieter) and that's it. Everything else is still connected and working for its primary purpose (e.g. Blu-Ray / Satellite / Cable / streaming / whatever) and I haven't lost access to any particular service (not that I'd do YouTube via a STB, but I still can via a myriad of options without having to resort to a laptop).
Dumb TV. Smart content devices. The other way round is just silly.
So I won't be buying any more Panasonic gear and it looks like I'm not the only one!
Panasonic made it to my "Do not buy" list when they in their infinite wisdom thought it wasn't enough that they got your money for the TV, but they wanted some extra pennies from adverts on the EPG.
They used to do nice kit like the old Qintrix CRTs and some of the early(ish) plasma screens.
Seems like everyone is on race to fail to see how fails hardest.
Panasonic are going downhill so fast, when you look at the floor you can see the red shift.
I was a Pana fan, owning a succession of Pana TVs for over two decades, but in the last few years they have lost the plot, (even though picture quality is still lush).
I am now praying NK dont launch an attack, because my new TVs are LG.
came for the snark, stayed for the pedantry.
One could, of course, have argued that the OP is observing the good ship Panasonic on it's voyage to the downhill from a fixed point near the hilltop and so when he looks down he sees it red-shifted as it races away from him. Or am I over-thinking it?
"One could, of course, have argued that the OP is observing the good ship Panasonic on it's voyage to the downhill from a fixed point near the hilltop and so when he looks down he sees it red-shifted as it races away from him" -- 's water music
Bugger, I knew someone would get me with an alternative frame of reference!
To get really pedantic, the term "red shift" is NOT interchangeable with "the Doppler Effect" as it INCLUDES shift from the Doppler effect AND other effects such as the shift due to the expansion of the universe (cosmological redshift).
In this specific case I believe "blueshift" or "negative redshift" would be the best term to use. One cannot exclude a contribution to the wavelength shift caused by the gravitational effects of falling into a black hole.
"This is one of the reasons why I don't have a 'smart' TV. Unless you mean 'smart' as in 'neat' or 'clean'."
Yes, it's a slightly odd word used in an uncommon way in British English. Smart is rarely used to mean clever or intelligent. It's mainly used to mean clean, tidy, well dressed etc. I get a similar grating feeling when people use "mean" for nasty instead of tight-fisted. Language evolves, I understand that, but currently it seems to be an enforced invasion of US English because they can't be arsed to localise their advertising. I wonder if the US accept UK english in the same way? Or is there a fear the US won't understand so it has to be re-worded for them while in the UK it's assumed we will understand?
Maybe we should table this motion.
The last Panasonic thing I bought was a PVR that I sent back within the week because its TV guide had unblockable ads that took up a third of the screen real estate. After this daftness, Panasonic got added to my 'Sony' list, and there they remain.
These consumer product companies have no idea how to write and manage decent software and no idea how to commission others to do so on their behalf. They don't understand that in this age of identikit everything, good software is now the only real opportunity for differentiation they have.
Yup. I've got a 2010 model Panny TV, and it recently stopped working on ITV-HD via satellite when ITV changed a parameter of the satellite signal (still within the DVB spec). I've had e-mail discussions with P about a s/w update but the probability of that is infinitesimally greater than zero. P stopped updating the s/w about a year after I bought it, and virtually all the 'smart TV' services on there at the time are now gone. My next TV won't be Panasonic!
I've recently bought a Samsung Blu-Ray player and that phones home to Korea all the time to find out what to do. It works a treat now but I wonder how long for.
"P stopped updating the s/w about a year after I bought it, and virtually all the 'smart TV' services on there at the time are now gone."
This sounds ripe for someone to hack the "smart"ness (embedded linux) and preduce custom firmware.
Meantime I'll stick with my fileserver running Plex Media Server and a small HTPC.
"This sounds ripe for someone to hack the "smart"ness (embedded linux) and preduce custom firmware."
In principle, maybe. But why bother, when the innards of a "smart for a while" TV are generally massively underpowered and almost completely undocumented. Why not something reasonably recent and powerful with reasonable documentation and plenty of software that you can get off the shelf (with accessories) for £50 or so for hardware.
Maybe the add-on kit doesn't integrate quite so nicely into the "user experience" (spit), what with needing another remote control. I think many people might put up with that. Quite a few seem to be here already.
Panasonic got added to my 'Sony' list, and there they remain.
And yet Panasonic is a gigantic company and you really can't tar the whole thing with the same brush. I use Panasonic projectors almost exclusively at work because they are far and away the best things I've seen. Yes, some of the newer ones are getting "smarter" (in the sense that they can do HDMI over ethernet, split screen and the like) but they also - even the flashiest models - talk "PJLINK", which is a very simple network-carried control protocol, and have real, geniune serial ports if your control system prefers.
Not cheap compared with some, but well worth the money. At least, the "fixed installation" range that I buy from. Can't say anything about the "home / portable" range...
M.
"Hasn't been anything worth watching on TV in ... uh ... Probably ever."
Excactly.
I -literally- threw my TV set out the door years ago (yes, it was still a CRT type), didn't miss it for one second ever since.
Besides; having no TV in the house switches the kids their brains back on.
> "Bet it looks lovely in the front garden, complementing the stained mattress and rusty washing machine."
No. It landed on top of said stained mattress, next to the rusty washing machine. In a garbage container. The lot now serving as landfill somewhere in China.
My dog -a Rottweiler- died 8 years ago and I never owned a Cortina. Hence I'm not brilliant enough to even come close to Geoffrey Hughes. The TV set had something in common with Onslow's set though: It had to be kickstarted every now and then.
It never takes long for the smug "I never watch TV" brigade to jump into a thread about TV to tell the rest us how superior they are.
As someone else has pointed out, how do these smug people actually know if there's nothing worth watching on TV? Is because the Open University no longer broadcast their modules and they can tell just be glancing at the TV schedules once per year that the OU haven;t started up again?
<sigh> here's the obligatory XKCD
First: English: is not my native language, please go right ahead making remarks about grammar and/or misspellings.
Second: superiority: it is my impression many in here are feeling superior simply because they can write a script and/or get Linux to work properly.
Third: back to TV: Producing 'TV' costs huge amounts of money; Studio/broadcast equipment costs huge amounts of money; Staffing all this costs huge amounts of money. All of which has to be paid for with taxpayers and/or advertising money.
This means the product 'TV' _has_ to be distilled down to the least common denominator and has to be immensely politically correct. Otherwise the product simply won't sell.
Personally I try and keep myself informed via the interwebs. Noticing what various 'TV content providers' try stuffing down my throat via the internet is enough for me to conclude there's nothing worth watching on TV. Everything that _is_ worth watching can be found and bought elsewhere.
And if I really, really want to watch this football game? I go over to the pub around the corner and watch it there.
Now go stare at your 16 foot smart screen and gobble up whatever they serve you. In full-HD of course. And that is fine with me. Just as it should be fine with you that I don't feel the need for having 'TV'. Nothing superior about that.
"Producing 'TV' costs huge amounts of money; Studio/broadcast equipment costs huge amounts of money; Staffing all this costs huge amounts of money. "
Maybe it used to. There's no reason why it should in 2016.
In the UK, many areas have a "commnunity" TV channel of one kind or another (e.g. Freeview channel 8). Such a channel was also part of the licensing obligations of the earlier cable rollouts. These channels haven't spent a fortune on kit or facilities. The quality of the content tends to be a bit variable (to put it politely) but that's not because they haven't got the kit to make decent programmes, it's for a different reason.
Are these backend servers for gathering data to serve ads or actually needed to run the apps? I'd like to believe the apps would run without them, but, if the only reason the servers are needed is additional profits for Pana selling ads then they should get their hands slapped and then some.
I have a FireFoxOS phone, assuming the TV's work the same way most of the apps are not apps as such, they are just API files that interact with a HTML website. So if they can't talk to the website, you are screwed.
Most of my games on the phone are shortcuts to github for example.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Firefox_OS_apps/Building_apps_for_Firefox_OS
What turns a Panasonic smart TV into a Dumb TV, about five years and total indifference from Panasonic.
I have a five year old Panasonic smart TV that can't even read the EPG any more. Have tried using their 'support' service and they blame it on the broadcasters. Even though Panasonic have used a 3rd party EPG (GuidePlus) rather than the Freeview one and it is surely within their capabilities to do a firmware update.
Won't buy any Panasonic sh1te again.
I have been looking to buy a decent TV without the apps crap but I don't think they exist. All technology is the same now. A schoolkid writes an app to do something noone needs and it get built into any piece of electronics.Why do I need an internet toothbrush or washing machine? Oh I know - so it can keep loading ads and checking for software updates because the junk never works.
I would try to use monitor only TV screen with my old STB, if they still exist but last time I checked on these the price was exhorbitant.
There will be a backlash eventually for people wanting real hardware without builtin junkware at a premium price, but this will be built by artisans or "makers" with 3d printers etc, but I can't wait for this.
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