It seems that no matter how expensive a smart TV is, performance always gets worse over time. With laggy menus, slow apps, and a deteriorating user experience. You might hink this is just inevtiable as apps get updates and need faster hardware, but you can eke out some small performance gains with the TV you already have here and there.
These different gains can add up to where you’ll notice the difference, and some of these settings should be tweaked, even if they don’t make a difference to the perceived speed of your TV at all.
Your TV isn’t slow—it’s just overstuffed
Regardless of the brand or operating system, smart TVs all have background processes just like any computer, and not all of these are essential or even beneficial to you. There are processes that check for and handle background updates, some manage advertising (yuck!), and others are simply watching and tracking how you use your TV.
Credit: Jason Fitzpatrick / How-To Geek
Running these processes isn’t free either in terms of processing power or, indeed, literal electrical power, and they may be partly responsible for a laggy interface and apps that are slow to load. So it’s time to roll up your sleeves and turn them off to see if it makes any difference.
Always-on tracking and data collection
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek
In case you didn’t know, many modern smart TVs have a “feature” called Automatic Content Recognition or ACR, which watches everything you watch on your TV. Not just what you stream on a smart app through the TV itself, but even private movies you watch on a DVD player or the games you play on a console. This data is sent back to home base for analysis, so the company can build a profile about your watching habits and interests and then sell that information to third parties or even use it to market things to you directly via your TV.
Not only is this extremely creepy behavior, if you ask me, but it uses up memory, CPU cycles, and the internet bandwidth you pay for. However, even if this made no difference to my TV’s performance at all, I would still want to turn it off.
The tricky part is that different brands and models of TV have wildly different steps to disable ACR, and many of them use confusing menus and language to prevent you from easily finding the toggles. This means that you’ll have to look up the steps for your specific TV in order to get to the right options, but there’s a great compilation by Consumer Reports that documents the steps for most major TV brands and operating systems—so start there.
Background app updates and “smart” recommendations
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Even when your TV is in standby, it’s still working hard and even drawing a significant amount of power from the wall. It’s checking the web for app updates. refreshing those “recommendations” on your home screen, preloading assets like artwork, and more.
That sounds convenient, and to some extent it is, but it’s another set of background processes that can slow down what’s happening in the foreground. Personally, I have a fast, modern internet connection and I don’t bother to update streaming apps until it literally tells me I have to update, or I can’t watch my shows. It usually only takes a few seconds on a modern broadband connection, so why let the TV spend effort checking for updates all the time if it only saves me a few seconds once in a blue moon?
To fix this, disable auto app updates and personalized recommendations. However, again, this changes over time and across TV brands.
If you stop these background fetches from happening, you should have snappier responsiveness, faster wake-up times, and apps opening faster. At least, that’s what I experience on my TCL and LG sets, but it’s not like I used a stopwatch, so it might be placebo?
Energy-saving and post-processing
I’ve written before about how eco-modes can hurt image quality and, these days, TVs tend to ship with eco features activated by default. There’s nothing wrong with that, if you want to save energy, but it can have an impact on performance. After all, limiting the speed of the processors in a computer, even one shaped like a TV, is a key way to trim the peak wattage.
However, that also means you may have less performance when starving the TV of power (and therefore clock speed) than if you just let it run as fast as it can. Hey, maybe disabling the advertising and spyware will offset the extra energy needed to run the TV as intended!
Likewise, post-processing of your image also consumes processing power, and it can also cause input delay which you might perceive as a laggy system because it makes things on the screen happen longer after pressing a button on your remote. You’ll have to decide what forms of post-processing you can live without, but one that’s worth turning off in every situation is “motion smoothing” which really only exists to make low-quality sports broadcasts look better and shouldn’t touch any other sort of content. Turning off features like TruMotion (LG), MotionFlow (Sony), or Auto Motion Plus (Samsung) not only makes the image look more natural but also lightens the processing load.
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek
Too many apps, not enough memory
Most smart TVs have very little RAM, not much storage, and you’ve probably got a bunch of apps installed that you never use. So the last thing you can try is auditing the apps on your TV, deleting all the ones that our TV overlords will allow, and then cleaning out the caches for the apps that you want to keep. Reboot your TV after this, and then hopefully it will be closer to the snappy performance it had when it was new.
Ultimately, however, your smart TV is going to slow down as new OS versions and new app updates become too much for the hardware to handle. Which is why I prefer simply bypassing the smart TV’s own operating system and using an external device like an Apple TV instead, which I can upgrade without replacing my TV. Just remember to turn off ACR!
Credit: Apple
Brand
Apple
Operating System
tvOS
Resolution
4K
Ports
HDMI
