How Can I Turn My Old TV into a Smart TV?
3D television was more like a fad and it came and left and is not a big deal now but Smart TVs seem to be here to stay for quite some time and with more and better features too. Smart TVs as you may well know offer different special functions like letting you browse the internet, connect an external storage or a USB key and access different multimedia content installed on your computer. And even if your TV does not have such functionality there are many ways of turning it into a smart TV by connecting certain devices so that you can access and view content like Amazon Prime and Netflix or you simply may want to surf the net on your TV screen and you can be sure that you don’t have to pay a lot to achieve that. And there are actually different ways of turning your old TV into a smart TV.
The first and the simplest way to do it is by connecting your computer- laptop, desktop or tablet to your TV via an HDMI or a mini HDMI port and use a wireless Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and view your computer screen directly on your HDTV screen and view online content. Sure this is not the nicest or the neatest way of achieving smart functionality but it is very simple and costs very little if any. Or again as a cheap solution if you already have a gaming console at home you may want to connect your Play Station 3, Play Station 4, XBox One and XBox 360 as they are capable of streaming movies or letting you browse the internet even though it may not be the easiest thing to do to log into your Netflix account or to put the movie names in. Then you have the Roku as one of the best complete solutions on the market as it is good for streaming stick or dongle that lets you stream movies, Youtube videos and other content and you just connect it to your HDMI output and get signal from your home wireless router and you can start using it through its remote or your mobile phone screen and use its great on demand smart TV functionality.
Google Nexus Player as a simple card based interface is a very small round shaped box with Chromecast-like features of Google Cast that offers a decent but not really a perfect way of using Android TV as it doesn’t have an Ethernet port and comes with limited storage. Amazon Fire TV Stick with a dual core processor, 8GB storage and 1GB memory is a low cost, small, powerful and simple way of making your regular TV much smarter, again by plugging into the HDMI port (works with most HDMI ports unlike Chromecast). It has a good selection of apps like Amazon’s Prime Instant Video, iPlayer, Netflix, Spotify for streaming music and Sky News. And Google Chromecast is probably our favorite of the lot as it is a cheap and amazing way of using smart apps on your television- a great media streaming adapter with ease of set-up and use functionality, working very smoothly, with many apps available but it has no remote control and some apps are not on it yet. So you have a few options for turning your old television into a smart TV and costs and functionalities are different for each so it will come down to what you already have available at home, what you want to achieve and how much you want to spend.