UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.

With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.

To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.

When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.

The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.

I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.

My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays). I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and channel down a damned TV any more.

This, 100%.

I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).

Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.

When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.

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.

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.

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.

People say this after buying the cheapest $500 65” TV they can find or plugging in a $35 Roku.

You get what you pay for.

I’m honestly not even sure if consumer apathy is the fault of these mega corporations. They’re just giving people what they want.

They don’t want to pay a premium for TV (ads), they don’t want to pay $200 for a set top box (slow UI), they don’t want to pay for media per-use (declining blu-ray and digital purchase sales, death of the DVD rental/bargain bin market).

I have people in my life who have Amazon TVs all over their house and yell voice commands at them over and over while these cheap TVs are too slow to respond and they think it’s a good experience. People are dumb.

They read it but vice versa.

The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.

For people looking at OSS, Phoniebox seems to be the popular/mature project: https://phoniebox.de/index-en.html

(My partner and I are building one for our daughter)

We have a Yoto here as well, for our six-year-old.

The concept is great - RFID as a replacement for cassette audiobooks (with fewer storage limitations!).

I do wish it integrated better with sources of free audiobooks. The Libby app gets us access to a lot of audiobooks through the public library, many of which are not even available for purchase through the Yoto player. We can only use it to play them for him as a Bluetooth speaker from our phones, which removes a lot of the utility of the player (he can't navigate chapters, we can't set a sleep timer, we can't use our phones for other things).

The concept is great though and the specific product, walled content garden notwithstanding, has been a net win for us.

The blank cards they sell are great. We borrow audio books from the library and I rip them to a card, you can reuse them as well so don’t need to buy too many. I also put radio streams on them, like classical stations for when my sons going to bed.