Do you own a Samsung TV? Chances are that when you turned it on this week, you couldn’t use it because there was an issue with Samsung’s servers that caused the smart interface to essentially be inoperable.
Reports indicated that most apps on Samsung’s Tizen smart hub couldn’t be accessed. Most apps, that is, aside from Netflix, which routes data through its own apps and many users reported the service was still working.
All of which would seem to indicate that the fault lies with the Samsung Smart Hub, and not anywhere else.
Always connected – except when you’re not
As TV smart interfaces take on a more important role, TV brands have tried to differentiate themselves from others, as well as create an ecosystem through which users feel comfortable and want to keep using. It’s all part of the goodwill a TV manufacturer establishes to retain its customers instead of losing them to another TV brand.
However, the all-consuming focus on Internet-powered features has its rather obvious pitfalls. If a TV can’t access its servers for any reason, you’re left not with a smart TV but a rather ‘dumb’ one.
Even worse, if there’s an issue with the servers themselves, then it could lead to what Samsung TV customers experienced this week – an outage that affects practically every Samsung TV owner across the world.
Issues such as these are something of a win for physical media. Despite its disadvantages compared to streaming’s convenience, your discs aren’t going to be affected by a server outage.
They can function on their own and don’t need the Internet to survive – though that’s not to say that 4K Blu-ray can exist entirely without the Internet. Some playback issues can be remedied by a firmware update for the 4K player, as has been common over the last few years.
There’s been issues with apps on some TVs not working because the app is no longer compatible (it’s just become too advanced for it). Manufacturers often update the firmware to the point where older devices don’t have the processing power to run the latest firmware, essentially making them useless because your apps will no longer update or work.
If you want to become an Internet agnostic, you’ll have to go pre-Internet.
A flick of a switch could cause havoc
Some owners won’t understand that a fault on the server can render their TV almost unusable, but this shouldn’t really be a surprise. It’s a problem that is likely to happen more often than not as entertainment moves further into an online-connected future.
A Samsung TV needs to be able to access the Internet. I’ve seen a proper reset carried out on a Samsung 8K TV, not a hard reset but one that wipes away data from the TV’s internal hardware, and to re-download all the information and set up the Samsung Smart Hub took a considerable amount of time. And I’m not talking five minutes here.
Smart TVs these days are not much more than a mere husk, a void really to be filled with data that comes from servers that are nowhere near your location. A TV cannot properly function without the Internet – it is co-dependent on that relationship, so it can monitor and track what’s happening on the TV. As soon as that connection is severed, your TV is in major trouble.
We’ve seen UK retailers brought to their knees through cyber-attacks. Airports struggled when the CrowdStrike IT outage happened due to a faulty update in 2024. Sky has had issues in the past year of its service going down for hours because of a firmware update. Even at Trusted, we’re affected if our platform experiences any issues.
These issues are nothing new, but considering the relative complexity of these devices, there’s always a risk that something unaccounted for could go wrong. It was a source of humour/tension/jeopardy in films with the idea that someone could press a button and the whole world could be affected; but like most things, fiction has become reality.
We could always turn our backs on the Internet, as I imagined some might be advocating right now, but that’s unlikely to happen. We’re wedded to the Internet, our devices inextricably entangled, and your day could veer from good to bad depending on your access to the Internet.
Whether you like it or not, this is not the future anymore, this is our current state of reality. On Samsung’s Homescreen it tends to say that “Everything you want is here”, but as this outage has shown, that’s not entirely true.
