Does anyone here have experience of the pre-Android Sony Bravia (around 2013)? After years of ignoring the ‘smart’ features on ours, I got curious and started experimenting. What I have found is simply unbelievable. It is so broken on so many levels that I have to wonder how a manufacturer like Sony could screw something up this badly. Maybe there is something wrong with our TV?

Even if there is, that does not explain the so-called ‘apps’ that come with the TV. I am completely mystified how anyone ever could have thought that such an endless collection of pointless rubbish videos could be a selling point for anyone, yet there they are. The fact that they cannot be deleted or organised in any way also doesn’t help. The reason I mention them, though, is that they all play fine. Good quality, no buffering or hiccups. That is important for the rest of my complaint.

Amongst the apps is the Opera store. Here are some things, also mostly rubbish, that can be added to the Sony. A few are actually interesting. There are two that make it possible to view external playlists on the Sony. One is called OTT Player, the other SS IPTV.

Finally, there is the built-in ‘browser’ . I put it in quotes because it is without question the absolute worst browser I have ever seen. Apart from the unhandiness of the controls, it mainly works only to display Sony advertising. For anything else it repeatedly freezes and even when it doesn’t it takes forever to load anything. So far I have not succeeded in getting a single video to play on it.

All of this has a surprisingly amateurish look and feel. The browser is simply hopeless but I thought I might at least be able to view some external playlists through one of the players mentioned above. My intention was to make my own playlists with legal content if I could get it to work. I did try a range of pirate lists at first (for testing purposes only) as well as a couple of legitimate ones I found after much searching (they aren’t easy to find). All give the same result: Playback is choppy, with constant buffering and it freezes or drops the connection after several seconds. This is on a LAN connection, not wi-fi.

I have a streaming computer next to the TV. All the same links work fine on it. As mentioned above, the built-in apps also work fine, so I don’t see how the problem can be related to my Internet connection.

At first I tried the OTT Player for the external links. After experiencing the playback problems, I looked for something else and found SS IPTV but had identical issues with that. These are the only two players in the Opera Store that can be used with the Sony.

So is this TV just a pile of crap? I know there are other ways to accomplish what I want, but I would like to understand the problems I have encountered. I actually bought the Sony as a dumb monitor, and it works fine for that. At the time, reviews indicated that it had the best picture quality for the price and that is what I wanted. In that regard it hasn’t disappointed, but it is also supposed to be a ‘smart’ TV and in that regard it seems pretty useless to me. Can anyone offer any enlightenment as to why internal apps stream fine, but anything else, even the built-in browser, constantly chokes? Is anyone else actually able to stream external content on this model? The one I have is the KDL W670.