My only point here is that all smart TVs are not equal, and mine is stupid, so perhaps Hal's doesn't act as it should either. The reviewer of my TV on the net suggested everyone who had one should get Chromecast to make it work properly. Not being a fan of Google, I chose the Firestick instead. Other than the connectivity, this TV is fine and even survived being thrown to the floor in the November earthquake.
With your indulgence, I'm putting this matter on the back burner for awhile while I set up my newly-arrived above-ground pool! Hal
Good luck with the pool. And when you get back to your streaming video questions, read this article from CNET.
Beth, thanks so much for taking me under your wing and painstakingly walking me through the steps, over many of which I stumble! That CNET article looks like it could be of further help! I'll get back at a later time... Cheers, Hal
Hey...if I play one of my standard DVD's on a friend's Blu-Ray player, will there be any change in resolution or audio fidelity? Thanks, Old Hal
No reason why there should be..all Blue-ray players should be capable of playing standard DVD's without any problems
It's odd that the opening post in this thread seems to have nothing to do with the title. However, using the opening post as a basis for the topic of this thread, I will say that I can no longer hook up a DVD player up to my television successfully. Although doing this was easy enough when VHS, and then DVD, players first came out, I don't seem to be able to do that anymore. A couple of years back, I bought a Blu-Ray player to see what all the fuss was about. I couldn't get it to work, so it's sitting in a box somewhere, or maybe my wife sold it on eBay, as I haven't seen it lately. When I was doing the DVD options with Netflix, I was using a separate monitor to play the movie but would have preferred to be able to play them on the television, so I bought a regular DVD player, having given up on the Blu-Ray idea. It is sitting on the shelf below my television now. Although the instructions seemed clear enough, I could never get it to play. Using the thread title as a basis for determining the topic of this thread, after several years of streaming, my evaluation of some of the streaming networks are: Netflix - Easily the best choice, the biggest annoyance being that there are as many foreign-language films now as there are English-language ones. This wouldn't bother me if I didn't have to wade through all the ones that are in languages that I can't understand while looking for those that I could understand. Customers should have an option to choose the languages that they want to have presented to them as options. For that matter, why aren't the descriptions in the same language that the film is in? Sometimes, the description will say that it's a foreign film, but not always. I don't mind Swedish, Norwegian, or German, but I'm lost when it comes to some of the other ones. Hulu - Hulu has a lot of choices, perhaps even more than Netflix, but the presentation is confusing to me. I have a hard time finding anything on Hulu. Another annoyance is that they often remove episodes of the series that they play so, by the time I become aware that they have a series that I might be interested in, the first few episodes are no longer there. Plus, I get disconnected from Hulu a lot, and I am almost never disconnected from Netflix. Amazon - I have Amazon Prime, and they do offer a pretty large selection of worthwhile movies on Amazon Prime. However, they rarely add new ones, so I have seen pretty much everything that I want to see on Amazon Prime a few years ago, and I can't afford to pay for a lot of movies. Disney - Perhaps they'll add more one day but, the last time I looked, they had almost nothing for anyone over the age of five. Epix, Starz, Showtime - After the first week, you've seen everything that you want to see. Google Play - When I am willing to pay for a movie, I have a better chance of finding one that I want to watch on Google Play than from Amazon. Still, I use Google Play maybe two or three times a year, at most. YouTube - I have looked at it a few times, but I don't know if I have ever watched a movie on the YouTube channel. I don't see much there for free, and if I am willing to pay Google for a movie, I'll probably find it easier on Google Play.
If you have a smart TV, it comes programmed for streaming, as @Lois Winters said. However, even if you do not have a smart TV, you can stream all kinds of movies and television programs if you get a little box device called a Roku. The Roku connects to the internet just like your laptop does, and also connects to your television, so that you can watch programs and movies that you would normally only be able to watch with your laptop, desktop, or tablet. If it is a network that requires a subscription (like Netflix or Disney ), you still pay for that subscription each month, but once you purchase the Roku, there is no other charge for using it, and there are a huge bunch of free channels that you can watch with it. I think that Google has a similar device, and both Amazon and Apple have one, but the Roku seems to be the cheapest and is easy to use. We had one with our other television, but when it started working intermittently, (the television, not the Roku), we gave it away when we got another television that was a smart TV and already connected to the internet itself. We don’t have any kind of cable or paid television service anymore. Bobby put up one of those small antennas, which brings in the local stations, and the smart TV receives just about anything else we might want to watch. If you are interested in streaming, you might want to look up Roku on YouTube and see in depth how it operates, @Patsy Faye .