3 Cool Things You Can Still Do With Your Not Smart TV

Smart TVs are taking the home entertainment arena by storm. Everyone is buying into the concept of a TV that not only connects to your cable service provider, but also hooks up to the internet to browse through an endless stream of free and on-demand entertainment. While this is a great way to keep fresh and entertaining content on our TVs, it does pose a problem to anyone who invested in an ultra-high definition or a big LED TV just before smart TVs caught on.

You can do many interesting things with your old TV, especially if it has an HDMI and a USB port. Your screen is still a great display unit that can connect to a wide range of gadgets if you have the right cables or protocols.

Hook It to Something Smarter

This is by far the simplest way to gain more years for your still-usable TV. That it cannot access the internet, stream music on YouTube, or access Spotify on its own doesn’t necessarily make it archaic. You can hook it to a PC via HDMI, making it smarter than any TV in the world.

If you want something more compact while still enjoying the traditional battles for remote control supremacy, get yourself an Android set-top box, an Apple TV box, a Chromecast dongle or Amazon Fire stick. All these will go into your HDMI port and give your TV the smart capabilities of a regular, smart TV. This could be a great way to avoid the high prices that come with purchasing next-gen hardware on or around its release date.

Use It as a Dedicated Gaming Console Display

Very few families are willing to spend good bucks on their child’s gaming console display. While very few kids will notice the difference, letting them have some access to that retired LED TV is way better than leaving it to languish and gather dust in the garage. You will get a peace of mind enjoying your new smart TV, and you kids will enjoy better clarity on their games. They will also have a decent screen they will use straight into their late teenage years.

Most current generation gaming consoles have a HDMI port that you can use to send full HD content to your old LED screen. This will produce a decent display that could even be good enough for you if you want to play a game or two. You get to separate the gaming console from the living room TV, reducing annoying conflicts.

Hook It to a Sizable External Hard Disk

If you are comfortable with browsing through offline media, you most probably have a sizable collection of media stashed away on your computer hard disks. A good way to bring you’re not-so-smart TV back to life is by hooking it up to a sizable hard disk with all this interesting media. All you need is a TV with a USB port and the ability to read the most popular file systems formats in the market.

You will have to swap the content on your hard disk every now and then — unless you don’t mind repeating the classics stored on your hard disk.

Buying a Smart TV Is Inevitable

You can postpone the retirement of your current TV, but you cannot put it off forever. Sometime in the future, you will have to give in and finally invest in a true, smart TV. Even though smart set top boxes and dongles like the Chromecast and Amazon Fire might still get the job done, they are not as versatile and diverse as a smart TV.

Smart TVs bring more than just internet access to the equation. Compared to the work-arounds mentioned here, they offer you more energy efficiency, better image and sound processing, and better native programming control that could even let you automate your audio visual entertainment experience with ease.