Scope

Changelog

Hardware Platform

Navigation Philosophy

Launcher

Voice Assistant

Google Assistant

Search

Commands

Amazon Alexa

Media Playback

Video

Motion - Everything 60Hz

Supported Codecs

HDR / Dolby Vision

Audio Passthrough

Network Streaming

Photos

Broadcast TV

Channel Setup

TV Guide

PVR

PiP & Timeshifting… NOT!

Apps

Netflix

Prime Video

YouTube

Google Play Movies & TV

Mobile Helpers

Chromecast built-in

Android TV Remote Control

Keyboards

Storage

Standby

Remote start

Bloat- & Spyware

Support & Security

Verdict

I am not really a video purist and there are lots of reviews which cover image quality of today’s TVs in great detail. So I am concentrating more on the functional aspects which reviewers tend to ignore but are in my opinion much more important to the satisfaction of the average TV buyer.

This review has been conducted with a 2019 non-Master Series BRAVIA model. The purpose is to reflect the current state of Sony’s integration of Android TV, therefore being subject to frequent changes based on latest findings, but also to give advice on how to squeeze the maximum out of a Sony BRAVIA with Android TV operating system.

[2021-06-09] Reflecting Google’s recent updates to the Launcher and Search

[2020-12-02] Introducing Android TV 9 Pie

The TV market is quite a bit different from the smartphone one. A SoC is typically used much longer as was the case with MediaTek’s MT5891 which has been deployed to four BRAVIA generations between 2016 and 2019 in the form of Sony’s ATV2 and ATV3 platforms. This SoC comes equipped with four equal ARM Cortex A53 CPU cores running at only 1GHz, 2GB of RAM and OpenGL ES 3.2/Vulkan 1.0 compliant ARM Mali T860 MP2 graphics. While I am convinced that this is sufficient for most common TV tasks, Sony has a track record of cluttering the Android TV operating system on BRAVIA with all kinds of bloat- and spyware which runs in the background, occupying hundreds of megabytes RAM, inevitably leading to frequent background app killing due to shortage. As an iPhone user I have to say that navigation isn’t exactly smooth on BRAVIA with quite some lagging and apps starting rather slowly. As time goes by, the system becomes noticeably more sluggish and less stable each and every day. Reminds a bit of the good old Windows 95 days. Reboots every now and then are inevitable. The long power button press quickly becomes your best friend.

In late 2019, Sony finally started deploying a new chipset with their Master Series models, unfortunately still being a buggy MediaTek (MT5893), however more than doubling down on CPU and GPU performance compared to the previous MT5891. In 2020, the MediaTek MT5891 from 2016 has finally been sent to retirement with the whole lineup being based on newer chipsets. Deploying MediaTek’s S900 (MT9950/MT5895) marks another major milestone in Sony’s roadmap for their lucrative midrange line of products, moving to a more cost effective single-chip design, using the SoC’s neural network accelerator for image processing instead of an expensive FPGA.

We live in times with sophisticated graphics which intuitively guide us through and mature voice recognition. Over are the days when we had to search our infrared bone for the appropriate button… you may think…

Sony did not manage to completely pull the “D-pad only” navigation paradigm with only the up-down-left-right controls through. In fact, Sony’s remote is conceptually identical to remotes of pre-smart TV times. For some people who are used to controlling their old-fashioned equipment via HDMI-CEC, the clunky and button packed remote might be a nice gadget. I believe in this one single and easy to use device however that can satisfy all my media consumption needs (+ sound system for which only volume control is needed).

Even Google isn’t exactly clear on how their TV products are supposed to be controlled. Streaming boxes typically come with a D-pad. Google also did this little app called Android TV Remote Control which pretty much defines all necessary controls. On the other hand there is Chromecast which implies a totally different philosophy. The two can easily coexist in one single product though.

Sony abandoned their One-Flick touchpad remote in 2016, merging voice functionality into the big bone, which in my opinion was a huge step backwards. Samsung made a bold move by going with their voice enabled and D-pad based Smart Remote only. Even though I am no big fan of Samsung I have to give them credit for that. They did bite the bullet and optimized the UI and accompanied apps throughout, whereas on BRAVIA you’ll find different navigation philosophies, none of which is completely pulled through.

Despite having Bluetooth Smart onboard, button presses are transmitted via directional infrared. So this still is Stone Age with respect to how we interact with our BRAVIA in 2019 as voice control does not seem to be quite there yet. Or why else would you add Google Play and Netflix buttons?

There is really a lack of a clear input concept throughout. It is just a mingle-mangle of half-baked and antiquated approaches. What I am quite glad about is that Sony didn’t jump on the “air mouse” train which has been hyped as THE next big thing in TV when LG released their Magic Remote. Just like with Samsung’s late gesture control, I found navigation to be much more cumbersome. Looks like I wasn’t the only one as both companies have been backpedaling ever since. Going with a simple D-pad with built-in mic for voice control probably makes the most sense today. It is only a matter of a decent voice assistant, which do exist (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Bixby, Cortana), plus educating people.

The launcher is Android TV’s central entry point and media hub for which Google has recently issued an update, posing as kind of a compromise between the old launcher and the new Google TV one, offering both, the familiar app-centric channel-based home screen and a Google curated guide in the form of a separate Discover tab.

This two-tier approach can either be regarded as a mild transition to the new interface or an admission that neither of the two ideas crack the TV right now as neither do a lot of apps integrated with channels in a meaningful way with service providers seemingly posting arbitrary content like non-personalized highlights or trending stuff, nor does Google’s very own content curation reach very far with Netflix recently having been stripped from the list of supported services, leaving only Prime Video, Disney+ and the local Joyn in Germany. The algorithm does not seem to be particularly smart about our viewing habits either with the interface lacking the possibility to finetune recommendations by rating and marking content as watched. Another central aspect of the Google TV experience currently missing is the Watchlist. While being similar to the Play Next channel, the Watchlist is entirely driven by the user, perfectly being integrated with mobile Android and the Chrome browser, adding the ability to post content from virtually any device.

It still feels like one has to deep-dive into every single app in order to browse the respective service’s content, resulting in Google’s content curation algorithm not getting trained. In order for Google to become the super-aggregator and curator we’ve all been waiting for, a Utopia in which all of our desired services seamlessly integrate through one unified interface, the biggest challenge seems to be getting content providers on board, including local ones. Some however seem not to be willing to put content recommendations and discovery into the hands of another party.

The Android TV launcher’s intrusiveness contradicts the minimal approach that many other smart TV vendors like LG and Samsung are taking, only occupying a narrow ribbon at the very bottom rather than the whole screen. With Google having traded in background playback for video previews, bringing up the home screen rips you out of whatever you have just been watching. Contrary to what Google demoed at their I/O conference back in 2017, even their own apps still lack support for the feature. Pretty poor trade in my opinion. Another bad decision has been the removal of the task switcher, allowing for quick hopping between recently used apps and app killing in case of a system slowdown or inconsistent app state. nVIDIA restored the feature for their SHIELD TV which can be accessed by double-pressing the HOME button.

Even six years after its launch, Android TV remains ill-suited for families and multi-user households, lacking the possibility to switch between profiles with user-tailored curation and age-appropriate restrictions in place. I don’t like my kids to be confronted with horror movies. Neither do I want my recommendations to be spoiled by my wife’s drama/romance biased recommendations. Limited Google account switching has been introduced with Nougat which however does not solve the problem for 3rd party apps, also not influencing what is presented on the home screen with channels not being customizable per account. The only upside is the possibility to quickly switch between YouTube profiles.

Voice control is not science-fiction anymore, but a key feature of today’s smart devices. So-called assistants are also supposed to improve interaction with the TV, especially with regards to searching for content, but also to controlling it via spoken commands. Wouldn’t it be cool to ask things like ‘show me new/top/recommended/most recently watched movies/TV shows’ and it would return results from any installed service? Content discovery done right…

Google Assistant

Search

Commands

Unfortunately Google Assistant has not yet been made available in quite some countries in which you are therefore limited to the ancient Google Now. Assistant doesn’t change things in a dramatic way on the TV though. Neither is it possible to find content across your apps/services nor can you control a hell of a lot.

One of the biggest issues about Assistant on BRAVIA arises when outputting audio over HDMI-ARC in which case the first 1-2s of each voice response are effectively being swallowed. Early Oreo firmware versions worked around this issue by routing the Assistant’s voice response via the TV’s internal speaker. I actually liked the idea but it may have led to other problems as the workaround has eventually been withdrawn.

Even though not being too big a fan of Amazon’s business practices and ethics, their services are quite worthwhile which is why I happen to be a Prime member, also owning an Alexa-enabled smart speaker which allowed me to try the respective Alexa skill for BRAVIA (Sony’s TV - Basic). For those with an iPhone wanting to try the technology, there is also a respective app which unleashes the full Alexa potential without requiring an Echo for example.

The skill is rather limited in functionality. Searching for content is not supported at all. It is however possible to turn the BRAVIA on and off, control things like playback (play state and volume) and to switch TV channels or the input source. Most commands are not working properly though. The Sony Android TV skill fails to match many German channels. Switching channels by number isn’t very practical either. Audio control via HDMI-CEC/ARC is not usable as volume can only be changed in steps of one. Unmuting didn’t work at all.

Alexa integration feels pretty half-assed. The respective skill only received a 2.5* rating by users on the Amazon Appstore. But hey, Sony can now write “Alexa built in” on their boxes…

BRAVIAs neither support automatic nor manual refresh rate switching in order to match it with video played through 3rd party apps, presenting at a permanent 60 frames per second which theoretically results in micro-judder for a lot of content here in Europe. The only exception seems to be the stock TV app, switching to 50Hz for smooth PAL playback.

Sony’s Motionflow is supposed to make up for it, being capable of upconverting everything to the native panel refresh rate. For 24p film content via apps, Sony’s image processor is capable of detecting the 3:2 pattern within the 60Hz signal, reverse it and perform a perfect 5:5 which only works for 120Hz panels though. For this to happen, one has to set Motionflow to True Cinema (or Custom with Smoothness=Min) and Film mode to High. In order to smoothen out the 3:2 pulldown judder on 60Hz panels or the inherent 24p stuttering due to the low frame rate, one can play around with Smoothness and Clearness in Motionflow Custom mode. Motion processing is one of Sony’s sweet spots. Optimal settings depend on the actual panel type and personal preferences.

Motion interpolation can also be engaged to mitigate motion judder while playing PAL content. Using Custom mode and somewhat raising the Smoothness slider results in decent frame rate conversion without introducing a too visible soap opera effect (SOE). The more you crank up that Smoothness, the more visible it gets and the more artifacting Sony’s implementation exhibits in scenes with lots of fast movement and panning. Don’t forget to also lift the Film mode (or CineMotion for U.S. models) setting as otherwise no frame interpolation is applied at all. Putting it to High (or Auto in more recent BRAVIAs) results in proper cadence detection for most video and film based content. So keep in mind that Film mode only determines for which content to apply frame interpolation, but not its magnitude which is controlled by the Motionflow Smoothness slider.

It always takes one or the other second for the motion processor to detect and lock on the given cadence, especially for interlaced PAL content. For some content, the TV even fails to lock or constantly loses lock, resulting in (intermittent) judder. Talking about interlaced content, the BRAVIA unfortunately does not perform frame doubling when being played back from inside apps via Android’s MediaCodec, resulting in half the motion resolution. The other time when motion interpolation becomes a bit of a pain is for fast ball sports action (like football or tennis) at a low 25 frames per second.

Several set-top boxes either support manual (nVIDIA SHIELD TV) or automatic (Apple TV) refresh rate switching based on the content that is being played, which purists for sure prefer over frame interpolation. APIs for mode/refresh rate switching exist as part of the Android SDK which are however not supported by BRAVIA. With my origin being HTPC, I’ve had a fair share of issues with switching refresh rate on-the-fly. Enough to not like the concept too much, also given the inconsistent UI response time at 24Hz versus 50/60Hz, which is why I do not totally disagree with the approach taken by Sony.

It isn’t possible to decode any modern video format at higher than SD resolutions in software on the underpowered ARM CPU/GPU combo. We are therefore pretty much limited to formats that can be decoded in hardware on MediaTek’s video decoder ASIC, which are plenty though, the most common ones being MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP (DivX, Xvid), H.264/AVC (Hi10P), H.265/HEVC (Main 10) and VP9(.2).

VC-1 Advanced profile, even though supported by the MediaTek video decoder ASIC, lacks proper driver support for the respective public Android MediaCodec API. Software decoding it at 1080p is just not feasible. Keep in mind that this format is used on quite some of the older Blu-ray releases. Respective rips therefore won’t play smoothly inside 3rd party apps on BRAVIA. The pre-installed Media Player app does not suffer from this issue as it accesses the hardware via some private low-level APIs (Stagefright/OpenMAX IL) instead of using the public Android ones.

So far, decoding has been fine for most modern video formats I threw at it at 24p (except for the mentioned VC-1 which however can’t exactly be described as modern anymore). In order to smoothly play high resolution high frame rate content like 2160p60, the whole video pipeline needs to be sufficiently optimized which currently isn’t the case. Neither is the Sony/MediaTek implementation of the MediaCodec APIs a good one nor do most apps make use of them in an efficient way. Even Google’s very own YouTube and Chromecast built-in are suffering from stuttery playback of such content.

It still feels like HDR is in its infancy on Android TV opposed to Apple’s tvOS. The most severe woe in my opinion is that non-video-planes are typically not tone-mapped in HDR mode. So there is always a distinct color- and luminance-shift in the UI elements which however also hurts while playing HDR content with true CinemaScope widescreen aspect, so content for which black letterbox bars are not encoded into the video, but have to be added by the TV. One will find those bars to be dark gray rather than pitch black.

Sony’s history of integrating Dolby Vision is also a difficult one. Apart from the massive delay and requiring external players to explicitly support a new “low latency” mode via firmware update, internal app support also suffers from limitations as BRAVIAs only support single-layer Dolby Vision (profile 5/dvhe.stn) which is common to streaming media. This implies that Ultra HD Blu-ray rips won’t play as HDR, just like the common LG trailers which are also dual-layer. This restriction only applies when the BRAVIA is acting as a Dolby Vision decoder in case of app/file playback. In case of HDMI, the connected player is responsible for handling the dual-layer decoding with the BRAVIA only acting as Dolby Vision display.

Unlike with HDR10 and HLG, where the video stream just has to be passed to the common HEVC/VP9 decoders for proper HDR playback, Dolby Vision requires some special app treatment, enumerating the compatible decoders and choosing the correct one based on the given profile and level. I successfully tested playback of some single-layer Dolby Vision files via the stock Video and MX Player apps. Others either failed to play the video (Kodi) or displayed the content at wrong colors/luminance (VLC).

Even with more recent chipsets supporting eARC, BRAVIAs are only capable of outputting ARC compatible audio formats for apps, meaning that uncompressed and lossless multi-channel audio formats (like LPCM, TrueHD or DTS-HD MA) are only supported for external HDMI devices. I still believe that the good old lossy Dolby and DTS formats are enough for the average home user with a soundbar anyway. And all modern audio formats by Dolby and DTS have some sort of backward compatibility baked in.

Sony has been struggling to get the Android passthrough APIs right forever. While Oreo has been a step in the right direction, finally adding support for DTS formats to be carried over HDMI-ARC, those are again absent from the list of supported encodings as of Pie. Apps like Plex, which rely on the reported capabilities, therefore revert to decoding DTS and outputting it as stereo PCM. Officially supported formats are AC3 (Dolby Digital) and EAC3 (DD+/Dolby Digital Plus), including EAC3 encoded Atmos (EAC3 JOC).

Sony’s Oreo firmware even pretended to support DTS-HD which indeed still works for apps not relying on the mentioned crippled capabilities reporting, like for example the stock Media Player app. Lossless DTS-HD MA works as such that the DTS compatible core is extracted for transmission which however does not work flawlessly at the current time with audio either frequently stuttering or cutting out altogether.

As for network connectivity, the whole Sony Android TV line-up till this very day features a 100mpbs Ethernet port only and Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) with 2x2 MIMO rated at 866mbps (on 80MHz wide channels). This looks perfectly sufficient for media streaming at first glance. However, Ultra HD Blu-ray specifies up to 128mpbs which disqualifies the Ethernet port right away. Question is though, whether you really want to waste 80-100GB per movie on your media server, not to mention streaming it off the internet.

In order to test the actual network playback performance over Wi-Fi, I used the jellyfish bitrate files which have been streamed off of a fast NAS using DLNA. I even went up to the 200mbps (25MB/s) sample which probably is a bit of overkill for 4K@30fps with a 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.

I first tried to play the samples off of a fast USB 3.0 HDD in order to verify that the SoC is capable of decoding HEVC at such a high bitrate (Main 10 High@Level 5.2). I also stress-tested my network infrastructure (NAS ⇒ Gibt Ethernet switch ⇒ Wi-Fi access point ⇒ Wi-Fi client station) in order to rule out any potential bottleneck. All tests went well with the network achieving a TCP throughput north of 500mbps (via iperf3) using an iPhone X as client at the same distance as the BRAVIA in direct line of sight of the access point.

With the BRAVIA being equipped with the same 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO configuration as the iPhone X, iperf3 attested a sustained download speed of “only” around 250mbps.

Throughput and connection stability drastically decrease with distance and obstacles between TV and the Wi-Fi access point. Radio design therefore does not seem to be too good on BRAVIA. Major bottleneck however seems to be the Wi-Fi controller internally being hooked up via USB2.0.

As for reliable video playback over network, the outcome very much depended on used protocol and app. CPU usage is quite high when transferring large amounts of data over network. The combination of VLC and DLNA gave me the best results, maxing out at 160mbps (at optimal radio conditions) after which playback suffered from occasional rebuffering.

Unfortunately, the jellyfish bitrate files are not available in 60p which would have stressed playback even more. The bigger the stream, the higher the CPU usage, the more fragile playback due to timing constraints which are fairly tight in case of 60p. In fact you might already face problems when playing the relatively thin 2160p60 YouTube clips which are <30mbps. VLC again performed best despite its platform independent nature, unfortunately lacking proper media management.

It is hard to make a final assessment of whether a Sony BRAVIA is the only playback device you’ll need or whether you are better off with a more powerful media streamer, supporting a greater variety of A/V formats and wired Gbit Ethernet. BRAVIAs have been designed with the relatively thin and standards compliant streams of the common OTT services in mind. So don’t expect too much.

Apart from video, 3rd party apps on Sony Android TV typically render their visuals at 1080p which then get upscaled to the native 4K panel resolution. Photos will therefore first get downscaled to 1080p, just to artificially be blown up to 4K further downstream. There is no public API for 3rd party apps to bypass the downscaling and render to the 4K output directly like it is possible for video via the MediaCodec API. The only app capable of doing exactly that is Sony’s pre-installed Media Player app, usability-wise being quite an improvement over the previous Album app. Diashows can now be paused and photos are not sorted in the reverse chronological order anymore but alphabetically instead. Sorting by date in ascending order would have been an even better solution. Unfortunately there is no way to change the interval at which photos are presented. Also the fading between photos takes a bit too long for my taste.

Browsing the DLNA Server for photos still suffers from some rather show stopping issues which USB playback does not suffer from. A diashow can for example not be started at a random photo but always starts at the very first photo within a folder. DLNA playback also lacks support for displaying EXIF metadata and location in case GPS data is present (via reverse geocoding).

There is also another way of viewing photos at 4K by using BRAVIA’s built-in DLNA Renderer. Several DLNA Control Point apps on mobile can be used to browse photos stored on a DLNA Server and cast them at full resolution. As for Chromecast, clients use the screen mirroring technique to display photos on the big screen, effectively encoding them into a 1080p H.264 video stream. Quality degradation again is inevitable. This has been tested with Google Photos on an iPhone.

I moved most of my media consumption to the web with well over 90% being on-demand.  I truly believe that linear TV via traditional means of distribution will be with us for quite some time to come which is why the topic can’t be ignored. Tuner integration is therefore still an important aspect of today’s TVs. From a hardware point-of-view, all European mid-range and high-end BRAVIAs feature true twin tuners, each supporting all common means of TV distribution such as DVB-S/S2, DVB-T/DVB-T2 and DVB-C. What sounds cool on paper has to be backed up by decent software though.

Many people think that Google does not care at all about linear TV, which is not true however, providing quite a comprehensive framework (known as TIF or TV Input Framework) for integrating live sources into Android TV, having seen significant updates in Marshmallow (6.0) and Nougat (7.0), adding APIs for Timeshifting, PVR and PiP. Google also provides a nice little viewer app called Live Channels on top, consolidating all live sources in a seamless way, perfectly being integrated with the Android TV experience. Unfortunately Sony didn’t follow suit. While you can install the app from the Google Play Store, you can’t make use of the advanced features such as Timeshifting or PVR as Sony does not implement the underlying APIs. Even the program guide isn’t fed with EPG data.

I would love to see Sony embracing Google’s TIF APIs as a whole, moving more in the direction of a vanilla Android TV. Sony just can’t do software, having ported over the TV menus from ancient BRAVIAs with the user interface therefore being dauntingly old-fashioned, not blending very well with the Android TV one. What you get is some unloving, unresponsive and mostly monochrome OSD. It feels as if it is coming from some cheap old external set-top box. So you basically have two separate systems to handle. The awful button packed Sony remote therefore makes sense which is a shame nonetheless.

The whole channel setup is a total mess, far from a common structure or naming conventions. Sony for example distinguishes between Digital and Satellite where Digital refers to cable (DVB-C) and terrestrial (DVB-T/T2) reception. Isn’t Satellite digital too? And why in the blue hell would you call your channel search/scan facility Digital Tuning?

Due to a lack of a comprehensive user manual, it is hard to find the right place where to create and edit favorite channels. The Action menu is your best friend. However, while the favorites editor is entered via the Action menu, the full channel list editor is to be found deep in the Settings menu. In a perfect world, one would never have to mess with the full channel list. Favorites on Sony are dramatically borked though.

Favorite channels, even though being re-sorted, retain the channel numbers from within the full channel list, resulting in the favorites channel numbering not being consecutive and impossible to remember. Navigating your favorite channels via numeric buttons therefore isn’t much fun. TV Guide and TV (former Discover) menu at least provide linear lists in the intended order to scroll through.

The most convenient way to switch between full and up to four favorite lists is by using the TV menu. What is really annoying though is that the TV autonomously reactivates the full channel list every time you turn the BRAVIA off and on again. So each time the BRAVIA is turned on, the channel list has to be switched back to favorites.

The flawed favorites implementation forced me into maintaining the full channel list, effectively turning it into a favorite list of its own. The respective editor inside the TV is hardly usable however. After having moved or deleted three channels, the bad usability and unresponsiveness of the UI have already driven you crazy. The Sony Channel Editor, being a PC-based tool available for Windows and Mac, is nothing but a poor attempt at improving the editing of channel and creation of favorite lists, either perfectly demonstrating Sony’s lack of a proper mindset for modern software development and technology or simply being the work of a student apprentice. PCs are not that popular anymore. Fiddling around with files has also lost its cool. A platform independent web-based thingy or mobile app would have been a much nicer solution, directly connecting to the channel list on the TV. The tool also suffers from some decisive flaws like for example favorite channels not being sortable.

When performing a full auto scan, all previously scanned channels are wiped, even the favorites, requiring one to start from scratch. So in order to add missing/new channels, one can either hope for the Auto Service Update to catch them up overnight or get acquainted with the rather painful manual frequency scanning. I wonder anyway how Sony maintains satellite transponder/frequency lists for the full auto scan. At least I couldn’t find a way to update them. I don’t think that a “full scan” performs a full-blown blind scan. So you can either perform a network scan and hope for the NIT (Network Information Table) to be up-to-date and complete on the predefined transponder or again resort to manual frequency scanning in case of missing channels.

Channel management on BRAVIA is more of a gamble. Typical scenarios and use-cases have not been thought to the end. Detailing all flaws and bugs would probably go beyond the scope of this review. Hopefully I haven’t lost you already…

The TV Guide comprises event metadata from both, the DVB stream (EIT - Event Information Table) and also the web (Gracenote) for additional information like highlights, cast/crew and related/recommended content. Sounds pretty cool from an informational point-of-view. However, many events do not receive any additional information which is most probably due to a flaky matching of the found services/events via EIT with Gracenote’s database. Freesat users are also out of luck as the TV won’t pull any information for those channels.

Just like the other Sony custom TV menus, also the TV Guide feels like a foreign object in an otherwise modern looking Android TV operating system.

Major flaws are that TV events which have been scheduled for recording are unfortunately not marked. A vertical line indicating the current time would also be nice. Actually those are standard conventions for a guide like this.

What I like about the guide is the auto update in standby, providing you with complete and up-to-date information at any time. Unfortunately all guide data is lost upon a full reboot of the TV.

The guide is also integrated with Android TV’s unified search engine which is not without some major usability flaws though. Search can for example not be restricted to favorite channels only, returning results from channels you might not be able to watch due to a lack of subscription. It also doesn’t immediately become obvious which channel a found event is on. One has to deep dive into the respective events in order to find out. Stripping down the channel list to only the channels of interest dramatically improves search performance and accuracy.

Then there is the recording feature which has taken Sony over half a year to deliver after Sony’s Android TV launch back in 2015.

In order to perform recordings, a hard disk or large flash drive (> 32GB) has to be connected to the single SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port. Beware that your storage gets formatted and encrypted when registering it for recording. So you will lose all your data with the storage not being usable outside of this configuration anymore afterwards. Unfortunately Android’s adoptable storage cannot be used for the purpose of recording.

Recordings are stored in a DRM contaminated format and are therefore not meant to be portable… or edited… or archived. There is actually no legal requirement for manufacturers to protect recordings. Some broadcasters indeed require content copy protection as copyright owners would otherwise refuse to sell content to them. There are however mechanisms that are supposed to manage DRM only in case it is requested by the broadcaster for a specific program and not fundamentally for everything. I still doubt that it makes a ton of sense in a world in which one can easily take copies and share Hollywood blockbusters the day and date they come out on Blu-ray.

When productively using the PVR, it quickly becomes obvious that Sony concentrated on DRM rather than usability. Navigating timers and recordings via the Action menu is just horrible, contradicting Android TV’s context menu approach. It for example takes well over 10 button presses just to delete a recording with the user being greeted by three entirely different UI designs along the way.

A major letdown of the PVR is that for overlapping recording timers, only the first one is executed despite the TV featuring twin tuners. Watching one channel while recording another works for FTA. If you record an FTA channel, it is not possible to watch a scrambled channel in parallel anymore. The problem most likely is that there is no way of knowing beforehand whether scheduled events will be scrambled or not. Sony chose the easy way out, always assigning the single CI to the recording.

With Android Nougat adding APIs for PiP (Picture-in-Picture), Sony added the possibility to overlay the picture coming from a tuner or HDMI source on top of the Android TV user interface. As soon as you start playing another video, the PiP window is effectively being closed. So it doesn’t allow two video sources to be blended, let alone following two DTV channels in parallel despite the BRAVIA featuring twin tuners. So this certainly isn’t the PiP that many people have imagined, not providing the slightest practical use. This together with the limited twin tuner support in the PVR makes you wonder why Sony deploys twin tuners at all!? Looks more like a marketing gag to me.

Timeshifting is also not supported. It is however possible to perform a recording and start playback while still recording. This is not very convenient though as you have to start recording while in TV and then jump over to the recording player in order to start playback. And when done, you have to go back to TV, stop the recording, then go back to the recording player in order to delete the recorded file. All basic functionality already seems to be there in order to do a fully automatic Timeshifting. Sony is still in total denial.

A good TV platform is not defined by the number but the availability and quality of the important content apps and services. Sony advertises their Android TV line of products as having access to thousands of apps which is technically correct, an overwhelming number of those apps have only been carried over from mobile though, hardly being optimized for a 10-foot user interface with its controls, mostly being of niche interest at best (not to call them totally pointless on a TV), or games that are hardly feasible due to the slow SoC and lack of available disk space.

There has been quite some mistrust concerning Google’s TV ambitions after the demise of their first respective platform back in 2015. Even Google treated their successor as a second class citizen for a rather long period of time, putting new features/technologies/services on Chromecast and even competing platforms long before they arrived on Android TV. This has changed only recently with the Android TV based Chromecast with Google TV and several local content providers around the world finally jumping on the bandwagon. It is still a problem though that contracts and money may determine which content is on which platform. TCL perfectly demonstrates the segmentation we are currently experiencing in the TV world, putting the Roku OS on TVs in the United States while using Android TV here in Europe. I still believe that Google’s business model may work out, not taking a cut from streaming providers, instead monetizing their own services.

As for app/service quality, hardly any major content provider integrates with Android TV’s enhanced features such as the unified search or channels, most of them only providing a bare minimum WebView to browse and watch content, all having a different look and feel to them, not following any of the Android TV design guidelines. There are simply too many (TV) platforms around which is the reason why content providers prefer easy portability over a truly integrated user experience. In fact, every app/service is of so much better quality on an Apple TV, using tvOS’ rather minimalistic but brilliant stock video player. I have yet to witness a single stutter no matter the content. Also seeking video has never been more fun and consistent across streaming apps.

I love this “new” and convenient way of consuming premium content online and on demand without lifting my ass off the couch. The Netflix experience is pretty neat with good quality encodes. The Netflix app probably has the highest level of integration among all available Android TV apps. This already starts when setting up Android TV for the first time. After logging into an existing Google account, Netflix might already take its login credentials from Smart Lock, Google’s single sign-on feature, in case you have accessed Netflix from an Android device or Chrome browser before. Netflix also integrates with channels and the unified search. Navigating content is quite fast and not perceived as being too laggy even on slow hardware. Unfortunately, apps like the one from Netflix are more of an exception than the rule.

What takes a little from the experience is that there are hardly any trailers available for non-Netflix content. One can hardly blame Sony for that though. There are still some things I would like to see improved on Android TV and BRAVIA in particular. Certain Originals in Dolby Vision are mastered very dimly. Those are hardly watchable at daytime. BRAVIAs between 2016 and 2019 featuring Dolby Vision desperately need separate day- and nighttime presets for the respective format or the possibility to switch the technology off altogether. Subtitles on the other hand are literally glowing in HDR mode, also resulting in quite some blooming. After setting the font color to semi-transparent, subtitles are hardly legible for SDR.

The Amazon video experience has been appallingly poor since the very beginnings of Sony’s Android TV endeavor back in 2015. The pace at which important changes and fixes happened used to be shockingly slow. Marshmallow finally brought us Dolby 5.1 audio (so something that has been an industry standard for two decades already) and the possibility to more effectively seek inside a video by using a thumbnail view to indicate the current position. The update on the other hand introduced severe A/V sync issues which manifested themselves in frequent video stuttering and audio dropouts, rendering the service pretty much useless. Another year had to pass before those issues finally got mitigated with the release of an official Prime Video app.

The experience is still far from the Apple TV or Fire TV one though. Navigating video menus is quite laggy with lots of annoying waiting times involved. Netflix perfectly demonstrates that OTT services can indeed be quite fast even on slow hardware.

Searching and discovering content is a major pain. Neither does Prime Video provide curated content via Android TV’s channel interface, there is only one promotional channel advertising Amazon Originals, nor does it integrate with the global unified search. Keyboard support on Android TV is quite messy which mostly leaves you with the laggy on-screen keyboard and D-pad controls of the remote to input search terms within the app itself.

Recent app and web front-end updates introduced even more restrictions. The Prime filter got removed. So you are confronted with a mixture of free and non-free purchase/rental content which adds up to the confusing user experience. There is also still mild usage of color buttons which is so out of fashion nowadays. Color buttons have never been a good approach to easy and intuitive navigation in the first place.

YouTube has grown from occasional fun clip watching to a versatile entertainment and information platform in recent years. A good YouTube experience is therefore a key aspect of today’s TVs.

With version 2.0 having been introduced in mid-2017, Google brought their unified smart TV look also to Android TV, moving to a more platform-agnostic WebView, using substantially more CPU time compared to the previous 1.x with navigation being noticeably more laggy which especially becomes obvious when quickly flicking through video menus or when using the virtual on-screen keyboard in search which is not the native and localized Android TV keyboard anymore.

Version 2.0 also introduced quite severe stuttering while playing back 4K 60fps content, an issue which hasn’t fully been resolved till this very day. It also took Google two years to bring YouTube HDR to Android TV while competing platforms have been invited early on. Another half a year had to pass before Sony finally got it right, properly applying brightness and color when playing back VP9.2 HDR content. Same is now happening to the 8K/AV1 rollout. So if you think that Android TV will give you a better and more up-to-date YouTube experience as both belong to the same brand, you might get disappointed.

The move to YouTube 2.0, in many ways being a regression compared to 1.x, clearly demonstrates the love and care Google puts into their own TV platform. Positive aspects about this major update are the improved content curation and that it is finally possible to play live streams at resolutions higher than a pixelated 240p which also took Google ages to fix.

Google Play Movies & TV is typically the single go-to source for renting and purchasing the most recent blockbuster movies and TV shows on Android TV as 3rd parties typically have to pay Google 30% of the revenue made through in-app purchasing. To my very surprise though, one can use the Prime Video app for renting and purchasing stuff via Amazon’s store on BRAVIA. I don’t know how the Sony/Amazon deal with Google looks like or whether they use some backdoor here.

While you will be confronted with a rather large library of valuable content, I don’t really like the Google Play Movies & TV app on Android TV from a user experience point of view. Other platforms like webOS and Roku have long ago received a visual refresh, one more time demonstrating the significance of the Android TV platform.

The 4K HDR catalog is still quite manageable in German speaking countries with many titles only being available for purchasing at pretty high price tags, whereas on iTunes one can explore a much larger catalog of 4K HDR titles at the same price as their HD counterparts for both, purchasing and renting. Apple even upgraded past purchases to the higher resolution (+ Dolby Atmos audio) automatically at no additional cost.

One thing that is beyond me is that even though the OS supports multiple Google accounts, it is not possible to seamlessly switch between respective movie libraries. In order to do so, one has to remove the currently active account and add the desired one. One may ask what the purpose of having multiple accounts is then? Rightfully so. The only solution to this is to share multiple libraries under the family umbrella or revert to casting.

Google Cast, beside being a streaming technology, also implies a very powerful content navigation paradigm. And all Android TV based devices have it built-in. It is based on the idea that tablets and smartphones have become brilliant navigation devices, being perfectly personalizable with the multi sign-on problem already being solved as your mobile device is probably already signed into all your desired services. So why not use those devices for the very purpose of browsing/finding stuff and let our big screen only display the desired content?

Chromecast built right into Android TV can go all the way up to 2160p60 on BRAVIA, even supporting HDR using the VP9(.2) and HEVC codecs. The integrated video player is not without some major woes and limitations though. It struggles to play 60p video at high resolutions in a stutter-free way. Also consider that the refresh rate of the display cannot be switched either. So you’ll need to engage some Motionflow to get a consistently smooth video experience as services may support any common frame rate (e.g. YouTube).

A general limitation of the Google Cast technology is the sparse format and container support. It works for most web videos, but when wanting to cast a versatile home library, one might need a potent server with transcoding capabilities or take another media sharing approach instead.

A mobile device based on Android is probably the better Chromecast companion compared to other platforms, as it supports the casting of almost any HTML5 (MP4 or WebM) web video by using the Chrome browser. On iOS, you are mostly restricted to Chromecast-enabled websites only (even when using the Chrome browser). Some 3rd party browsers like Video & TV Cast can overcome this limitation, but usability of those is usually poor.

I really like the casting idea, but it needs more care by both, Google and app developers/content providers alike. Some content providers still don’t support it at all, some apps/services seem to only work properly in tandem with the real Google Chromecast device, most probably because it is the preferred testing device. Unfortunately the Android TV implementation does not seem to be 100% compatible. Yet there is hope that the situation will improve with Google’s new Chromecast device building on top of Android TV.

Android TV Remote Control (or simply Android TV on iOS), being available for iOS and Android based phones/tablets), features D-pad and touchpad remotes, with the latter one being superior in terms of usability as it does not require one to constantly have an eye on it for navigation. With the Android version of the app, it is possible to use the mobile’s volume buttons to change the volume of the TV. This unfortunately does not work on iOS, therefore lacking volume control. An up/down swipe on the very right of the touchpad or some multitouch gesture could for example do the trick.

The app lacks a dedicated on/off switch. Sony also lacks a respective software button on the Android TV home screen to switch it off. One possible way to put the TV into standby is via voice command. Waking the TV up actually works via any button, however requiring one to enable Remote start which I do not recommend.

There are several other features that I would love to see with this touchpad remote for Android TV. One is quick swiping, adding the possibility to move multiple menu items per single swipe (just like with Apple TV) as this makes touchpads so much more powerful.

Another one would be the possibility to define multitouch gestures for certain controls (e.g. volume).

Unfortunately the app suffers from some decisive bugs under iOS which render it pretty much useless.

There are also a bunch of other remote apps, most of which are using Sony’s web API, either suffering from tremendous lagging or not being very convenient with respect to eyes-free controlling.

I perfectly understand that people just don’t want another computer-like device in their living rooms, me included. That’s probably one of the main reasons why the initial Google TV failed. But the lack of comprehensive voice search support is why I also tested several other text input possibilities together with some of the most popular applications providing search (like the global Android TV search, Netflix, YouTube and Prime Video). Also, when it comes to signing into every single service/account on the TV, an alternative to the standard D-pad remote in order to input the credentials is well appreciated.

I tried today’s most common means of text input in the form of a mobile device (iPhone) running the Android TV remote app and a HID compatible keyboard (e.g. MINIX NEO A2 with full QWERTY layout on its back).

There are three categories of apps providing text input. First the truly native apps which make use of the standard Android facilities, then there are WebViews using standard HTML facilities and finally WebViews using custom facilities. While all 3rd-party keyboards I tried worked with Android TV search and native apps (e.g. Google Play Store), those are unfortunately the least represented as most major content providers chose WebViews for easy portability.

Famous representatives of the second category are Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube. While input via a HID compatible keyboard works fine, input via the Android TV iOS app suffers from the show-stopping issue that the very first character is always captured twice and a non-functional backspace.

“lie to me” for example becomes “llie to me”, resulting in no hits.

The third category is the least user-friendly one, not being compatible with any 3rd-party keyboard. The only way to input text is by using the painful virtual on-screen keyboard together with the remote’s D-pad. Prime Video used to belong to this category for many years but recently got upgraded to the second category.

Even today, usable flash memory on BRAVIA is still only 8GB in size and has even been cut in half on recent models due to an additional vendor partition required for Project Treble support, probably still being enough anyway given the sparse variety of useful apps/services and playable games.

As of Marshmallow, Google added the possibility to expand internal device memory via some external USB storage device (so-called Adoptable Storage). Keep in mind that not every thumb drive is well suited for adopting, even if the manufacturer attests high transfer speeds. And you probably don’t want to connect a mechanical (rotating) hard drive due to its bad random access performance and Android’s standby behavior.

After several disappointments compatibility- and performance-wise, I tried a fast USB SSD, yielding good random read/write speeds. Unfortunately, Pie on BRAVIA still suffers from tremendous issues when adopting some USB storage with the BRAVIA often not properly resuming from standby (Deep Sleep) or storage not being accessible which only a reboot takes care of.

I also tried a 128GB Samsung BAR Plus which used to be one of nVIDIA’s recommendations for adopting storage on their SHIELD TV before they pulled the respective list. This pen drive however causes severe boot issues with BRAVIA seemingly getting stuck in bootloader already. Or with other words, the TV simply does not boot at all most of the time.

I can only advise against adopting storage via USB on BRAVIA. Using so-called removable storage to play media from looks fine though. NTFS and exFAT are read without major issues.

Looking at today’s streaming boxes, those consume 2-3W peak under load and even less when being idle. Maybe they don’t have tuners or a very sophisticated image processor built-in, those parts could however indeed be switched off in standby, only leaving the application processor running at little power consumption, being able to serve requests at any time. So why does a BRAVIA 4K TV still consume >20W (even up to 30W on the newer UR HW platform) after it has been switched off? Doesn’t look like a very good hardware design in terms of power efficiency to me.

After hitting the power button on the remote, this shallow sleep state (in which the TV still consumes the mentioned >20W) is kept for a rather long period of time (up to 1-2 hours) until deep sleep is finally entered, reducing power consumption to under 0.5W, from which there are frequent wakeups though. I have no clue what maintenance work the TV does in standby. DTV guide and service updating shouldn’t take that long when done right. And what those wakeups are actually good for remains a secret to me.

The above power consumption measurement plot demonstrates that from the time the BRAVIA has been switched off at 21:00 until it finally went into deep sleep spanned over one hour, from which it woke up every ~5 minutes, so several dozen times over the course of one single night.

The main cause turned out to be Android itself and some Google services setting up periodic jobs/timers to wake up the TV in order to do… well… something. I don’t know what customer benefits they have. There are certainly no time-critical notifications on a TV. It does not have to look for updates with such a high frequency either. This behavior again shows that the OS has its origins in the mobile space with different requirements and hasn’t very well been optimized for the TV.

Those wakeups, while probably not violating any standby regulations, cause quite some misbehavior on BRAVIA. USB ports are also powered, causing a connected HDD to spin up/down or bias lighting to turn on/off all the time. Communication on HDMI ports might turn on connected devices or cause interruptions on devices connected via the same AVR as well. So if a connected device mysteriously turns on or if you experience frequent short A/V dropouts on interconnected HDMI devices while the TV is in standby, you now know why. Plus they might have an impact on the lifespan of the affected devices. Sony is just pointing fingers at Google, stating that those wakeups are common to Android TV.

Any app can set up jobs/alarms which wake the system up or keep so called wake locks, effectively preventing deep sleep altogether. Popular apps like Spotify or Prime Video have been affected in the past. An Android TV can therefore easily become a power hog. Completely powering down or unplugging the BRAVIA would probably be a bad advice as OLEDs for example execute a panel cleaning program in standby. Moreover, scheduled recordings wouldn’t work anymore. Google really needs to fix their app model in regards to standby behavior!

With the BRAVIA being a Google Cast ready receiver, it employs a mechanism which enables other devices (like for example a mobile device running Chromecast-enabled apps) to wake it up from deep sleep over WiFi which however seems to be very sensitive, not only reacting to magic packets addressed to the respective TV. I found Bonjour/mDNS to be the culprit, resulting in the BRAVIA not staying in deep sleep. Devices like several smart home devices, NAS or a network printer might keep the BRAVIA quite busy by periodically sending out queries.

mDNS queries in my network result in several hundred wakeups over the course of one single hour. The BRAVIA immediately wakes up again after having fallen asleep. I therefore strongly recommend not to enable the Remote start feature.

When looking at the installed packages and running processes, one might find deprecated technologies (BIVL, DIAL, Miracast/WiFi Direct,...), most of which are poorly implemented anyway, platforms in the platform (Sony Select, BRAVIA B2B/Hotelmode), promotional stuff (Gameloft etc.) and even a spy trojan in the form of Samba TV which you should opt-out from as quick as you can. It does not provide the slightest customer benefit even though Sony/Samba want to make you believe otherwise. Pretty much the contrary is the case, dramatically compromising the TV’s performance by constantly collecting data about our viewing habits which is then being used for targeted ads.

A lot of the stuff could just be ripped out or at least be disabled by default. In fact, after manually removing most of the mentioned bloat- and spyware, the system becomes quite a bit more responsive with important services constantly being kept in main memory.

I have also been pointing out several privacy concerns with BRAVIA for quite some time, like some Sony deployed services still happily exchanging data after disabling them and declining the respective privacy policies. Just in time for the 2018 privacy law changes in the EU, in fact one day before they took action, Sony released some mitigations in that regard which probably implies that they did have some dirt under the carpet.

If you’ve ever owned an Android phone, you might already be familiar with the fact that getting updates is an incredibly slow process. The situation seems even worse in the TV industry with sets constantly being outdated. Sony has been no exception to that with Android TV 11 already having been pushed out the door but BRAVIA still sitting Android TV 9.

If you hoped that at least security updates were coming in frequently, you might get disappointed too. With the move to the connected TV, we let another potentially vulnerable device in our home networks. More and more of our precious data is being stored on them, like for example several logins with credit cards attached to the respective accounts. Frequent security updates are therefore key to keep the data somewhat safe. Sony is typically several months behind with respect to Android’s security bulletins. It for example took them half a year to plug the infamous KRACK vulnerability. For wireless networks operating in WPA/WPA2 mixed mode, BRAVIAs chose to connect via WPA(TKIP) instead of the more secure WPA2(CCMP-AES). The sheer lack of awareness concerning security is mind-boggling to me. The situation might improve as of Android TV 10 with Google finally managing security updates for several critical system components.

In order to meet Google’s three major upgrade policy, Sony had to push the Linux kernel for their ATV2/ATV3 based BRAVIAs to a newer version or otherwise would have failed to properly deploy Android TV 9. The AG8 OLED has been one of the last models based on this very platform, having been released in 2019 with Android TV 8.0 Oreo pre-installed, therefore expecting to see updates to Android TV 10 and 11 as well. Sony chose to go with a 4.9 kernel which is also used on recent models with newer SoC. Despite the kernel being a long term supported (LTS) one which will receive patches until 2023, patch level on BRAVIA is an ancient .125 from 2018. You might want to have a look at the CVE reports that have been filed since then.

What most people don’t understand is that even though Google delivers the Android TV OS, device and SoC manufacturers still have lots of responsibilities with respect to software which is where things fail. Android updates are worth nothing if the rest of the system is left behind. In fact, every major Android TV update from Sony brought more new issues to the table than they actually solved due to insufficient system adaptations and flaky drivers. Sony’s integration of Android TV for ATV2/ATV3 unfortunately still lacks support for Project Treble which is Google’s attempt at improving the updating fizzle by cleanly splitting off the hardware-specific part from core Android, enabling the OS to be updated without relying on silicon vendors anymore.

The recent demise of Vizio’s SmartCast-only philosophy and the original Chromecast losing market share to Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku indicate that people nowadays indeed vote for a classic user interface. Google however has an answer to that trend in-house. And even though they recently stepped up their game, releasing their Android TV based Chromecast with Google TV, business is still a tough one with the market seemingly already being saturated with the aforementioned devices. None of the bigger TV players are on team Google. Sony and Philips/TP Vision, both having a rather homeopathic market share compared to the likes of Samsung and LG, are just not enough to carry the platform forward. The nVIDIA SHIELD TV is more of a niche product and the many cheap Chinese streaming boxes won’t help Google make a lot of money either. So where is Android TV heading? I fear that it will just live on in mediocrity.

Even though Android TV on BRAVIA has come a long way, it can still be a frustrating experience at times, with the biggest construction areas being WiFi, CEC and audio passthrough. The integrated tuners and PVR are more like a bad joke, far from being state-of-the-art or even usable. Sony has been ignoring the importance of digital broadcast TV for far too long already. The whole stuff needs to be ripped out and rewritten from scratch. And not just for a future generation, but also for current and past, because this is simply not acceptable.

The most frustrating thing about BRAVIA probably is support. Important fixes and critical security updates take way too long to arrive at customers. With that in mind, it may probably be a good advice to disconnect BRAVIAs from any network and turn it into an as dumb as possible TV.

Then there is the technical support staff who either keep telling customers to perform a factory reset which hardly ever fixes anything, or pretending that the next firmware update will fix everything, even famine in the third world, seemingly holding people off until the deadline for returning has expired. Last thing you will hear from them is that everything is as intended and well within specification anyway.

Here is a final rundown of yays and nays of Android TV and Sony’s integration in particular: