14 DAY TRIAL // Smart TVs have the advantage of their own storage which holds an OS and some apps and widgets that allow them to behave like home-theater personal computers. Sony is getting ready to upgrade its Bravia series.
In addition to home-theater personal computers, Smart TVs can play the role of set-top boxes, allowing owners to watch not only live shows but also older ones.
However, it ultimately depends on the platform whether you get access to the programs you want or if you have to settle for whatever your carrier decides.
Some TVs solve this by providing more than one video input, but that means you need to pay for more than one source (PC, STB, TV cable) and Picture-in-Picture or Picture-by-Picture capabilities aren't always available.
More importantly, the software platform has a great stake in what shows you can watch and when.
Sony intends to upgrade the Bravia TVs with YouView
Sony's television sets use Android TV for the most part now, provided by Google, but this does not avail British citizens much.
Now if the YouView platform were included, that would change things, since it would enable both live and catch-up series through services like BBC iPlayer and 4oD. All accessible through a single guide.
The company has decided that all Bravia TVs released starting later in 2015 would feature both Android TV and YouView.
Such an approach would make it possible for people only getting introduced to long-running series to scroll back through the series' history and start from episode 1.
Presumably, this would be done through the same app, so that you would not have to launch Android TV separately in order to, say, view something on Netflix.
As far as upgrades go, this is just a software change at the heart of it, one that isn't that large in the grand scheme of things.
But it should help make Sony's Bravia TVs more interesting to the prospective buyers from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Estimated time of arrival
According to the company, all the Bravia TVs released starting this summer will possess both Android TV and YouView, in the UK at any rate.