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You told us: Even with smart TVs, you’re mostly using streaming dongles
June 17, 2025
TVs come in all different shapes and sizes, as well as varying levels of “smart.” When I bought my television a few years ago, I knew I wanted a bigger 4K TVwithoutany smart features. I didn’t think I would use them (I already owned a Chromecast), and many manufacturerscharge a premiumfor that extra software. To this day I don’t regret my decision to buy a “dumb” TV.
For those of you who do own a smart TV, do you use the built-in smart features? Or do you use a secondary device for your streaming needs? This is the very questionI asked you last week, and out of over 600 total votes, there’s a clear method most smart TV owners use tostream content.
Smart TV owners, do you use the built-in smart features or a streaming device?
Surprisingly, 40.71% of voters who own a smart TV use an alternate method to stream their content. Out of that pool, a majority 36.67% use some sort of dongle — like aChromecast, Amazon Fire TV Stick, orRoku— while 4.04% use a gaming console like aNintendo Switch,Xbox, orPlayStation.
29.56% of voters exclusively use their TVs’ on-device software for streaming. Even more people (29.73%) tend to switch between a dongle and their TVs’ on-device software.
Here’s what you had to say
Here are some of the best comments from last week’s poll explaining why they voted the way that they did:
That’s it for this week. As always, thanks for voting, thanks for the comments, and don’t forget to let us know what you thought of the results below.
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