What are the advantages of a separate TV streamer?

[Jams]

I see in your latest article “screen Stars” in your system number 3 you suggest an Apple TV streamer. The Sony TV seems to have a decent streaming app. What is the advantage of the separate streamer? Is the sound better? Is the picture better? Please let me know because I’m in the middle of considering my next system. I’ll be running the sound through an AV system.
Many Thanks

 

[RayP]

Jams, I bought an Apple TV box last summer. It connects to my AVR allowing sound to be directed through my 5.1.2 system. So even YouTube sound is much better than via TV speakers. Apple TV has Atmos sound on many programmes.

No TV I’m aware of can produce more than 2.0 sound.

 

[Messiah]

I use the inbuilt streaming Apps on my Sony TV and can see no need for a separate streamer.

Picture quality is great and it feeds an Atmos signal (film/programme dependant) to my receiver which sounds great.

I would suggest using the inbuilt apps first and see if you feel anything is lacking.

 

[twinkletoes]

Heavily depends what you want to do. If you want to buy/ download movies from services such apple movies then you really have no choice other than to use a board box. I belive that Apple TV on tv's dont include this service still ,but could wrong. Another thin I like that apple does is they auto upgrade movie as they come out to 4k HDR version as and they become available. or if you have any older 1080p version of the box, suspect they will do the same as they roll 8k content.

But amazon for example works better through my tv than the Apple TV with regard to dolby vision and HDR content but Amazon has trouble across the board with this anyhow with some shows saying there HDR and not displaying properly. The terminal list for example.

My Tv for example its very hard to turn off the HDR programming, with Apple TV you can turn it all off with a few clicks if you dont like what its doing with you're films/programs.

Another thing to consider if you want to stream music you can do it without the tv on with airplay but most amps these days have a connect feature of some sort.

But this is the big one-

You have to consider obsoletion in the future. As you keep the TV over its life time apps that where once present start to disappear or just stop working, its literally happened to every smart tv ive owned, for this simple reason Out board boxes will always have a place. Dont know about you but I keep a tv till fails screen wise but it doest mean you have to run out a buy outboard box now just somthing to think about.