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Half of UK smart TV owners don't know what the 'smart' bit is for

Bought to be up-to-date, not to connect to interweb

More bad news for TV makers and smart-telly fans: only a third of Brits planning to buy a smart TV are doing so to make use of its internet connectivity.

It gets worse: only half (53 per cent) of smart-telly owners know what the 'smart' but is actually for.

Still, some who don't have manager to connect their smart sets to the internet. Only a quarter of smart TV owners have yet to do so.

No wonder BBC bosses have complained in the past that smart TVs aren't easy enough to use.

YouGov relies on data from a panel of 350,000 folk in the UK - though it didn't say how many of them had said they own, or plan to buy, a smart TV.

We're not entirely surprised by the results. If you're buying a new TV, internet connectivity will only be one factor among several, screen size and picture quality among them.

You're not, after all, going to buy a crap TV just because it can connect to the internet.

Indeed, YouGov's numbers show that picture quality is important to 96 per cent of smart-telly owners and size matters to 93 per cent of them. Next on the list is sound quality, a key criterion for 89 per cent.

Folk who own a smart TV may not all know what it's for, but some are making use of the feature. Just over one in three (35%) of them say they now spend more time watching content provided by catch-up and on-demand services, such as BBC’s iPlayer and Amazon's Lovefilm, than they do watching broadcast TV. ®

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