I have not connected my smart TV to my home network in three years. I do not mean I sometimes forget. I mean the TV has never had the Wi-Fi password typed into it, the Ethernet jack has never had a cable in it, and the TV’s own operating system has not been used once. I bought a streaming box, plugged it into the HDMI port the TV came with, and the TV became a dumb display (a monitor with no built-in smart features, just a screen that shows whatever the connected device sends it). Three years in, this is the part of my home network I am most confident is private.
The reason is not paranoia. The reason is that a smart TV in 2026 is mostly an ad-and-tracking machine that happens to have a screen attached. Connect it to Wi-Fi, and the TV starts a thing called Automated Content Recognition (ACR) that takes screenshots of what you are watching, sends them to a server, and uses the data to target ads at you. Some TVs let you disable ACR. Most of them bury the setting four menus deep under a label like “Viewing Information Services” or “Smart TV Privacy.” Even with ACR off, the TV’s home screen shows ads in the app rows. Even with the home screen ads disabled, the TV may still be sending usage data back to the manufacturer. The fastest way to skip the whole mess is to not connect the TV to anything.
The setup is straightforward. You plug a streaming box (or a game console, or a laptop, or a Chromecast) into one of the TV’s HDMI ports, you switch the TV to that input, and you do all your streaming through the box instead of through the TV’s built-in apps. The TV becomes a display. The box does the streaming. The TV’s networking chips sit unused.
What you actually need
The cheapest option is a streaming stick. A Chromecast with Google TV HD is about $30, supports 1080p, runs the Google TV interface, and works as a Google Cast target (any device on your network can cast a video to it). It is not the most private option on the market. Google sees what you cast. But it is cheap, it works, and the privacy posture is the same as a smart TV, which is to say “limited.” The price-per-feature ratio is the right one for a guest room or a kid’s TV.
The middle option is an Apple TV 4K. About $150. Supports 4K and Dolby Atmos (the surround-sound format used by most streaming services and 4K Blu-rays), has a Gigabit Ethernet jack for a wired network connection, includes a Thread Border Router (a small piece of hardware that lets smart-home devices that use the Thread wireless protocol talk to your home network), and integrates tightly with the Apple Home and HomeKit lineup. If you are already in the Apple world with HomePod speakers or HomeKit Secure Video cameras, the Apple TV 4K is the one that pulls the rest of the smart home together. If you are not in the Apple world, the integration does nothing for you, and the price is harder to justify.
A JBL MA710 is the high-end option I ended up with. It is a smart AV receiver (audio/video receiver, the box that sits between your speakers and your source devices) that runs around $880. It supports 8K video, Dolby Atmos sound, has four HDMI inputs, and has Google Cast built in. You plug all your streaming devices into the receiver, the receiver feeds the picture to the TV and the sound to the speakers, and you control the audio routing through the receiver instead of the TV. The “TV is dumb” part of the setup is identical to the cheap Chromecast option, the difference is that the audio is no longer limited to the TV’s built-in speakers.
Any of the three works. I have all three in different rooms. The point is that the TV itself does not need to be smart for any of them to function.
Why this is also a networking upgrade
The second reason to keep the TV off Wi-Fi is that the networking chip inside most TVs is bad. The Ethernet jack on a 2024 mid-range TV is usually limited to 100 Mbps (megabits per second, a measure of network speed; most modern wired networks support 1 Gbps or faster). The Wi-Fi is faster on paper, but the antenna is small, the chip is underpowered, and the TV is competing for bandwidth with everything else in the room. The 4K HDR stream that stutters on the TV’s built-in Netflix app often plays smoothly on a $30 streaming stick, because the stick has a better Wi-Fi chip and a more recent network stack.
The Thread Border Router point is the one most people miss. Matter and Thread (two smart-home networking standards that let devices from different manufacturers talk to each other) require a Thread Border Router on the network to bridge Thread devices to your Wi-Fi. A smart TV is a good place to put a Thread Border Router because it is always on, always powered, and centrally located. The Apple TV 4K and the Google TV Streamer both include a Thread Border Router. A $400 mid-range smart TV often does not, even if it advertises “Matter support.” The streaming box is the device that should be the smart-home hub, not the TV.
Trade-offs
There are four real costs to this setup, and I want to be candid about all of them.
The second-remote problem is the one I underestimated. You have the TV remote (for power, input, volume) and the streaming-box remote (for everything else). Some streaming boxes can control the TV over HDMI-CEC (the protocol that lets devices on the same HDMI cable send commands to each other), which lets you use one remote for both. Not all TVs support it well, and when it does not work, the diagnostic dance is annoying. Family members who never wanted to think about input sources will have opinions about this.
App availability is the second cost. Some streaming apps are still TV-only. A few local TV station apps, a few regional sports apps, a few smaller cable-replacement services have not built for Apple TV or Chromecast. The workarounds are screen-mirroring from a phone or laptop, which works on every modern streaming box, but it is not the same as a native app. If you are in a niche case where the only app you watch is a TV-only one, this setup does not solve your problem.
Initial cost is the third one. A $30 Chromecast is not a problem. A $150 Apple TV 4K and an $880 receiver is. If you only have one TV, the streaming box alone is enough and the price is reasonable. If you are rebuilding a multi-room setup, the math changes. I run three TVs and the cost of three streaming boxes plus one receiver was less than the cost of three smart TVs with the same features would have been, but the cash flow is front-loaded.
You give up the TV’s “just works” experience. When you buy a smart TV, you plug it in, it walks you through the network setup, and you are streaming in ten minutes. With this setup, you buy a streaming box, you plug it into the TV, you switch inputs, you set up the box, you connect it to Wi-Fi, and then you set up the apps. Two device setups instead of one. People who do not want to do this should not do this.
What I would tell past me
If I could send a message back to the version of me that bought the first smart TV and connected it to Wi-Fi, I would say three things.
Anyone with one TV who watches the big four streaming services is covered by a cheap streaming stick plus the TV’s existing HDMI port. People rebuilding a multi-room setup, already in the Apple or Google smart-home lineup, or caring about audio quality will see the upgrade to a streaming box plus a receiver pay for itself. Anyone who watches one specific TV-only app that no streaming box has will find this approach does not work for them.
- The networking chip in the TV is the slowest part of the chain. Whatever streaming stick or box you already have is faster, and using it makes the picture look better, not worse.
- The TV’s privacy settings are not a substitute for not connecting the TV. ACR, the home-screen ads, the usage telemetry (the background data the TV sends back to the manufacturer about how you use it). These are all things the manufacturer has a financial interest in keeping on by default.
- Put the Thread Border Router in the streaming box, not the TV. The streaming box is what stays updated, what has the better networking chip, and what is on the network even when the TV is off.
- The 4K HDR stream that stutters on the TV’s built-in Netflix app will play smoothly on a $30 stick. The networking chip is the bottleneck, not the Wi-Fi, and the stick has a better one. This was the single most surprising finding in three years of running this setup.