Hisense is trying to outdo Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which recently announced they’ll update their TV software regularly, following years of complaints that they never bother.
LG went first, committing to delivering four major updates over a five-year period for its webOS platform for every new TV that’s sold in future, only to be outdone by Samsung, which last year promised to keep updating its Tizen OS platform for a full seven years.
Now along comes Hisense, and it’s beating them both – kind of, sort of, maybe – with a somewhat sketchier promise that it’ll update some of its TVs for up to eight years after purchase.
We say Hisense’s promise is sketchy, because it’s far from clear which TVs will be getting any updates, nor how many. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the promise only pertains to Hisense’s homegrown VIDAA OS platform, which runs on around 30 million Hisense TVs and also some other brand’s models.
Hisense’s TVs are far from exclusively VIDAA. In fact, it sells a whole host of models that run different operating system software, including those powered by Amazon’s Fire TV, some running Google TV or Android TV, some that run Roku OS, and even a few that run minor platforms such as Titan OS and TiVo OS.
Most Hisense TVs that do run VIDAA OS are sold in Europe, but there are comparatively few in the U.S., where it currently lists 11 models that do and 157 models that run alternatives.
So while Hisense is “guaranteeing up to 8 years of updates”, that guarantee is more than a little bit ambiguous.
FlatPanelsHD was the first to report Hisense’s promise, which was actually made earlier this year in a poorly-circulated press release that claimed the company was “setting a new industry standard” in doing so.
The eight years’ worth of updates will bring “enhanced security” to Hisense VIDAA OS TVs that should ensure user data is well protected and the platform retains its integrity, along with extended app compatibility, so they’ll be able to keep running popular streaming applications long after they’re sold. The updates will also bring regular performance boosts and extend the lifespan of Hisense TVs, and so on.
But bear in mind that this is not the vast majority of Hisense TV models we’re talking about, and “up to” eight years of updates is not the same as “definitely” having eight years of updates either. So its promise is more of a best case scenario, in case you happen to be lucky enough to have bought a VIDAA OS TV that qualifies.
The promise will probably carry a lot more weight in Europe, where the VIDAA OS platform is much more common on Hisense TVs, but then again, there’s still no clarity on exactly which models will get the full eight years of software updates.
If you happen to buy a Hisense TV with Roku OS, Android TV or Google TV, you might well get luckier, as both Roku and Google have a policy of continuously updating their operating system software every one-to-two years.
