Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now Support is Coming To LG's 2021 TVs

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

Thanks, but no

[Anubis IV]

My TV will never again be connected to the Internet. TV manufacturers have a history of including user-hostile features or adding them after-the-fact. They've been caught monitoring content you play on your TV and reporting it back for analytics akin to the data Nielsen wants, they've been caught turning on built-in microphones without permission and then uploading those recordings to the cloud, they've been caught dynamically inserting their own commercials into the shows you watch, even in places where they didn't exist before, not to mention adding ads to settings screens and the like that are entirely in their control, and the list goes on and on.

While LG—to the best of my knowledge—hasn't yet been caught in engaging in these sorts of shenanigans (unlike Samsung, Vizio, Sony, and others), my TV is at its best when it's a dumb display.

Re:

[dbrueck]

Yeah, I'm in the same boat - in addition to terrible security, the TV implementations of pretty much every app are crap, always behind on updates, and really hard to develop for.

Re:

[Computershack]

My TV will never again be connected to the Internet.,,, my TV is at its best when it's a dumb display.

Connected to a device which will be connected to the internet, your cable TV box, set top boxes such as an Apple TV box or your computer or your games console.

Re:

[Z80a]

Or a IBM PC compatible running some media distribution of linux.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Personally I just run Windows, because everybody in my house knows how to use it. I could use Linux, but I'm sure there would be some issues where it wouldn't work with one of the streaming services we use. Windows just works with everything. The interface is kind of terrible, especially for a TV. But most of hte time we are watching stuff anyway, so if it takes an extra 30 seconds to get the show started then I'm find with the provided I know I won't have any issues getting stuff to work.

Re:

[Z80a]

Yes, but you have the choice.
You can have windows, linux, Amiga OS, whatever the hell you want running on a PC.
In a smart TV, the only choice is whatever comes installed.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

None of which have microphones or cameras, and each of which lives or dies as a product by how well it treats its customers.

Cable box? Not a factor for us because we use Plex DVR connected to an OTA antenna. Game consoles? Only used for games. Chromecast or Apple TV? Much more widely scrutinized than any given model of TV, and in many cases provided by a company you already trust your digital life to. Uncomfortable with those STBs? Hook up a Pi running Plex or your software of choice and call it a day.

The w

Re:

[crow]

My TCL Roku TV will do the spying on what you watch, but you can turn that off (if you trust them). There's no microphone or camera in the TV. I'm still looking to find the right block to kill the ad on the main screen. Overall, I would say that for privacy it's not bad.

And if you don't want to use the streaming features, then just don't set it up to connect to the Internet. The main screen is the most convenient input selector I've seen on any TV. I would say it's the best dumb TV I've seen.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

So just get a cheap PC and put that under your TV. For $100 you can get something that will easily handle GeForceNow, Netflix, and all your other smartTV content without worrying about who is spying on you.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

I wasn’t suggesting people should do without services they want to use. I was suggesting people may want to reconsider relying on their TV to provide those services. Your suggestion is exactly what I did, except it’s a much more expensive gaming rig that doubles as our pi-hole server and Plex Media server, and which is connected to the TV via an AVR that is also not connected to the Internet.

Re:

[WindBourne]

Actually, I continue to use VIZIO connected to the internet. With chromecast, it is a THIN OS and they appear to be constantly update.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

Yeah...that thin OS is exactly the problem I was talking about. I was talking about security and privacy concerns, not the lack of updates that you seem to be speaking to.

Re: Thanks, but no

[WindBourne]

You WANT a thin OS combined with updating. The heavier it is, the easier to have bugs. And not updating means they no longer care.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

You WANT a thin OS combined with updating. The heavier it is, the easier to have bugs.

That's a false dichotomy, I'm afraid. What I actually want is no OS in my TV, or, barring that, an OS that has no Internet connection and no ability to reach the outside world.

If my only choice is a smart TV, then sure, a thin OS is the preferred way to go, but that's entirely besides the point with the issues I was raising. I wasn't complaining about bugs in the OS or a lack of updates for the OS/apps (though those are certainly issues as well). I was citing the industry's well-established practice of putt

Personally I was skeptical

[CastrTroy]

Personally, I was skeptical about game streaming, but I've been using GeForceNow for the last 6 months and for a lot of games it actually works quote well. There's some high twitch games like rocket league that don't work well, but a surprising number of games are actually very enjoyable. If they keep on increasing the size of their library, I might just never buy another graphics card.

That's not to say that there aren't advantages to playing locally on your own machine. But for me the costs just work out much better. I could spend $6.50 a month or I could spend $500 on a graphics card. That would take 77 months (over 6 years) to break even, at which point it would be time for a new Video card, and probably new Motherboard, processor, RAM, and some other stuff to go along with it. With game streaming i can use my old computer until the hardware breaks down, at which point, it will be cheap to fix, because I don't need high specs.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I specifically don't like Stadia because the game is tied to the Service. With GeForceNow, you get to play the games you've already purchased on other stores. That way if the cloud gaming disappears, you can still play the games on your own machine. I've seen Google cancel way too many products to buy something that is tied to their service.

I have a ton of free games right now on GeForce Now, because Epic has been giving away so many free games. Plus stuff from my back library that I purchased on Steam sale

No thank you

[WindBourne]

I have seen with both Samsung and LG electronics that after 2-4 years, they stop all support for their products. Even now, I have a samsung TV that is only 4 years old and the apps on it are HORRIBLE. WIth the LG bluray player, after just 3 years, they stopped updating and would no longer play any of the new Blueray disc. In fact, on the cheaper LG player that I had, they stopped playing the OLD blueray's as well. Do not get me started about their support of LG/Samsung house appliance.

Nope, I no longer bu

Re:

[CastrTroy]

That's the expected lifespan anyway. I bet they did some analysis and found out that a high percentage of users have their TV break or replace it within 5 years, so there isn't really much point in keeping the software up to date.

I had a broken backlight on my LG TV and I fixed it myself for $50. Way cheaper than buying a new one, but I'm sure the vast majority of people would just put it on the curb because it's too expensive to get a professional to fix it, and they aren't technical enough to figure out

Latency

[DivineKnight]

Someone explain this to me: assuming money is no object, why would I ever give up a NVME-based, water-cooled Threadripper with a 3090 video card for a cloud-based gaming service? The latency, on even the fastest of Fibre connections is much worse than running your own machine.

Even on a mid-level machine, you're doing better than this. Who the hell are they marketing this to? People who like losing in RTS or FPS games? People too cheap to buy a Costco special?

I swear, this has all the sheer tone-deafness of

Re:

[iamhassi]

Better battery life and play on any machine you love. I was playing streaming games 10 years ago on Onlive on crappy tablets and it ran great.

Re:

[im_thatoneguy]

Go to relatives' homes over the holidays and bring your water cooled thread ripper tower as your carry on? I played across the internet onto my Xbox over Christmas since I didn't want to bring my Xbox X with me.

There's also power usage, noise and space considerations.

I also stream across my LAN with Xbox so that if the wife is on the TV I can play Xbox games on a laptop or desktop screen without packing up the whole xbox and plugging it in somewhere else for an hour.

Latency on most TVs is around 10ms. If w

Only for single game

[Venguer]

This will only allow playing single games, for multiplayer or competitive games, the delay will be too long