I won't pretend to give you a generalized answer, but rather answer it for myself and my household:

(Context: I work at Netflix, which may make a difference so it's worth noting. That said, I'm back-end cloud systems, with nothing to do with consumer devices).

I consume my media from several sources, including iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go.

I could get a SmartTV that lets me access them, but IME, smart TV manufacturers move pretty slowly; I also think of my TV as just a large display, and imbuing it with more smarts makes it more painful and expensive to upgrade to something else. By focusing on modularity -- this TV is just a bunch of HDMI ports with a big screen -- it lets me optimize the TV for display, and use another device for content access.

Which is why I prefer the AppleTV rather than a SmartTV.

(We could have another conversation about AppleTV vs Roku or the Fire TV, but that's outside the scope of this particular comment thread).

Hi, I work at Netflix, you may have heard of us.

dev, test, build, and prod run on Amazon (leaving aside the actual streaming, which comes from cache boxes closer to the customer). We've been pretty public about the process, and some of the issues.

Global warming hysterics are not content with whipping themselves for raping mother earth want to turn the rest of us into Flagellants as well.

I smile when gas prices rise, because the prices of my oil and refining stocks rise with it. Better to join Big Oil then fight it!

Typically, the way these patents are written, the pattern is "a system and a method to do FOO; here's one possible, but not exclusive or reference, implementation of our idea: BAR" where BAR (e.g. the win95 and modem stuff above) is meant to be an illustration of how an idea like this would work, rather than detailing the specific requirements for the idea to work. In other words, the fact they're using Windows 95 and modem is likely, largely, irrelevant to the actual meat of their claim.