2 Smart home devices
2.2 Smart set-top boxes

If you own a TV set that doesn’t support smart functions but you don’t want to replace it by a new (more expensive) smart TV you can purchase an external smart device called set-top box that provides you with these smart functions. The smart set-top box is able to offer users all functions of smart TVs [9], [10]. Of course it is necessary to connect it to a TV set.

It means that using the smart set-top box it is possible to:

- watch broadcasting (the most often of satellite television; eventually terrestrial or cable television) in high definition (HD) quality,
- record live broadcasting on internal or external storage (USB sticks or drives),
- play multimedia content from external storages (support for video formats: MP4, MKV, MOV, MPG, MTS, TS, VOB, WMV, XVID, M2TS, AVI, ASF, audio codecs: MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, M4A and picture codecs: JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG),
- receive and watch streamed video using (Ethernet or Wi-Fi) connection to LAN and Internet and even transmit streamed video in some cases,
- run and use preinstalled applications (web browsing, access to social networks, communications, news, etc.), be able to update them and install many others.

Smart set-top boxes can be controlled in the similar way like in case of the smart TVs.

Fig. 6 Examples of set-top boxes