Set top box creators have come from every angle, vying for a piece of this lucrative pie. Roku, Boxee, Western Digital, Apple, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, TuneIn — on and on the list goes, companies looking to get onto your TV. But these devices create as many problems as they solve, though, adding new remotes, inputs, and interfaces into a viewing experience that's supposed to be simple.

Theoretically, that puts TV manufacturers at an enormous advantage: if Samsung can design the whole interface, from Netflix to your DVR, it should be able to create a seamless experience that improves upon the disjointed universe of set-top boxes. Sony or Vizio could overlay content on top of your TV, so you can watch a show while reading tweets about it; Samsung already has a great ESPN app that just runs a ticker below whatever you're watching. Your set-top box can't do that, since it's on its own input and takes over the whole screen. Just about every manufacturer bought into this logic, and over the last couple of years store shelves have flooded with internet-connected, content-streaming "Smart TVs." But each of these companies has tried to develop its own interface, its own style, and every attempt has fallen flat. Smart TV interfaces are almost universally slow, clunky, and unnecessarily complex.

This is the first step in a process we’ve seen many times over. With PCs, fragmentation reigned as manufacturers worked on their own operating systems and ecosystem — but when Microsoft’s Windows united disparate hardware onto a single platform, the whole industry took off. The same happened with cell phones, as we shifted from Brew and its many competitors to Android and iOS. Rich app ecosystems develop when a few platforms dominate — selling one app to everyone is far more appealing than making individual apps for each tiny group of users.

Search and TV: what could’ve been

Google entered the market with a smart, fresh idea of how to find and organize your content. But thanks to a combination of lackluster hardware, weak manufacturer support, a small app ecosystem, and an interface that simply couldn’t deliver on its promises, Google TV went nowhere. The OS has its devotees, and has certainly improved over the past two years, but Google may have missed its window into the living room.

Always be simplifying

So why, when we can watch Netflix on our TV, do we spend $100 on a set-top box... that lets us watch Netflix on our TV? It's the interface. They use your existing remote, and force constant up-up-right-right-down-left interactions to get anything done — have fun entering a Wi-Fi password. Even Google TV, the feature-rich OS that combines your TV and the internet better than any other, is cumbersome to the point of being unusable.

Meanwhile set-top boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku are simplifying at every turn. You can't do much on an Apple TV, but you can do it all without any training. Roku's remote is simple and geared toward its services. These boxes and others have remote apps for your phone, and Apple's leading the charge toward making your TV just a bigger smartphone display, receiving and displaying content as instructed by your phone or tablet.

In a word, it's about simplicity. We watch TV because we don't want to spend a ton of time finding what we want to watch — we either want to channel-surf or we want Netflix to tell us, and quickly. That's why Steve Jobs' remark to Walter Isaacson is so breathlessly passed around. "It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine, "Jobs said. "I finally cracked it." Jobs didn't promise more features, or a better picture. He promised a setup that would work.

In those eight years between TV purchases, much is also likely to change. Services will come and go, and there’s been little evidence that manufacturers can keep up with the changes. Google TV promised a phone-like app platform where companies control their own services, but with the plethora of TV interfaces that’s simply not feasible for Netflix or Vudu to maintain. The manufacturers aren’t accustomed to building and maintaining apps, either, and their experiences nearly always fall short.

Dumb screens

As carriers frantically work to avoid being "dumb pipes," so too do manufacturers fear being "dumb screens." Manufacturers want to control everything about my TV, from the screen itself to what's on it. I'd rather they focused on building a big, beautiful, inexpensive TV that looks and works well. That's all I'm buying my TV for anyway — I already have plenty of ways to watch Netflix.