Television sets. They don’t make them like they used to anymore. If you think so and perhaps have had trouble with your expensive and newly-bought smart TV set, you are not alone.
Even as demand for smart TVs have surged with the rise of OTTs and the most urban Indians increasingly replacing their LCD TVs with smart LED ones, it seems, so have the complaints of malfunctioning. In a nationwide survey, one in three households in the country say their last television had problems within five years.
And guess what, a similar number of people were forced to buy a new TV set, as repair costs were prohibitive, or they wanted newer features.
LocalCircles, a community social media policy enabling platform, set on the survey after it found that smart TVs failing way faster than earlier TV sets was one of the most common complaints on its platform in the last couple of years. The survey was conducted across 329 districts in the country, with 36,000 responses from across the spectrum, from Tier 1 cities to Tier 4 towns and rural districts.
With many middle and upper middle-class households upgrading to Smart TVs in the last five years, complaints have also gone up. LocalCircles noted that while buying of Smart TVs have increased, so have complaints, While some actually changed their TV sets though it was working fine to get more features that smart TVs offer, many said they ended up malfunctioning or needed repairs soon enough.
A majority, as much as 61 per cent, said their smart TVs lasted more than five years, while 19 per cent said they lasted three to five years and 9 per cent said just two to three years.
“It is to be noted that 13 per cent of those surveyed indicated that their television worked properly for less than one year to around three years,” LocalCircles said in a press note issued Tuesday morning, adding, “This does not speak well of the quality of many televisions sold in the market or through e-platform. To sum up, 32 per cent of consumers say their last television went bad in less than five years!”
Interestingly, the survey also found that most of these owners either went and got their smart TVs repaired ‘locally’ instead of going to the company’s authorised service centre because of their prohibitive cost, many simply swapped for a newer model, since repairs were cumbersome and cost a lot. Usually, companies offer warranty on TV sets for just a year.
The findings clearly indicate that televisions are failing much faster than in the previous decades when televisions would function up to years normally and sometimes even 10 years without needing any repairs, LocalCircles noted. This, even as the new and costlier smart TVs have pushed the segment’s value to $11.53 billion.
