EN-LIVE-N THAT TV STREAM!

As television sets get 'smart'-- with an Internet umbilical-- customers are more demanding: they can move beyond the choice offered by their cable or satellite dish provider, to tap the vast resources of live news and entertainment that the Web offers -- much of it for free.

ACT, a major Indian broadband fibre player, will soon provide its customers with a hardware hotline to tap this Net-based edutainment trove. Starting in August, ACT Fibernet subscribers can order a Stream TV box that connects to their broadband WiFi router wirelessly or through an ethernet cable, to their TV. The same box links to the TV using either the HDMI or the audio cable provider and lo! The TV has become smart and Android-Dolby- 4K-ready at that.

Set up is fairly simple, and uses a remote that syncs to the TV via Bluetooth and then on it serves as the magic want that lets you browse through hundreds of online movie, news, gaming and TV show channels. The remote has short cut buttons to Netflix, YouTube, live TV channels and the Google Play store. SCT has tied up with Netflix, Yupp TV, Sony Viv, Hungama Play, Zee 5, Hooq and other over-the-top video providers and in most cases, a free introductory subscription is thrown in. If you do decide later to subscribe to any of them, ACT helpfully provides a single payment gateway. On my 2K TV, the picture quality of HD content was excellent and my ACT plan though way short of gigabit, was fast enough to provide smooth, jitter free video. An icing in this cake is the ability to speak your channel searches using Google Assistant. The ACT Stream TV 4K is a good deal for Rs 4499-- and if you have a non-smart TV, it is even better value as you are now certifiably smart!