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It's a weeknight, the couch is warm, and the streaming app you open every evening greets you with a message instead of a menu: this version is no longer supported on your device. Nothing is wrong with the picture. What ran out was the software, because smart TV updates were never promised for as long as the glass lasts.

So do you replace a TV that still looks great, or plug a small stick into a spare HDMI port and carry on?

What happens when smart TV updates stop?

The TV keeps working on its last software version, but app makers slowly stop supporting older platforms and security patches end, so the streaming apps you open every night fail long before the picture does.

That is the part the spec sheet never shows. Developers build for current versions, so a set that stops updating eventually meets an app update it cannot install.

LG's webOS Re:New programme guarantees four years of webOS updates for models from 2022 onwards, so an LG bought this year stops getting new versions while its panel is still young. Amazon commits to at least four years of security updates for Fire TV, and Insignia sets running Fire OS inherit that floor, so swapping a Fire TV set for a Fire TV stick buys no extra years on paper.

Further down, the promises thin out. TCL says it typically provides security updates for at least two years after a model first ships, on a policy page that does not even name TVs, so a budget TCL is the set most likely to need help first. Sony publishes end dates model by model. Roku and Vizio publish no support period at all, and Roku gives no end-of-life dates for its streaming boxes either. Our view, and only a view: silence is not proof of short support, but nobody can plan around a date never written down. The panel side is covered in what an OLED burn-in warranty actually covers.

Two sources sit behind the cards below: Engadget's October 2026 survey of manufacturer support pages, by Matt Tate, and Tom's Guide's December 2025 streaming stick review.

The ratio is the one to sit with. Two sets of similar size and price can differ more in app life than in anything printed on the box, which is backwards from how most people shop. Picture tweaks such as why Filmmaker Mode looks too dark get the showroom attention; software years get none, which is, admittedly, the least glamorous reason anyone has ever chosen a TV.

Which fix fits the TV you already own?

The right move depends on two facts you can check in a minute, the brand and the model year, and the table below maps each common combination of the two to a single next step.

Do this sum first. Find the model year in your TV's settings, usually under About or Support, add the years your brand promises, and subtract that total from the year you expect to replace the set. Anything above zero is your gap number, the years you'd spend with no promised updates. Then find your row.

Notice what the table never says: replace the TV. A set past its support window still shows the picture it showed on day one.

Where a streaming stick falls short

A stick replaces the apps, not the television: picture modes, input switching, voice settings and the TV's own security patches still belong to the set, and the cheapest new stick brings young software of its own.

That last point is the one buyers miss. Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Select launched at $39 in October 2025 on Vega OS, a new Linux-based system, and Tom's Guide found no sideloading, some cloud-hosted apps and only 1GB of RAM. The cheapest fix swaps an ageing system for an unfinished one, so check your apps exist for it before you pay.

A good streamer can still outlast any TV brand's promise. Apple's 2015 Apple TV HD runs tvOS 26, yet Apple listed it obsolete on 31 March 2026, ending Apple repairs and parts, TechRadar reported. On a stick, software can stay current for over a decade while the hardware becomes unrepairable.

A stick also lengthens your audio chain. If voices drift out of step with lips, our guide to which device should wait when soundbar audio lags has the fix, and what dialogue enhancement can and cannot fix still applies because sound passes through the TV. Before you plug in:

• The TV's own browser and built-in apps stay unpatched, so stop using them once you switch.
• You may juggle two remotes unless HDMI-CEC lets the stick's remote wake the TV and set volume.
• Use the wall adapter in the box, since a TV's USB port may not supply enough power.

Keep the TV, not the dead apps. If your gap number is above zero or an app has already failed, buy a Roku Streaming Stick 4K this week and move your daily apps onto it, skipping Amazon's Vega stick until your apps are confirmed there. A 2024-or-newer Samsung with working apps can wait. The panel was never the problem.

The evening news is on again, and the channel logo sits in the same corner it sat in last night. A few weeks into life with an OLED, most owners start wondering what that little badge is doing to the screen, and whether the OLED burn-in warranty would pay up if the answer turns out to be something permanent. LG, for one, advertises five years. Whether those five years mean what you hope is a different question.

What does an OLED burn-in warranty actually promise?

On LG's Canadian OLED warranty page, the promise is five years of protection for the panel on named premium lines, yet the page never mentions burn-in or image retention, so coverage cannot be assumed.

That page (as read in October 2026) says the panel is protected for five years. A footnote names the G5, G6 and W6 lines. So the five years is a promise about the panel, or more exactly the panel on a handful of named lines, not a birthright of every LG OLED. Check the model number on the box before the headline does your thinking for you.

• Year one: everything is covered, labour included.
• Years two to five: panel and parts only, with labour charges applying.
• All of it sits under applicable terms and conditions, which the headline does not quote.

The page is Canadian: terms differ by country, and LG's terms in the US, UK or India, along with other brands' terms, were not verified for this piece.

None of this makes burn-in imaginary. RTINGS, in a note last modified in August 2026, says burn-in resistance has not clearly improved under extreme static use, even though newer OLEDs are much brighter. HiFi Editorial, reporting RTINGS on 16 August 2026, describes a 10,000-hour test on a continuous news feed at maximum SDR (standard dynamic range) brightness, where a 2017 LG C7 and 2020 to 2023 models showed similar burn-in rates. I would hedge that second report, because it is secondhand and the rates are not shown.

The reading that survives both is practical: a bright, unmoving logo is the habit to manage, so brightness is the lever you hold. Our piece on why Filmmaker Mode can look too dark covers the settings, and TV glare and whether a matte screen is worth it weighs the glare that tempts people to push brightness back up.

Four numbers settle most of the worry, three from TechRadar's December 2025 report on RTINGS' long-term test of TVs bought in 2022, all run at maximum brightness (failure count as of November 2025). Every OLED there developed burn-in only in the single-static-logo torture test; under mixed usage it was not really an issue. The fourth is the warranty page's labour split.

Test hours are not household hours. They describe the harshest evening anyone could build, far outside a home with varied viewing. The ordinary risk is a screen parked on one channel for days, not a Friday night of films.

How does the five-year cover break down?

Year one is the generous year, with everything covered, while years two to five narrow to panel and parts, with labour charged, and nothing on the page states a burn-in rule either way. Now my own arithmetic, not a source's: five years at five hours of TV a day is about 9,125 hours, roughly half the hours the long test applied. Under mixed viewing most of the test's hours are far gentler, so a burnt panel inside the warranty is the unlikely case and an ordinary fault, where the labour clause bites, the likelier one.

Read down the middle column and the pattern is plain: the generous part is year one, and the vague part is the clause you care about.

Where does the five-year promise break?

It breaks at the fine print, not the calendar: coverage is subject to terms and conditions, and burn-in cover stays unconfirmed for every brand until you read the terms for your country and model.

Opinion: I read the silence as a warning, not an invitation. LG may well treat burn-in as a covered panel defect in practice, but nobody outside the company can tell that from the page, and I would not spend money on the hope.

Set-up is where owners decide their own risk, and it often shares an afternoon with the soundbar, a separate fight laid out in soundbar audio delay and which device should wait.

• Country: a Canadian page is not your contract.
• Brands: Samsung and Sony burn-in terms were not verified here.
• Plans: ask whether any extended warranty names image retention.

This week, find your TV's exact model number and read your own country's warranty page for it, searching the terms for burn-in and image retention. The decision: buy the OLED you want and keep static logos in check, but pay nothing extra for burn-in cover until someone puts it in writing.

Related: how many years of smart TV updates each brand promises

A newsreader's lips close on a hard "p", and the sound lands a beat later. Or a beat earlier, which is worse. You open the menus and find two sliders, one on the TV and one on the soundbar, and a question nobody answers on the box: which device should wait? Soundbar audio delay is rarely a fault. It is two machines disagreeing about time, and the fix depends on which one is running ahead.

Why does soundbar audio delay happen at all?

Voices drift because the picture and the sound take different routes, and every box on the sound route, from the TV's audio output to the soundbar's decoder, adds its own processing time. The picture is not innocent either. Motion smoothing and upscaling hold the image back while the sound leaves early, so a quick bar under a heavily processed picture puts voices ahead of lips. A slow bar puts them behind. Same symptom, opposite fixes. Even picture modes move it: the Filmmaker Mode settings we looked at recently strip most of that processing, and sync shifts with them.

Direction matters more than size. ITU-R BT.1359, the broadcast recommendation from 1998 that is still in force, found viewers detect sound arriving 45 ms early but only notice late sound at 125 ms. A bar running slightly late can pass unnoticed for years; one running slightly early looks wrong from the first sentence. Thunder follows lightning, never the reverse. This is the most useful number in home AV, and almost nobody quotes it.

Four numbers settle most living-room cases. RTINGS, in a January 2024 study built on 500 latency measurements, found a soundbar's ARC or eARC link often syncs worse than plugging the source into the bar, and that one sound-effects setting added 30 ms. Its headphone test puts typical Bluetooth SBC latency at 150 to 250 ms (as of 2023). Voice modes are processing too, worth knowing if you lean on the dialogue enhancement modes on TVs and soundbars.

The Bluetooth figure rules options out. A standard SBC link is past the late limit before you open a menu, and a delay slider can only make the early signal wait; it cannot pull late sound forward. The tolerance ratio is our own division of the ITU thresholds.

Should you set the delay on the TV or the soundbar?

Set it on one device only, preferably the soundbar because it sits last before your ears and sees every input, and use the TV's AV sync setting only when the bar has no delay control of its own. Two stacked delays is the classic mistake. Broadcasters may already hand you a signal out of step, so the table starts with the slack you inherit; its headroom rows are our arithmetic from ITU-R BT.1359 and the EBU's R37.

Read the ARC row against the late-headroom row. That single measured hop, if it runs late, spends the whole home margin by itself. RTINGS found bars closer to perfect sync with the source in the soundbar's HDMI input, so a cable move can beat a settings hunt.

Does eARC fix lip sync, and where does it still break?

eARC can carry automatic lip-sync data, a feature HDMI first added in version 1.3, but it only works when both devices report their delays honestly, and plenty of chains still drift on particular apps and picture modes.

The real fix is newer. The HDMI Licensing Administrator released HDMI 2.2 in June 2025 with a Latency Indication Protocol, aimed at chains with a soundbar or receiver in the middle, so each device can report its delay. Both ends need it. Exact figures are still being studied, but early indicators suggest it reaches new TVs and bars long before the ones on your wall, so check for it on your next purchase rather than retiring a bar that works.

Picture modes are the other trap. Game mode strips video processing, which makes the picture faster and leaves the sound relatively late, so a delay tuned in Movie mode drifts when a console wakes the TV. The same goes for separate day and night presets, the sort people set up to fight glare in a bright living room: check sync in each one.

• Drift in one streaming app only: leave the global delay alone.
• Optical with Dolby: PCM output cuts decoding time but drops surround formats.
• Both sliders set: zero one of them before judging the other.

So, which device should wait? Whichever signal is ahead: one delay on the soundbar for early voices, less processing for late ones. This week, put on a newsreader, zero both sliders and watch lips close on a "p": delay early sound in small steps until it stops bothering you, and give late sound a different cable instead.