I still remember the near-instant channel switching from the 90s, when analog signals and CRTs where the norm. You could change channels on a dime.

Now with complex video and audio codecs, video post-processing and shoddily coded software there's been a very severe downgrade in that department. I don't have a TV at home but every time I'm in a hotel or my parent's place I notice how laggy it is when I'm just browsing through the channels (which is what I do 90% of the time when I'm using one, since there's hardly anything worth watching anyway).

For those of you who are too young to know what I'm talking about, have a look at this: https://youtu.be/v83WEzw8tfw?t=44

That video is already laggy compared to what I remember as a kid. If you were watching OTA analog the channel change was near instant. Even on our cable box it was near instant.

Was it not actually instant?

My recollection from the 80's was you switch the channel (physically) and it's... switched!

So was there some magical latency there that I just couldn't perceive, or are the "near instant" reports talking about some other type of TV? Or something else?

Change was instant, took a frame or two for all the sync, gain, etc to settle.

There absolutely was some latency, about 13ms worth, because it had to wait for the next field to start so it could properly synchronize and start drawing. But you'd never notice that yourself.

There was a few ms of latency but you couldn't actually perceive it unless you used a slow motion camera or something.

Yeah, I think that video appears to still have some digital delay. Perhaps something related to the satellite receiver decoding in that example.

Thankfully most let you skip the UI entirely by having direct input selection IR commands. Get yourself a generic universal remote that either has these buttons, or custom ones you can program.

With this I basically never see the UI on my LG and Samsung TVs, and I certainly don't interact with it unless I need to get into settings.

I am personally considering just getting an HDMI switch that I can manage externally from the TV. I mostly use the Android TV device I bought and its much more stable than the UI on my offline Smart TV thankfully it has most if not all the apps I need.

There are lots of shitwares that don't do async, so the shitware runs at a snail's pace offline because all the spyware requests have to time out before the shitware can do anything.