Ever since I have been embraced a consciousness, I have had meals while staring at moving pictures on a screen. I squirm every time I have to eat without watching something; (we will not delve on my psychological hollowness that compels the behaviour).
Now enveloped in the business of adult life, the only time I actually look at a large screen is while eating. But I absolutely despise having to spend several minutes looking for what to watch. A new TV platform claims to solve that.
Dor TV, named after the Hindi word for string or thread, is designed to offer highly personalized recommendations for what you can watch. Meanwhile, its other advantage lies in its pricing. It strings together 20+ OTT services into a single subscription plan that is part of the TV's initial cost of ownership.
You own a 43-inch QLED 4K TV for just ₹9,999 but pay each month to cover the rest of the cost as well as access dozens of OTT services.
It sounds promising, but is it truly any good? Let me take you through the specifics in this review of the Dor TV 43-inch.
What sets Dor TV apart
For starters, the price of the Dor TV is what will compel you to consider it. It starts at ₹9,999 for the 43-inch model, but that is just the down payment of sorts. Every month (until the 12th, at least), you will be required to pay ₹799.
As part of the package, you get subscriptions to at least 24 OTT apps and wouldn't need to purchase them separately. So, at the end of the first year, you will have ended up paying ₹19,587 for the 43-inch model while also enjoying the assemblage of OTT apps.
Here's all you get in the package:
Compare that pricing to what you would pay for a 43-inch 4K QLED, you would be in profit even when you don't truly pay for the OTT apps.
There is a caveat when it comes to the tier of subscriptions included in the monthly Dor pack. You may be left with the lowest tiers of each of the apps (that support multiple subscription options) and may feel discontent if you want to enjoy content at the highest quality (whether 4K or Full HD).
That said, if you're looking at the Dor TV primarily for its value for money, you will not be disappointed.
Let me take you through the various aspects of the Dor experience and how it differs from standard offerings like Google TV, as well as specialized ones like JioTV.
Interface
What sets Dor TV apart from the ocean of smart TV running Android or Google TV interface is the user interface. It aims to offer tailored recommendations to cut through the noise of random and misfit suggestions and show you content that is more suiting to your taste.
When you boot up the TV, you are asked to select a user profile, with up to five different profiles created for users. While setting up the profile initially, each user is asked to define their preferred languages, genres of content, favourite shows, and actors, and Dor TV optimizes the initial set of recommendations, which keep on refining as you use the TV.
When the cursor rests at the home tab, you will see the array of content you have watched recently but left unfinished, so you can continue watching it. You can move the cursor rightward for tabs based on popular formats, such as live TV news, sports, games (Android games playable with remote or controller), followed by a search icon and a profile tab, where you can find details about your subscription.
When you move the cursor rightward represented by large icons for each OTT app that is preinstalled.
Talking of the preinstalled apps, you will find most of the popular ones — Amazon Prime Video, JioCinema, Hotstar, Zee5, SonyLIV, Lionsgate, YouTube, and a few regional or less common ones like Docubay, ShemarooMe, etc.
All in all, there are over a dozen apps that come installed with the app, but the Dor TV subscription includes at least 22 apps at the time of launch, and the company expects to continually keep adding more. YouTube Premium is not included in this subscription, and there's no Netflix or Apple TV at the moment.
For Netflix, the company plans to get the TV certified over the coming months and bring support, but there's no guarantee at the moment.
Even though the TV runs a modified version of the open-source version of Android, also known as AOSP, you cannot immediately sideload these apps with a USB drive since there is no file browser preinstalled.
Coming back to the preinstalled apps, as you move the cursor over each of the separate tabs, you see content specific from the apps but again customized to your likings, language preferences, and based on the previous content you have watched.
Dor says these recommendations refine over time, but I have only used the TV for less than two weeks to notice any significant shifts.
Interestingly, when you choose any particular item to watch, the content does not start playing immediately or open the overview page within the respective app. Instead, the overview that pops up is delivered by the Dor TV UI, and lists a range of similar results underneath the main listing.
Why I really like that is because these recommendations are from the entire breadth of apps installed on the TV and not just the one that the specific title is listed on.
You can scroll further and see the actors in show or movie. Then, as you bring the pointer to their pictures and press the select button on the remote, you will see other TV shows or movies the actor has starred in.
With these functions, you have plenty of options when it comes to choosing what to watch, and should hopefully match your preferences for actors, genres, languages, etc.
Live TV
For times when you are you're unsure of what you want to watch, there are over 300 live channels. As someone who continually loses his shit over how poor the IPTV experience is with Jio set-top box, the Dor TV experience is far superior.
Even though the majority of channels stream from OTT apps, the loading is more seamless, and switching back from the respective apps to the list of available channels is almost effortless. It is still not as seamless as a traditional set-top box that uses a dish or cable TV, the convenience of not having to rely on separate hardware is surely underrated.
Dor TV also has an advantage over other players when it comes to news. If you simply wish to skim over the latest news without wanting to invest, Dor gives you single-line text summaries (more descriptive than headlines) using generative AI. It uses Mistral 7B AI model to generate speech-to-text summaries from live news channels.
App Store
While you cannot immediately sideload apps, Dor gives you the option to download other OTT apps or games from the app store, called the "Dor Store."
While here's a glimpse of the options, there are hundred of apps to download and use. Notably, some of these may require additional subscriptions now covered under Dor's monthly pricing.
Display
With the pricing the company offers, the Dor TV is fairly compelling. But part of what makes Dor TV exciting is the display it uses. After all, what good is a TV if you can't cherish what you watch on it.
On the tech part, Dor deploys a QLED-backlit IPS panel with a 4K resolution for the 43-inch model. The panel is fairly bright and feels on par with the claimed brightness of 300nits, and characteristic to QLEDs, has punchier colours and deep blacks compared to LED panels.
While the backlight feels sufficient, it also bleeds out of certain parts along the edges. So it won't qualify as a top-notch display, but you shouldn't be expecting one at this price.
The display comes with basic HDR support, so if you are looking for better visuals with more advanced codecs such as HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, you would be at a loss. Even without HDR, I have never felt the need to change ambient lighting to improve the TV's visibility.
If you absolutely want those features with Dor TV, you should wait for the 55-inch model that will launch in the coming months and will have Dolby Vision support.
At its current pricing, the panel feels good enough, and it would be immodest to ask for more.
Audio
Quite unlike the display — which served me well within what I was expecting, the TV's audio easily surpassed my hopes and expectations. The audio was fairly loud, even at very low volume levels, and I rarely found myself going above 15/100, even while watching the TV across a large 20 x 10 feet living room.
There's Dolby Audio support for supported content on apps like Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video, etc.
Remote and other hardware
I hate it when I pick a TV's remote only to find out that the batteries inside have died. That kicks off an exercise of scouring for loose batteries around the housing. Thankfully, there's no more doing that with the Dor TV's remote.
It's one of the few models in its price bracket that comes with a solar-powered remote. The bottom half of the remote features a photovoltaic cell that can slowly charge the remote when it is rested in a well-lit ambiance. You don't necessarily need to place it under sunlight, and light from a lamp should suffice. For faster charging, Dor has also included a USB-C port at the bottom.
While the remote eliminates the need for replacing batteries every once in a while, I wish there was an easy way to tell the remaining battery without having to go deep into the device settings.
Who is this for?
Dor TV is an ideal offering for first-time smart TV owners who want to experience various content from different apps without exorbitant fees or having to manage different apps separately. It's especially useful to those who cherish a good value for money.
In a way, Streambox Media, the company behind Dor TV, represents a similar ethos as Micromax, a once popular Indian phone brand that swallowed bigger competitors like Nokia for its high value for money. The two companies have a common link — Rahul Sharma, who founded Micromax and is one of the founders at Streambox too.
Besides households, I also envision the TV to be integral to public settings such as restaurants or hotels as a better solution than outdated dish TVs without proper subscriptions. I can also imagine these TVs being used in large volumes at business centres, railway stations, and airports, where it could even be used to serve the audience with suitable ads.
The Dor TV has been launched in the 43-inch model, which can be currently only be bought on Flipkart for ₹10,798. That pricing includes the base ₹9,999 value and the first month's subscription.
The 55" and 65" models will launch in the coming months and will be priced as follows:
- 55-inch: ₹16,999
- 65-inch: ₹24,999
Monthly subscription for these bigger models will remain the same at ₹799 a month for the first 12 months. After the first year, you will be able to create à la carte packages for a lower subscription if you don't use any app.