My mother is eighty-three and watches one channel. Not mostly one channel — one. She knows what is on it, she likes the presenters, and the idea of six hundred alternatives is not appealing to her, it is stressful.
I set her up last autumn and it has been the most successful installation I have done, precisely because I stopped trying to give her the full thing.
The setup is deliberately crippled. The box boots straight into the player. The player opens on a favourites list with four channels on it — the one she watches, the two she might, and the news. Everything else is hidden. There is no way to get to the settings without a sequence of button presses she will never accidentally perform.
The remote is the television's own, controlling the box through the HDMI link, and I put a strip of tape over the buttons she does not need. That last one sounds patronising written down and it was her idea.
What I did not anticipate was the thing she liked most, which was the pause. She had never had it. Being able to stop a programme to answer the door and then carry on is, to her, the entire benefit of the change — not the channels, not the price, the pause button.
I have thought about that a lot since. I chose the setup on channel availability and reliability, and the feature that actually sold it was one I had not considered at all because I have had it for fifteen years.
The practical advice: when you set this up for an older relative, do not demonstrate the range. Demonstrate pause, rewind on live television, and how to get back to the channel they like if they get lost. Those three things.
The hardware side matters less than people think here, but the remote and the boot behaviour matter enormously — this comparison is the right place to look, with those two things in mind rather than the specifications.
One channel, four in the guide, and a pause button she uses every day.