Despite being thinner and sleeker, the IR remote control that comes with your brand new smart TV isn’t fundamentally different than what we were using in the 1980s.

Insert it between your TV’s IR receiver and the flame from a lighter, and pull the slots along to generate the coded pattern. Get it just right and you have a paper and lighter remote control.

It seems that the TV remote control is not going to be consigned to the scrapyard just yet, but it's unlikely to dominate home entertainment systems forever.

Although the Apple TV 4K is a great streaming box, its remote control is—to put it lightly—polarizing. The symmetrical design is too easy to hold upside down, and it’s so thin that it often ...

Forty percent of users ages 18 to 34 prefer to control their TVs with a smartphone or tablet instead of a remote, Petersen says, citing data from Altman Vilandrie & Co. and Research Now.

Once you’re set up, TV Remote provides a default set of controls tailored to your TV with on-screen buttons to navigate your TV’s UI, switch channels and sources, control volume, and everything else ...

Apple clearly envisions this to be the one remote to control every single thing that you own. And that’s a lot of responsibility to heap upon one tiny little oblong.

Lenovo’s smart TV plans are similar to Samsung’s: Speak commands into the remote control and the TV obeys. The company currently has in the pipeline one smart 3D TV, the K91, which will come ...