What sort of extra stuff is my computer doing? Because I haven't asked it to do any of it.
So, I get that that Mac is so much more powerful than my TV, but I would therefore expect it to find playing VOD much easier than my TV.
As an analogy, if I drove a family saloon and a sports car at 30mph, I wouldn't expect the sports car to start overheating because it's 'got more power available', I'd expect the family saloon to overheat at 100mph and the sports car to find it easy. This is the opposite of what you're saying.
As for the aluminium casing of the Mac, this conducts heat much better than the plastic case of my fanless TV, so if anything the Mac's fans should be even less necessary when watching VOD.
Not that I disagree with your post, but it just doesn't make any sense to me.
You have a bigass OS to run even when you are just watching porn. Cloud services are on. I'm sure you get the point. When you boot your computer, it isn't using 0 GB of RAM, right? It is a very complex thing.
The Mac has more powerful hardware. However, that hardware, even in idle state (or close), will produce a lot more heat than your TV, just like a Ferrari, even at 20 mph, will consume way more fuel than a ford focus at the same speed. In fact, if you drive a high performance car just at those speeds, you will get problems: Filters won't have enough air going through, so you will have to make a trip to the mechanic because the car might accumulate dirt and then overheat, etc.
But let's let the metaphors for something else. One thing that you are being stubborn about, is that you don't get that your Mac isn't the culprit. Adobe and MS are.
You can do way more complex tasks on your computer without it stressing that much (Video conversion, opening a lot of apps at the same time, etc.), but because flash and silverlight are so bad on Windows BUT ESPECIALLY on OS X, the hardware has to step up to decode things properly, and it will kick the fans and battery life will decrease.
That's it, no big deal. If you uninstall flash and silverlight, if you do not use chrome (it has flash built in), you will find that your computer plays 1080p video just fine while doing a bunch of things at the same time (games, browser, music, more games, more tabs, spotify, etc.).
Yes, I can also confirm that it's mostly an OS X problem. I, too, noticed that my MacBook was much less bothered about playing videos when I was running Windows under Boot Camp.
As to the question about whether the television sets have similar software needs, I don't believe so. Playing videos on computers introduces a lot of copyright protection restrictions. Since a desktop operating system, such as OS X, allows a lot of freedom in terms of which applications one can run, and what those applications are capable of (stealing content), content providers are more strict about the ways the content can be delivered on computers. I suspect, but I'm not 100% sure, that there is less blockage due to restrictions when streaming on one's HD TV.
It's not an OS X thing (as in, the OS isn't the culprit), it's a flash and silverlight thing, especially on OS X. An iPad plays Netflix effortlessly, just like a tiny iPhone.
Why can't that dedicated software work on my Mac?? It clearly works very well.
For the same reason the Snake game on the Nokia 3310 won't run on OS X: It wasn't built for it. Yur computer plays videos and streams much better than your TV, it's just flash and silverlight that are the problem, and it will be fixed soon enough. Look at Netflix on iOS: Perfect, no flash.
This is what Apple has to deal with on the Mac side: 30 years of MS dominance = crap legacy. I can't wait for the day Apple closes the Mac down and only Mac App Store downloads (and respective restrictions) are allowed. **** like this would be solved long ago.
