All modern TVs come with at least one USB port, but aside from powering a Roku stick, what is it any good for? One option—streaming media off a storage drive—is hardly a secret, but life finally gave me a reason to put this feature to use.
A family-friendly way to watch home videos
Let kids play with a camera without involving the cloud
Years ago, I stripped all the phone bits out of an Android phone and turned it into a podcast and music player for my son. What I didn’t foresee was how much he would take a liking to the camera. He has recorded hours of footage of himself playing with his toys, along with videos of him and his younger sister goofing around. Like many kids, he talks to the camera like an influencer or podcast host—the TV stars of our time.
I intentionally made sure this portable media player is not connected to the cloud. Kids will be kids, and I don’t want to worry about what they may be unwittingly uploading to Google servers, nor does any company have the right to that data anyway. On the downside, it’s meant his videos remain isolated to the device that they were recorded on, which is a precarious reality for someone who has already dropped and broken a phone or two in his life.
Now that we’ve switched our son from a minimalist phone running LineageOS to a stock Android phone with Google’s Family Account Link parental controls enabled, he has asked me to transfer over his videos. The challenge is that the old phone had twice the storage space as the new one, and I’m not exactly the one to best judge which of these videos are meaningful to preserve. These are his memories, not mine.
So I decided to plug in an external SSD that is twice as large as the phone and copy over all of his videos. I then introduced this external drive to the USB port on my TV. Since my TV is a Samsung Frame TV, that USB port is actually on the attached One Connect Box rather than directly on the TV itself (pictured above). Now my son merely has to change the input to watch his old recordings on the largest screen he’s ever viewed them on.
Kids can figure out a TV in seconds
Local files are incredibly easy to navigate
It’s easy for a kid to learn, which is the beauty of the setup. Modern TVs can load videos from a drive fast enough to play them instantly. My kids can pause, resume, and skip around without dealing with any buffering—avoiding a concept that I’ve found kids take a long time to grasp (you try explaining to a four-year-old what the internet is and what it has to do with watching KPop Demon Hunters).
Our TV’s interface, and likely yours as well, looks absolutely bare bones compared to any streaming service. Even on a 75-inch Samsung Frame TV, there’s little done here that will wow you, but at least it’s speedy and functional. Since there aren’t any ads, it’s notably faster than the TV’s usual One UI interface.
A safe way to watch TV
I don’t have to hover around and monitor what they’re watching
Modern TVs and streaming apps were not built with kids in mind. Some are fine, like the kids section of Netflix or Disney Plus. Others, like YouTube Kids, not so much. A hard drive of local files is about as safe as it gets. If the kids only have access to the videos that I’ve placed on the hard drive, then I know what they’re watching.
As my son has re-watched these videos, I’ve also caught glimpses of moments in his life that I was not there to witness for the very first time. Even the videos I’m in feel like new memories when viewed from his perspective. Frankly, even those of us who are at home with our kids all throughout the day don’t always have a window into their rich inner worlds.
For the time being, my drive only really has home videos, but it might not be a bad idea to rip some of their favorite DVDs and place them here as well.
Putting a spare external drive to good use
There is much I could fit on a 1TB drive, but for now, I’m going to let my kids have this one. I’m in the process of building a media server where I can put all of our data, but it’s nice having my son’s recordings stored in a separate place. This once-ignored port on the back of my TV no longer goes ignored.
