Samsung Terrace Helps Me Bring Indoor Entertainment to the Outdoors

My Samsung Terrace outdoor TV allowed me to blend my landscaping hobby with enjoy televised sporting events

This past fall, I had the opportunity to blend my passion for maintaining the plants, flowers, and lawn around my home with my day job writing about home tech. I was offered a Samsung Terrace outdoor TV for review, which, when added to my Origin Acoustics outdoor speaker system, would help me take my outdoor entertainment system to the next level.

As soon as the 65-inch TV arrived, I emailed my local custom integrator, Millennium Sounds to ask them for help with the installation. I’m pretty handy, but I also know my limitations. There was no way that I was going trust my skills at hanging that especially heavy-duty beast on the exterior brick of my house.

Millennium co-owner Bill Lehman told me that his company always turns to Snap One’s SunBriteTV brand for its outdoor mounts, so I confirmed with him my preference for an articulating model and scheduled the installation.

After unboxing the mount and TV, Millennium’s tech team worked with me on my preferred TV placement right between my patio door and kitchen window. Because the installation took place in November in the Midwest, there wasn’t much time to enjoy any outdoor movies, unless I wanted to really bundle up. The major unveiling, therefore, finally took place in late May, when I was able to stream the live running of the Indy 500.

For me, watching the Indy 500 live, without having to spend five hours stuck indoors on a beautiful Spring day was perfect. So was the crystal clear 4K performance of the TV.

Subsequently, I’ve spent many afternoons and evenings watching portions of Yankees baseball games while having an adult beverage or hitting tennis balls to my dog. The sound quality from the Terrace TV is so good that I’ve never considered adding a soundbar, and the vivid brightness setting for daytime viewing makes the TV vibrant and visible from even the deepest corners of my lawn. At night, I turn down the brightness to a “cinema” mode just so I’m not lighting up the entire neighborhood with my TV. My only minor complaint is that Samsung does not have an app agreement with Major League Baseball, so I had to purchase a Roku 4K streaming dongle to attach to the back of the TV to watch ballgames on the MBL app.

For me, second only to watching the Indy 500 outdoors is watching baseball games on a warm summer evening or even a periodic Sunday afternoon, while working in the yard.

But, then, a “funny thing” happened to my Shangri-La backyard living oasis. First, a terrible heatwave and draught hit, starting in late June and carrying over deep into July. My lush, green lawn dried up and turned brown, each day the cracks in the ground getting bigger.

Then, when the rain finally arrived, just the other day, it was in the form of a violent middle-of-the night thunderstorm. Lightning hit one of my backyard trees, splitting it right down the middle, and leaving a huge mess. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and no major property damage was incurred. It seems silly to say it, but all of my outdoor tech also was spared.

The moral of the story is that you can try to bring modern tech conveniences into the natural world, but oftentimes Mother Nature is going to find a way to take back what belongs to her.

We’re having the mess cleaned up right now, and my lawn is starting to green back up. Eventually, once I’ve (temporarily) tamed my little section of the outdoors again, I will once again turn on my Terrace TV, tune in favorite baseball team, and listen to the birds chirping while a summer breeze blows around me. It’ll be pretty close to perfect.

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