I never type with my TV remote anymore now that I found this hack

• Finding a Bluetooth keyboard isn’t difficult
• Connecting the keyboard was simple
• This wasn’t the end of the road for the remote

Anyone who owns a smart TV knows what it’s like to log into a streaming service. Sometimes, it will just take your Apple ID or Google account information and make it simple for you. But many times, you’ll either be hit with the QR code that makes you scan it with your phone, log into it on a website, and then have the website grant access from your account to the TV and log you in. It can be a massive pain for everyone involved, which is usually just you.

There’s a great scene in the series The Other Two where one of the characters is an actor and invites his friends over to see the new movie he was in. He tries to log into his Hulu account, but he can’t remember his password. He spends hours trying to remember the password, trying all different email addresses and passwords as he uses his TV’s remote to type them all in individually. The hilarious scene ends with everyone having left and one person asleep on the couch. This is a perfect example of how frustrating it is to log in to anything on your smart TV or type something in.

You don’t want to have to use your smart TV’s remote to press arrow keys 800 times as you hit OK a bunch of times to enter your email address. Changing to uppercase? Move to the up arrow that’s 15 clicks away. I got sick of doing this and decided to do something much easier. I just bring along a Bluetooth keyboard and type in the password.

Finding a Bluetooth keyboard isn’t difficult

You can generally find one for cheap

You may not have a Bluetooth keyboard, as many people will rely on their laptop’s built-in keyboard to do the bulk of their typing. If you have a desktop, you might rely on one. For me, my MacBook Pro has some busted keys that don’t work so I rely on the Apple Wireless Keyboard to connect to my computer. It works well and has an incredibly similar layout to the one on the laptop, so it wasn’t a total shock to have to switch to using this once the computer’s keyboard stopped working.

This all is to say that I had it easy when I wanted to use my Bluetooth keyboard elsewhere. It wasn’t much of a problem to bring my keyboard downstairs to give it a try on my Samsung The Frame TV. Not only did I know I wanted to set up some streaming services on the TV, but I also wanted to be able to search for specific titles in said streaming services. I wasn’t going to do that with the Samsung TV remote.

Connecting the keyboard was simple

It only took a few steps

The Apple Wireless Keyboard runs on batteries, so make sure it is powered up with batteries before trying to connect it.

I had to check a few things before I was able to pair the keyboard with the TV. The first was that I set the keyboard to pairing mode. This meant touching the button on the side of the keyboard to activate it and holding it down until it began flashing. The second step was bringing up the Bluetooth devices portion of the Samsung TV.

To find that on a Samsung TV, I went to the Settings menu and looked for Bluetooth devices. I didn’t need to turn on Bluetooth on my TV, but you might in order to make it recognizable. I went to Connected Devices and found the Bluetooth devices list. In Input Device, the Bluetooth Device section lets you connect an external input device like a keyboard. This is just one of the many options you have to connect devices. If you click Set Up Now, it will bring you to the part of the menu where your TV is searching for pairable devices. My keyboard showed up with a string of numbers. I paired it by keeping my keyboard in pairing mode. The TV asked me to type in a four-digit code and press Enter on the keyboard for it to pair. Once I did that, the keyboard was paired.

This wasn’t the end of the road for the remote

I still needed it to get around

Now that my keyboard was paired, I was able to use it to type things on the TV. However, I still needed the remote to get me into the apps that I’d be logging into. This is where having a Bluetooth keyboard with a touchpad would have come in handy. They do sell them, if you are so inclined to get rid of your remote entirely. But since I wasn’t going to go out and buy a new keyboard, I had to make do with the remote and keyboard usage. Think of it as a TV’s version of a mouse and keyboard combo.

I logged in to Netflix and chose to type in my password rather than use the QR code. After using the Samsung TV remote to get into the username and password section, I quickly typed in my password on the keyboard and pressed enter to sign in. It went so much faster than using the arrows and center button on the remote. I repeated this for all the services I needed to do it for and was happy and content. While this was the only use case I had for the keyboard, I will use it to browse the web in the future on the TV, and I might try to use it for gaming in the future.