There are a few possibilities, but except for option three, there’s no certainty whether or not these will work it just depends on the details of your specific television.
One) power at the wall. Some televisions Will come back to their on state if the power is cut while they are on. For those cases, you can just plug the television into a smart wallplug, then turn the wallplug on and off. However, there are not very many TVs do this. Most of them come back from a power loss to the off state.
- send software commands over Wi-Fi. If your television model has an open API you may be able to format the commands to send to it that way. Some people have done this for some Samsung models. Here’s their discussion thread in his that gives you any ideas.
- use an IR blaster device. Obviously, Harmony is the option that has official ST integration. But there are community members that use the less expensive global cache device. It cost between $80 and $100. But it doesn’t have a button remote, it’s just the IR blaster. So now you need something to send Commands to it.
Roomieremote is one option that works very well, and they even sell the global device under their own brand. It’s still not a button remote, it’s designed to work on a tablet. But it does have smartthings integration built in from their side. The biggest issue for most people is that there is also an annual fee. But I did want to mention it because there are community members using it who like it.
There are some other ways to control the global cache device, most involve running software on a laptop.
- To be honest, though, the easiest thing is just to get the harmony home hub with the harmony companion button remote. This is often on sale for about $129 at Best Buy or Amazon.
Once you have that, there are several different ways to use it with smartthings, you don’t have to pay any monthly fees are by any other equipment, and you can create activities that combine your AV equipment and your home automation devices, like turning the lights to 50% when the television starts in the evening and you run an activity called movie time. It’s also been very easy to use the Amazon echo for voice control of many AV options via Harmony. So I just mention that here because it is the easiest way to get integration and many people are not aware of the lower-cost harmony option.