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This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…
Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.
Not too important, but quite a few legit TV apps are Flash based. YouView and TiVo in the UK are both entirely flash (AS3 for YV, TiVo was AS2 last time I worked on it). Roku I think were AS2. Samsung TVs used to support flash but that might not be handled any more, I think their browser is pretty decent now.
Most TVs have moved to HTML+JS though, that's true. Thankfully many actually moved to sensible browsers too, there used to be massive inconsistencies between devices.
Actually a bit of a shame. Although flash can be really annoying, you can control when frames are drawn and position things accurately. You also had much better control over the memory (which things are cached, what's still a vector), which is important if you've got only a few megs of RAM and you're sliding around 1280x720 images.
Flash could have been hugely better, but the compiler was terrible (thanks to motion-twin though, you saved my sanity so many times on AS2 projects) and the runtime needed a lot of work on slower devices. But for animating things when you know the exact resolution you're always going to be running at? Brilliant.
Source: worked on apps for smart TV and set top boxes.