I wish there were 3rd party "dumbing" kits for popular TV's though there are too many brands for this to be practical.
A fantasy of mine is a TV/monitor with a standardized mainboard which uses LVDS/eDP to connect to the panel and a choice of input boards. A dumb board with multiple inputs and a smart board with less inputs but Ethernet, Wifi and USB with an SoC plus open firmware. This enables easy repair and hacking.
Of course this would mean less profit as the TV life can be extended instead of tossed in the trash. We cant have nice things.
If you never connect it to the internet, what's the big deal? Just tell it to use HDMI 1 or whatever, and you shouldn't need to bother with the garbage that comes pre-installed.
Many smart TVs will connect automatically to any open wifi signal. Setting up a Faraday cage around the device, or a full Faraday room, isn't feasible for most people; likewise, disconnecting the hardware inside the device will be error prone and void the warranty.
Many modern televisions will stop working altogether of they go too long without phoning home. Some newer models won't allow you to use them without first connecting.
Likely advances in the future will be utilizing Ethernet over HDMI from newer connected devices, and perhaps building some sort of 3G or LTE or 5G antenna into the thing if the pricing and ad profitability works out. A more likely route is making agreements with ISPs to get access to their mandatory built-in modem wifi access points, which cannot be turned off by end users in some areas; that's a large logistical problem so we won't see things had that way for a little while.
I think it's a lot easier than that to be honest - most TVs have separate boards for the "smarts", and on the smart section, many will have a separate wireless module (usually so it can be independently certified).
I'd pay for the service, for sure.
If the TV fails to boot with the wireless module removed, perhaps cutting an antenna trace might be sufficient.
My TLC TV starts to bootloop after a few weeks of being unable to connect. I contact warranty, they tell me to try support first. I contact support, they tell me to connect it to the internet to download updates.
If they want to force you to connect it, they will find a way.
You don't want to return the purchase which doesn't work? Or they don't allow you - in this case what the court would say? If it's too bothersome, small claims court supposed to be an easier approach (in USA)?
If you just connect it to a single HDMI input though, then the only one of those that matters is that they're slow to turn on. Which is slightly annoying, but not a huge deal.
Buy a Vizio. Connect the ethernet port to a used router ($5 at a yard sale, $20 if you need to buy a new one). Don't connect the router to your house network. You're done.
The board in the article is the closest you'll get --- all the different companies ultimately use the same parts for their TVs, with firmware accounting for the biggest difference.
This is actually how you repair one of my favorite line of dumb TVs. Philips left the US TV market after these. I suspect it was for a bizarre reason: the default color selection was horrible and overred, and its optional algorithmic smoothing was terrible. You had to find a secret retailer menu to turn down the red (which took considerable online searching.) I think they probably got a lot of returns.
Otherwise it was great, and I have one that's still running.
Phillips left most consumer markets to refocus on industrial markets. The Phillips Hue lighting brand hasn't been owned by Phillips in several years now, as Phillips Lighting was spun out into its own company named Signify. It's an interesting question when Signify might finally take over the branding entirely rather than keep relying on the Phillips logo.
As an alternative to Smart TVs, something recently caught my eye on a deals website - signage displays, such as a Samsung QM49N. Anyone have experience with these?
While it does run an OS, it doesn't have a TV tuner, and I doubt it would show ads, since it is designed for signage (where I guess you have the control to show your OWN ads)
I lucked into getting one such tv for free, it works quite decently. It only has one hdmi port and the speakers are quite mediocre on it (rear firing). The color settings built into it are different things like "shopping mall, outside, train terminal, etc.". All of its downsides are mitigated by a good hdmi av reciever and speakers, it runs hdcp just fine, no problems for me.
A growing number of them are Microsoft's Surface Hub [1]. Admittedly they do have a "Smart OS" installed, but it's a Windows 10 variant (so at least amenable to the usual Windows 10 device management tools and system update processes).
It's an MSD3663 --- not much info in English, but there seems to be a lot of sites in Chinese and Russian (like this one, hence the "interesting" English phrasing) discussing these boards.
