FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). But they're often nice panels aimed at serious running hours, without this sort of junk (which would give enterprise IT conniptions) and can have very useful feature support like 802.1x authentication which so many devices still lack. Players like NEC will even advertise their use of an RPi compute and wink at lack of spyware [0] for some of their products, but lots of major "smart TV" providers also have a commercial lineup.
I think they're well worth considering, particularly for the HN crowd, granted I suppose for people who truly want built-in netflix or the like without connecting something like a Roku or Apple TV maybe it's less optimal. But even they might change their tunes back to the concept of separate boxes and normal panels if they dislike all the ads and data tracking.
You can still get cheap ones. And by cheap I mean TLC/Hisense level quality displays. Walmart sells Sceptre's for low prices and have no smart features, best purchase I've made in years.
We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV.
Sure I don't get 120Hz fancyness but at least it's 4k and the picture is good enough for my consoles.
+1 to Sceptre TVs! Recently (past week) bought a 4k Sceptre TV and it was less than $200. 60hz, looks great, the smartest feature it has is a clock you have to set yourself.
Just make sure not to buy the android or roku ones!
I bought a Sceptre last year and one of the hilarious things about it was it had the "lite" Roku interface, just your input selections with no smart features. Those TV's are fantastic for the price assuming they don't fail (and even then it could be argued that it's still a good deal).
I bought a TCL with smart features and there's no ads and I just dont connect it to wifi.
The Firestick 4k Max I got for $75 advertises prime shows occasionally (unobtrusively) but the UI is 2x as fast as my Chromecast so I very happily use it w/ IPTV, Airplay, and streaming apps.
I have a Firestick 4k Max on our main TV and a standard 4k stick on the other TV. They just work compared to my Shield TV which always seemed to fighting my home theater setup. I got them through a Prime deal, so I think I spent a total of $75 for both.
I've been tempted by some in-app features that only seem to work on AppleTV devices but not enough to spend that much when my current devices do the job so well.
Like some high quality audio streaming or better Airplay integration or something?
I had the same temptations to upgrade to Apple but I've resisted. Android seems to be where it's at for pure variety of software when it comes to TV/streaming media.
I was curious and looked up reviews for Sceptre, but according to some discussions on Reddit, they have build quality issues. One of the threads [0] had a discussion on picture quality and build quality issues.
Another subreddit [1] even has an automoderator comment that says getting a smart TV and not hooking it up to the internet is the best option. The automoderator also writes that if one is certain about going non-Smart, then one should "look at a projector or a Commercial Display. A projector means you will also 100% need audio with it. A Commercial Display or Hospitality TV you could pay up to twice or even more for the same TV (or worse) without smart features."
However, I'm not sure how reliable that automoderated comment on r/4kTV is.
There is the dystopian version of always connected, but it'd be nice to get firmware updates (supposing those updates mainly fix bugs, add features, improve performance).
I dont like 120Hz refresh, it looks weird. I see it a whole lot on bad 4k transfers of older movies, they're either doing a 3:2 pulldown or something else to up convert the scan rate, but no matter what it is, it makes the motion look weird and excessively fluid.
3:2 pulldown is taking 24fps film and making it work in 29.97fps TV video, generally with a couple interlaced frames. If you're seeing something "excessively fluid" the TV is interpolating frames. Which I love: 24fps needs to die. But a 120Hz refresh TV can also display 24 fps exactly, by showing the same frame 5 times, if the manufacturer has provided such a mode. 60Hz TVs cannot display 24fps without judder or interlacing
I ended up buying a Philips 55" gaming monitor instead of a TV. Seems to be the only way to get a high quality panel and proper HDR without spyware, most of the commercial displays I looked at didn't support HDR properly or had terrible panels.
Yeah, but I don't want a dumb TV. Or the side-effort of some moribund commercial line that will also cost a ton more.
You know what else kind of had this problem? Well, not the spyware as much, but just the crap software embedded: routers. OpenWRT appeared.
It appears most smart tvs are already running linux, but probably in the way that android phones are already running linux.
With android and smart tvs, the corps got a major foothold into managed computing platforms that they can control to do whatever spying was necessary. Firefox on the phone, ubuntu phone, etc, they couldn't break into Android, and nothing has broken into smart tvs.
But man if there was an OpenWRT I could replace my roku TVs with, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.
It's not just that, my relatives have an old LG smart TV that long ago stopped adding apps. If there was an open linux alternative, it probably would be getting updates and AppleTV and Disney Plus would be options on it.
Cursory searches have basically returned "man it would be hard, you'd need to know the board pretty well", yet ... aren't there armies of linux hackers that love hacking stuff like this? Seems like Smart TVs are a big, ubiquitous consumer item with privacy concerns that the linux hardware hacking community has treated with apathy. Which seems strange.
Maybe all the hackers think "eh, plug a raspberry pi into a free HDMI port" or "eh, build a media pc".
This is corporate big brother in your grandma's living room spying. This is freedom on the line, it's strange that the linux-as-hacking-freedom and the linux anticorporate crowd haven't jumped on this.
I worked at a place where they conference room TV's were showing ads for games, netflix. Everybody else looked at it as normal but my TV at home doesn't show ads, so it seemed ridiculously unprofessional to me. Just like when Windows shows ads in the start menu, etc. I don't see how people get used to it.
If you want a TV-priced display for use as a dumb monitor, just buy a TV and don't give it a wifi password. My main desktop monitor is a 43" Roku/TCL thing that is still running the factory firmware. Works great.
One issue with TV displays I didn't see mentioned here is glossiness. TVs are mostly glossy and monitors are usually matte. I strongly prefer the latter.
However those TVs are not easy to get and, like you said, they come with an increased price.
I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
I don't know if you have been following the news about Apple expanding its advertising business. If you don't want a corporation collecting data about your viewing, you could modify your approach slightly and try kodi.tv. I have Librelec running on a RPI with attached SSD as house media server. The add-ons catalog is large and growing, but it won't have all the channels you might want.
Does kodi / librelec have decent Netflix/Prime/HBO Max/Apple TV+ apps? I was under the impression they don't really support the big streaming apps and aren't really of use outside of watching torrented content.
Note that unless you're running Windows or Mac, 4k from Netflix is not available anyway. In fact, 1080p would not be available, according to their system requirements. Linux tops out at 720p on both Chrome and Firefox. I have to assume this would extend to Kodi on whatever platform you're running Kodi on.
Correct, if you use Linux you can pay a monthly fee to Netflix for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine to view 720p video.
Meanwhile torrents are a search away and they give me a no-nonsense .mkv file in 5 minutes, to watch wherever and whenever I want: phone, PC, TV, internet or no internet. The choice is easy.
> for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine
Not sure about this. Firefox and Opera both support 720p.
But, because of their choices here - or the terms of the content deals they've signed, idk - Netflix doesn't get as much money from me as they could. 720p is not sufficiently better than 480p (to me) to warrant paying them for 'standard' service, let alone their premium tier at $20/mo. So I just get their basic service.
Their loss, really, although collectively the Linux customer base is probably tiny enough that it's inconsequential to them.
On some devices Kodi can pass through to the platform native DRM if that supports higher resolutions, but bluntly you will be wasting your life waiting for updates as it breaks constantly.
Or the official apps right, that page is just about browsers (and implicitly unofficial apps)? So you could have the Kodi & Netflix apps on an Android TV (e.g. Nvidia Shield) device and have 4K Netflix.
I imagine Netflix gathers a lot of viewing data, and I can see a time when ads make it into the streaming platforms natively. Cable TV started out as an ad-free offering, and now it's almost 50% ads.
Like I really want to deal with torrenting, Plex servers, etc. Been there done that. I travel a lot and don’t want to deal with downloading media ahead of time.
I also stopped pirating music the day iTunes was introduced
You do know that iTunes just sells MP4s, right? They work in VLC. You can replicate your iTunes library to a NAS trivially and have it Just Work (now, the iTunes client isn't very smart about network drives, so you're better off having a local library that's backed up to said NAS, but that's not the issue at hand).
Haven't a lot of torrent sites gotten in trouble or implemented rules to mitigate against their sites providing content before the official release since they come out so fast and not always from official sources?
I've never heard of issues of having to wait any significant amount of time from an official release on the streaming companies.
Yea I've never seen a wait period after the official release either. This guy must be confused.
Torrenting is great but TBH I'm not going to waste my time setting up Sonarr/Radarr and maintaining tracker accounts to torrent stuff that I can watch through services I already have access to.
New gear usually needs time to marinate before it gets some hacking freedom.
New media is best ignored -- if you are always waiting with baited breath for 'the next new thing (TM)' they already have you and you will pay happily.
I personally ignore all new content and the odd time I want to see what's new there is more than enough waiting for me to download...
I'm not consuming every new song or film as they are released or even within a year of release because that is a waste of your attention and it's controlling you like a dog begging for treats.
The intention of the comment was -- if you just can't wait.. then pay your master. Seems you made your choice.
It has some and more. There are many add on channels with content you won't find on any of the commercial boxes. For example, Films for Action is a great channel addon with a curated set of alternative films. They don't fit the desired narrative of commercial systems and would be difficult to get any airtime from corporate broadcasters.
I think there are hundreds of channel add-ons. You can also connect a TV receiver. I like playing content from Newpipe on my phone directly to Kodi. You will find that button in Newpipe settings.
What's the advantage over Plex then? I've installed Kodi before but it didn't seem nearly as polished as Plex. Plex is doing away with plugins but I've never needed those anyways for Movie/TV content.
Unfortunately yes, I saw the news about Apple. I'm waiting to see what will happen concretely, but I'm not very optimist. We'll see and maybe it will be time to move to another device :'(
Your TV probably has more than one HDMI input. So you can try kodi.tv by repurposing an old computer you have laying around. I haven't yet convinced my partner to ditch her Comcast set top box. So we use both. Kodi is my first choice for viewing anything. The other box is being used less and less.
>I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
I'd be worried that's a losing battle long term though (maybe even short/medium term?), same with other hacks like running your own DNS and blackholing ad stuff that way. At the ultimate level, cellular modules and fixed data plans are getting real cheap, and for that matter for those living in denser urban/suburban areas I've heard people saying some stuff seems to be extremely aggressive about grabbing onto any WiFi they can find. But I could definitely see a point where everything comes with its own 4G module just for advertising usage (and maybe firmware updates so they can hang a fig leaf of "easier, no configuration!" over it). If we start having to talk Faraday cages for our TVs that's really hard to get around. Even purely in software they could use fixed DNS IPs to bypass simple user DNS, DoH to bypass users then trying to force all DNS traffic through their own, VPNs, and all the other ways everyone normally try to punch through aggressive firewalling with.
You're right that at present it's often still feasible to get a hostile TV then neuter it. But I think it's better to just not have a fundamentally malicious device inside your setup at all if it can be helped. To me that's worth some money up front, and I appreciate that it exists.
At the core and unfortunately it appears data harvesting and advertising really is quite profitable, and in a further grim twist those trying to avoid it might be even more valuable than the average. Which means the margins may exist on something like TVs to make it worth it to amoral manufacturers to get fairly nasty. That's a hard race as everything gets more and more integrated, vs just rewarding those who don't do it. Or else get laws passed with enough fines to change the equation!
Sadly, I agree. I am all but given up on #3 and basically resort to first 2 options for my own use. Most of my social circle equipped their houses with listening devices at every turn so my describing issues related to smart tv sound to them.. not even sure what. I am not even sure it registers as a valid complaint.
At least with my objection to shoving ice cream cake into my 1 year old they listen. With electronics I might as well speak Swahili.
It's only a matter of time until these span their own Amazon Sidewalk-like networks and then possibly use the neighbors smartphone as a gateway.
Like "my Samsung TV" <--> "neighbors Samsung TV" <--> 'neighbors Samsung Smartphone" (or skip the Smartphone if their TV is already connected without a properly set up firewall)
But will it join open networks automatically? It is of course entirely possible, technically speaking, but would get any company actually doing that in a lot of trouble in most developed countries.
> but would get any company actually doing that in a lot of trouble in most developed countries.
Why then is Amazon building out its parasitic WiFi network, if not to give unmediated access to its devices. I bet Amazon FireOS devices will do this very thing in the next 2 years, and not get into any trouble for it in the US
Honestly why wouldn't they connect to for example a cell phone tower or wifi hotspot ex xfinity wifi to download ads? Just pay whomever happens to ferry the ad to your TV a percentage of the take. Seems like this may well not be the case NOW but if I were planning to use a device for 10 years then a software updating adding this feature seems like a distinct possibility.
I just allowed my Samsung TV to connect to the wifi (to access the local network, because the Steam Link client is better on it than it is on the Apple TV) and then, on my router, I blocked all Internet access coming from the mac address of the Samsung TV.
At some point, these devices will be smarter than you about this. They will recognize a WiFi connection that cannot access the internet, and prefer an open network instead.
They will simply come with a cellular modem built in and you won't be able to block it. These things are so cheap now, and with virtual sims I think this is pretty much inevitable.
At some point everything will be internet connected just because the tech will cost pennies. We're not there yet, but for a big ticket item such as a TV or a car it's either already there or about to happen.
> They will come with a cellular modem built in, and you won't be able to block it.
Haha, joke's one them. I live in a nice apartment in the middle of a major US city, and in my last 3 apartments, cell signal reception was ranging between 1 bar and no signal reception at all. Good luck with a built-in cell modem here.
Thankfully, wifi calling is a thing working by default. So having almost no cell reception at home has exactly zero effect on my phone usage.
The worry I have is TVs also embedding an Amazon Sidewalk chip. Seems like it would be easy for them to egress your data through your neighbor's spy device with something like that.
I assume it is the latter, because that's what Alexa Sidewalk is. But that's a speculation, because neither of those currently exist in TVs, and I don't see LG or Samsung go along with it.
EDIT: I stand corrected, Sidewalk isn't a wifi network, it is it's own LoRa network that's limited to barely 1Kbps (which, imo, only strengthens my original point). Thanks for pointing out that technical detail in the replies.
What's to go along with? Samsung and/or LG are not required to participate in Sidewalk. They just need to be given the ability to scan for open WiFi networks and join when found. They really don't even need to know the SSID, but of course they'll track that info as well.
Sidewalk is not wifi, it's their own networking based using LoRa, which has its own wireless spectrum and its own limits. For example bandwidth is limited to single digit kilobyte/s in best case. Of course real world usage is going to be worse.
except it will cost you way more money, if I have to choose between breaking antena in TV for 600 USD or buying special display for triple price, I am fairly sure I'd prefer to void the warranty and still buy 2 other TVs in case I would need warranty
when I check cheapest/mainstream 65-75" TVs (wouldn't buy smaller nowadays considering cheapest 75" TV, which is Samsung here cost like 680 USD), all of them are smart
Do they, or do the consumer TVs come with a decreased price to make them more tempting as the manufacture knows they will make up that discount in selling the collected analytics?
There was an article back some time now that showed how one brand was making more from the data sells than from the TVs themselves.
This isn't really surprising, as in general consumer electronics has famously thin margins. If you are in the race-to-the-bottom part of that, any other revenue source has an easy time moving the needle.
But until recently those low margin consumer goods didn't have the ability to generate revenue after purchase. So it's same but totally different. It's not really the same thing if you sell at a 20% "loss" knowing you're going to make more than 2x the sale price in the data generated by that device.
Because of the Steam Link app, it's better at streaming good video quality than my Apple TV. I was really surprised by that but the app on the Samsung TV is wayyy better and doesn't drop half the frames.
I'm considering getting a 70" version whenever I get a house. While I've been renting I always just get the biggest and cheapest TV from the local electronics store.
Besides not having the usual crap, I would imagine these use higher quality component since the TV's might be on 24/7. Even that 50" at just over 1k doesn't seem that bad, that's usually what you would pay for a high end 50" anyways.
Which brands of smart TV show ads? I live in the UK and I've had three different brands of smart TV (Philips, Samsung and Toshiba) and my experience with all of them has been pretty good. Netflix, YouTube, etc. have worked pretty well and I haven't seen any ads that weren't linked to the apps themselves. Perhaps they're tracking me in ways I don't know about, though?
Samsung frame.
Hardware: It has physical netflix, prime, somethingelse buttons which immediately switch to that app without asking if you want to close the current app. Frustrating when you accidentally sit on your remote. So i modified my remote, put tape underneath the buttons to disable them.
Software:
In menu ads, sometimes, for some crap thing like tennistv. I have no idea how to disable it.
The fucking frame store is inbetween apps and starting point of the menu. Alyways need to do 4 (or 5, depending on ad) times to the right before being able to run the app you want.
It started playing samsung tv. After a week. I hate tv. Took me a day to get annoyed enough and then spend an hour to disable the shouting XL Americans.
So, typical Samsung. Software ux just sucks. Luckily a tv is mostly turned off* and that is why I bought it; hardware looks great when it’s off.
*off: it always switches to the frame mode. It is a laughable gimmick. Ever seen a painting giving light? You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
We need to save energy here in Europe. @Samsung: please fix it.
I thought i would not use thr smart functions, but I use it a lot. Tune-in radio and spotify work great. Also a lot of youtube and national tv app are pretty good. Airplay works fine too.
Recommend it? No. Happy with it… just enough to not return it.
>You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
I have this TV; you long press the power button to turn it off. The entire gimmick of the TV is the art mode, as the actual panel isn't very good and you can buy the TV without the gimmick for several hundred dollars less (A regular 65" Samsung Frame is ~2K, while the normal 65" QLED is $1,200). My gripes about samsung software aside - it's an odd thing to complain about.
Since I thought it was a gimmick I just assumed you could switch it off.
The TV is 32” btw. Just big enough to comfortably see the ball when watching football, small enough to not be the centerpiece of the living room.
I do not have any complaints about the panel btw, good enough i guess.
The person you're talking to hates TV, so they bought this one because it looks nice when it's turned off. I wonder if they're really frustrated with another person in their home who enjoys watching "shouting XL Americans" on the idiot box.
My Samsung TV shows ads in the bottom app bar. Or did until it was disconnected from the internet. Crappiest TV I've ever had, slow and just all around a bad experience. I would love a dumb TV with decent panel in UK! Any suggestions are welcome.
FWIW we just upgraded to a 98" NEC "commercial display" C981Q and couldn't be happier with it. I looked into the Raspi compute module but we just have a PC and some Crestron gear running it all, Shure ceiling tile mic and a vladdio cam.
I looked at an LG one, 65EP5G. It's around 10x the cost of other 65" LG OLED displays. I get that it might be higher quality, but not 10x higher, and I know there's some revenue from ads, but not $10k.
> FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc.
Do they have tuners? I've heard many of those are missing them.
If this is a major concern for you, I think you'll be happy to hear that tuners are ridiculously cheap, with built in recording capabilities for under $30. I suspect if you're in the market for one of these pricier TVs and willing to pay the premium then the extra cost for an external tuner unit will be not be a major factor. For cleanliness you can attach it to the rear of the TV and use short cables.
I'm very happy with the Tablo tuner + dvr device. You can place it near the antenna, since it has WiFi. Then, you use it from a Roku/FireTV/etc app. It's more than $30, but they do sell refurb models. And you connect your own storage device, so no markup on space.
Tablo looks interesting. I don't see any power consumption figures on their site, though. I'll have to contact them and see if they can tell me.
My house sufficiently blocks TV signals that with an indoor antenna I only get a couple channels well, and a couple more intermittently. With an outdoor antenna I can get all those well plus several others.
However the good places for an outdoor antenna from a reception point of view are terrible from a grounding point of view.
So what I was thinking of doing is putting in an outdoor antenna but not having it electrically connected to the house. There would be either no ground or ground to a grounding rod at the antenna site that is not tied to the house ground, and the coax from the antenna would go to a weatherproof box near the antenna. The weatherproof box would contain something like a Tablo or Amazon Recast, and a battery powered power supply.
> Do you want the propaganda piped directly into your living room?
If I didn't, why would I have a TV at all? /s
But you did a poor job of derailing a thread into one about you and your opinions that are only tenuously related to the topic. You should have mentioned how you "don't even own a TV" and how your choices are so much better than the sheeple's choices.
It would be interesting to know how many people use the tuner in their TV rather than cable, streaming, or the one in their DVR. Our TiVo use was supplanted by DIRECTV streaming in the past few years, but I don’t think I’ve used the built in tuner in about 15 years.
Is there any regulatory reason to include tuners in displays?
For the technically minded, not neccessary. Just buy a large computer monitor and connect it with a tiny computer. It's a hassle but the system is really yours, especially if you choose carefully what to install.
That's what I thought we well, but TFA seems to suggest that some TVs may overlay ads on top of any video source:
"Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen and matched them to an existing database of content to find out what a user was watching and when"
"pop-ups would reportedly appear halfway through the show and be injected into the users' own content, such as home videos"
Cue the responses confidently dismissing the issue because there is some convoluted setup involving additional hardware and network configuration that any consumer can surely set up if they don't like what these products are doing.
If the plan is to get a TV (irrespective of it including "smart" features) and then use your own external dongle, then you'd have to be crazy to connect the TV to the internet. I think that must have been an implied instruction in the comment you replied to.
I got a very nice "smart" TV, plugged in my own inputs, and entirely ignored that the TV had its own apps. It works just as well as a "dumb" panel would have.
Android TV now also comes with forced ads (since rebranding to Google TV).
I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.
What they did to the shield was a tragedy. It was so refreshing to have a device that I could completely customized to remove ads and suggested content. I don't blame Nvidia I think this is more on the Google TV side. I still think the shield is the best TV box on the market. I keep meaning to look into loading a different launcher that will let me go back to the old style.
I have no proof, but I have a feeling nVidia is working to fix this problem. They were probably blind-sided and so it's taking a while, but I fully expect them to create their own launcher now to combat this. Their customers were quite upset about it.
The problem is that you cannot turn off much of the smart tv junk, including things like ads. Paired with features such as the tv refusing to work if you don't periodically give it a valid internet connection (for it to send its cached metrics and download new ads, of course), which is slowly but surely becoming more common, and you're only marginally better off than just using the smart tv features.
I've seen a few of them. They usually start with nudging for the first few weeks ("hey, you should really plug me in and get an OS update!") before eventually refusing to work at all.
Luckily, Google has options to turn that stuff off. They could be lying about it, but it's better than generic TV brand which gives you no options, is a security nightmare, and is definitely selling every piece of data they gather to anyone who asks.
If you care about privacy absolutely do not get an Android TV dongle. Get an Apple TV (though yes, they cost more. Maybe find a used one on eBay if you're particularly price sensitive)
If you really care about privacy, don't get either. Apple is just as bad (or worse), they just have a really great PR team plugging away while they're building their ad mega-empire in the back.
That was a long article to read only to discover ZERO indication that Apple is planning on adding ads to the Apple TV (other than the author’s pure speculation).
Thanks for linking the article so I could see that for myself.
You literally have full control over what happens on an Android device most the time and Apple devices are always in a locked down walled garden where you have absolutely no idea what is going on with your data.
> Some may argue that there's no need to be dramatic and that there's nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then.
Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it's something else I'm canceling and going back to P2P. Fuck 'em.
I find ads intolerable, but I am privileged enough to be able to afford to make them go away in almost all cases.
For those on a very tight budget, Disney+ with ads, Kindle with ads, podcasts with ads, etc. are the only thing that is affordable.
I suspect for many in the lowest income brackets, traditional cable TV with good old fashioned commercials is a primary source of entertainment.
Thus, we also need to keep in mind that those who cannot afford to make commercials go away are subsidizing this further for those who can in an unfortunate irony.
This might seem crass but if I was in a situation where I couldn't afford the ad-free version of a streaming service, I would simply abstain from the service entirely.
I understand many don't care, but I hate ads with an intensity I cannot describe with words.
Right but that means you're not paying full price, since the ads subsidise it. So to modify the OP's point, people are going to need to be prepared to pay more for content and IMO we're already at price saturation point now.
Not necessarily - it's what the market will bear, not the cost itself. This just means the target market will tolerate the ads, not that they are subsidizing the cost of the TV. The extra revenue could just as easily be gravy - especially because this is probably the result of some implicit collusion.
This is my expectation of the market, based on at least the following two points:
1) Video games are sold at full price and still include ads and microtransactions
2) Cable TV was originally ad free (and marketed as such), until they realized they could include ads and make even more money.
I hold the opinion that executives at many of these companies hold the view, "Why only get some of our customer's money when we can get all of it?" (though they probably word it differently, something about recurring revenue and monetizing the existing customer base).
> Cable TV was originally ad free (and marketed as such), until they realized they could include ads and make even more money.
This is why I laugh whenever some new ad-free service launches. People forget history and then are surprised when it repeats itself. Any service that touts itself as "the ad-free version of X," will eventually be stuffed full of ads.
Video games are not sold at full price. 20 years ago the average game price was $50. The price point was universally increased to $60. In Europe the price point has scaled beyond that but in the USA the price has stayed $60. 20 years of inflation has not be accounted for in that price. 20 years of technology improvements leading to increased art team demands, etc.
And to top that off, the frequent mass sale events on popular game distribution channels have led to a culture of people not purchasing games UNLESS they are on sale.
I'm not a fan of the implementations they have selected to make up for that, but it's a bit disingenuous to imply that all money making on top of the $60 cost is profiteering.
> 20 years of inflation has not be accounted for in that price
With all due respect, the inflation argument sounds good but is not based in the reality of the market. Other folks have gone into a lot more detail on why this argument is badly flawed.
But to pick a single argument: if the inflation argument was valid, companies - both AAA and indy - would be unable to make a profit without selling microtransactions. But those games and companies they are turning profits. Even companies selling games with microtransactions are getting record profits when you discount recurring revenue - microtransactions.
Yeah but look at how large the market is, and how much it has grown since then. I'd imagine it's at least 10x the size and it costs virtually nothing to sell to all those additional customers. That's the real reason video game prices haven't kept pace with inflation.
Valve has proven with lots of data that holding deep discount sales actually greatly increases revenue. It took a long time for the industry to fully realize this.
They are not simply trying to cover costs. It's indeed charging what the market will bear. Which I have nothing against, I'm more upset that gamers fork over cash for all these micro-transactions. But that is another topic.
Where does the myth that cable TV was ad free come from? Cable TV was never as free. Cable was first introduced to bring broadcast TV - with ads to places that couldn’t get reception.
Then the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN came to cable. They were local broadcast channels that used satellites to broadcast nationwide to cable companies.
Then came cable TV channels like CNN, ESPN, MTV etc with ads.
Also, there were some Cable TV channels, sometimes bundled with other channels, that explicitly did not have ads (HBO, to name one), just to complicate things further.
> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption…
HBO has always been a premium add on to basic cable. Just like it is today and it still doesn’t have ads.
> But scores of big companies, including General Foods, American Express, Procter & Gamble and Pepsico, are already cable advertisers, along with innumerable used-car dealers and other local businesses that can afford cable's relatively low rates.
> Many cable channels have yet to begin operating, and those now running commercials, such as Ted Turner's 24-hour Cable News Network or U.S.A. Network's ''You'' program for women, carry 30-second and one-minute commercials that are a standard feature of regular television.
Even that doesn't really work. I'm "not paying full price" only because they force upon me hundreds of channels that I don't want, including really pricey ones like every sport. The bullshit I actually watch, I'd be shocked if I'm not paying more than full price for.
The real problem is that content creation/disribution industries are addicted to ridiculous pricing and distribution policies. Nobody can buy what they want, at reasonable terms, we're stuck with them playing stupid games that hurt everyone (likely including themselves).
Strong disagree on this one. I'm pretty sure someone looks at the service that lacks (to their mind) sufficient advertising and is making decent revenue and thinks something like "Wow, a couple (more) ads and this could make a lot more money!" And then (more) ads are added.
Unless there's some dis-incentive we can expect to see more ads in more places. People abandoning the service doesn't seem to be enough, I suspect the longer someone has a particular service the more they become accustomed to it and the more pain it takes to get them to move to another service.
Even if you are paying full price, inevitably the complany will have some brilliant CEO who figures out that not showing ads constantly is leaving money on the table.
The only channels that promised fewer ads because you pay for it and delivered on it (not switching to double dipping within a decade) are the ones financed by mandatory TV license fees.
People do pay and it does not work. The only thing that works is government regulations.
Pay for games? They shove ads in them, game engines even have support for this.
Pay for subscription services? They show you ads for their own shows at best or half a minute of paid advertising before every episode at worst.
Pay for anything at all? They track everything you do whether you pay or not. Worse: now they know you have disposable income since you're spending money on frivolous entertainment. The value of your attention just went up and so did the opportunity cost of not advertising to you. The more society pays, the more annoyed the executives get at the money they're leaving on the table.
What society needs to do is make advertising illegal. Just straight up prohibit it, consequences be damned. No buts, no compromises.
Amazon Prime Video requires a paid Amazon Prime subscription. You are paying for the content. You also paid for the TV you watch it on, and you pay for the delivery service to your house. There's money every step of the way, so, having advertising on top of that? Insane.
Depending on the service you may be paying a subsidized price.
Around 1994 my parents were paying $110~ USD for a cable package in suburban NY. It was basic cable, the extra premium channels, and HBO. Adjusted for inflation that's $210, I know that inflation doesn't always tell the entire economic story but now I'm paying
Netflix $20, HBO $15, Disney+ $6.76, Hulu is free with my cell phone plan but let's say $10. That's $52, my internet is $65 however I would have that anyway for many other reasons. Even if you added that in it's still much less expensive that in the past. The quality is also significantly better, and I can choose to watch most shows when I want.
Subsidized doesn't mean anything in this context. These services aren't offered below cost, they're very profitable. Companies will always view not showing ads as leaving money on the table, regardless of how much profit they're already making.
I would love to pay my local sports team or NBC or something money directly for broadcasts of all their games but it's impossible because the exclusive streaming rights are split out across at least 3 different services that I'd need to pay far too much for on top of my season tickets.
We already do that, since ads presumably make the companies money. Thus the overall effect of this should be that we make products cheaper, since they won't have to pay marketing budgets.
Network effect companies (e.g Facebook) would see how useless their network effects are when only some are willing to pay, and they therefore can't get all their friends updates.
And most creators will find out just how little their content is worth (you probably need to be in the top 50% just to make pennies per hour).
I would say bring it on, but most sites would run into the problem that for their media customer it wouldn't be worth the effort to click the apple pay (or whatever) button to get access.
I remember paying for DVDs and being forced to watch trailers after putting the disc in the tray. Even when we directly pay for content they can't help but add advertisements.
Not quite. A while back we used to pay for cable tv and the programming used to have tons of ads. Now, we assumed the premium you pay for Apple products was because 'you' were not the product, unlike say Android, but looks like with some clever marketing about privacy focus Apple was just building up their own ad business.
I think paying for content/product doesn't ensure you wont see ads, well perhaps it doea but until the company decides it needs higher margins.
People call me crazy for paying for reddit and YouTube premium. The fact is, they're some of the few places where I can pay directly to host the servers and pay the creators. I won't considering using any other social network where I can't contribute directly, versus indirectly with my data and eyeballs.
It's not that simple. The demand to reach a target demographic isn't going away. Thus, as the difficulty of reaching that demographic increases so does the cost advertisers are willing to pay.
Also, it's common for companies to offer a paid service and then double dip with an advertisement offering as well.
It is the TV and media companies that are a) using lies and deception to convince America that it's ok to instead pay (1x + advertising + a hidden loss of privacy) for a TV, and b) colluding to raise the prices of 'dumb' TVs as an added lever against consumers.
Educating people on the real costs, and pointing out better alternatives are the best ways to combat this.
Last time I bought a TV was about 10 years ago, IIRC I paid €350 for it and it had no "smart features" at all and I assume Samsung made a profit on it. Or do you want to tell me that Samsung ate a €3k loss to give me a TV?
This is just silly; TVs can maybe made a little bit cheaper by some ads, but not much, and TVs were plenty cheap for a long time well before "smart TVs with ads" became a thing (my TV wasn't a luxury model, but not the cheapest either).
Advertising requires views which drives engagement optimization which results in addictive design. Binge watching of TV shows, excessive social media usage, video game addiction have all been linked to depression, anxiety.
Convince people? Any ban on advertising is already likely to enjoy significant public support. There's precedent for this.
Maybe, maybe not. The mental effects of products optimized for delivering advertising don't seem to be great for people or society (see: Meta's products, Twitter, TikTok).
This actually is a very valid argument. Cigarettes actually provide value to the user. Yes, there are negatives, but the user typically knows those and decides the upside is worth the risk.
Do people know the risks of being profiled by ad companies? I am not sure most people can even begin to understand the associated risk. The few attempts to show people what companies know about you were shut down pretty hard.
It’s been discussed for years in dozens of articles on hacker news and everywhere. At this point the burden is on you to show us on how being plugged to social media 24-7 is not harmful.
Not at all. Being bombarded with every not-yet-banned psychological trick ever invented is unethical: harms privacy, makes public spaces ugly, increases waste, and when not promoting actively harmful stuff, promote stuff in harmful ways.
This probably sounds over the top, but at some point it feels like they're saying they own you. You're paying them for one service, and they'll unilaterally decide it's not enough and they are going to make more money on you. But they don't do it via a price increase that gives you a fair opportunity to decide on the value exchange. They just start shoving this stuff on you.
And worst of all, it's your time they're taking to do it. The one thing there's never enough of, and that you'll never get back.
A lot of consumer-facing tech follows the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. "I want to know everything about you and who you talk to." "I decide what's best for you." "You can't leave."
I can't help but conclude that the engineers complicit with this are deeply broken people.
It's not just our time! It's also our limited attention. They think they have a right to it, they even think they can sell it off to the highest bidder. As if it belonged to them.
Desire is the cause of suffering. Advertising, in its way, generates desire where there was once none and therefore causes suffering. And, it does so on industrial mass-scale!
Worst of all, there is no mechanism, at all, to restore the bliss advertising has destroyed. Because, money cannot buy confidence, friendship, fulfillment, or (most famously) happiness. So, once exposed, you have no way to regain what has been obliterated from your soul.
Advertising is not harmless, adblocking is not immoral, and your well-being is more important than anyone’s profits.
Yup. It's kind of incredible how these platforms are fucking up their services. Like, all they had to do was to provide the content in a way more convenient than pirating, but they've managed to go down a path where the experience get more and more user hostile by the day.
Ditto. I got rid of windows shortly after they introduced ads in the OS. It really doesn't matter to me that there are technical ways of blocking them, I don't want to have to think about it or play cat and mouse with them.
When it comes to websites I really wouldn't care if they blocked my access because I use an ad blocker. I don't feel any entitlement to their content and they have no entitlement to what displays on my machine.
Also, knowing which ads you've seen is more valuable than the shows you've watched. Think how much advertisers are paying TV manufacturers to know the conversion rate of their latest TV ads.
It should be mentioned that "advertising" is not "showing an ad". it is collecting and selling detailed information about people's activities and behaviors.
Amazon Prime Video showing preroll ads is massively dumb on their part. I'm already paying you and already actively using your service. I specifically have a Prime subscription because it gives me access to a huge catalog of obscure sci-fi & horror films. Really awful stuff. I'm not interested in the latest content you paid some outrageous amount to acquire the licensing rights to.
If you're paying for Twitch Prime, but still getting ads, then what are you paying for exactly? Less ads?
Sadly I think it's what happens when companies are pushed to generate more and more profit each year. So you you start just a few ads to the paying users, because: "They won't mind one short ad" and then suddenly it's all ads all the time.
It does make you wonder exactly how ads are so profitable and which products are paying the whole thing. It almost can't be electronics, because ads apparently help finance TVs and phones as well.
>If you're paying for Twitch Prime, but still getting ads, then what are you paying for exactly
One free monthly sub + all the free games and DLCs. Cost me 4€ a month and I also have access to the Amazon Prime Video catalog. It's a very very good deal.
I dumped Prime a couple months ago. So far the only consequence has been having to use an alternate platform to watch a specific movie and I have much less random "stuff" arriving in my mailbox/front porch now that I have to give some thought about shipping costs for cheap items.
So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available.
and this:
> What’s more, if the Disney+ profile being used is associated with a child, no ads will play.
A clarification for the advertising to kids things. Looks like it's no ads to preschool kids
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available
But it will not remain available at that price. Instead that's what the plan with ads will cost, and the prices of the current ad-free plan will be bumped up by 30%.
And that ad-free plan will eventually have ads. Ads are infectious and will always spread uncontrollably once you let them in. Give an inch and they will take a lightyear.
oh I missed that, I'm only just finding out about this now. Can you point to where you read that?
I just found this contradiction to what I had mentioned earlier (going to edit my original message)
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
> So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
Fundamentally the problem with paying for ad-free content is that the people who can afford to pay for it are the people advertisers want to target.
Now. Just like when food companies sells the same package as before (or a slightly bigger version) as "now with 20% free product!" and after a few months, they remove the free product discount. Price increased, less people noticed it.
> The Dow giant still expects Disney+ to be profitable in 2024.
Disney+ isn’t profitable once you take into account “transfer payments”. They may not be profitable at all yet. But they specifically mentioned being profitable including transfer payments.
That basically means that when Disney movie studios use to sell streaming rights to another company - say Netflix. They may make for instance $500 million (made up number). Disney+ still “pays” the Disney movie studio $500 million. It’s counted against Disney+ profits. Of course the Disney company as a whole keeps most of that money. But it still has to pay part of it to the actors, producers, etc who have a revenue share agreement.
It was a big point of contention when Black Widow was released.
That's text-book financial engineering. I understand the creators' concerns, especially the ones that signed contracts before Disney decided to create Disney+, but on the Disney side I really don't care. It's more, I'm explicitly hostile to it due to the balkanization of streaming platforms now that every big producers start to have their own end-user distribution, subscription-based service.
It’s not “financial engineering”. It’s standard managerial accounting. I’m an MBA drop out and studied this over 20 years ago (undergrad in CS. The dot com boom called my name). In most large organization, different departments are separated into “cost centers”. Managers are often responsible for their own profit and loss. Internal “costs” are assigned to departments working together.
Why should the Disney+ manager get credit for making $450 million in profit by causing Disney Movie Studios to lose $500 million? How is that good for the overall business? Again I’m completely making up numbers.
We had a method to pay one bill and get all of the content you wanted - it was called “cable”.
They're just actually introducing the ads at the current pricing level, and adding a higher "no ads" level. Of course they would have ended up there soon enough anyhow, but they're just doing it immediately.
I'd argue that invasive advertisements including but not limited to ads that make you remember catchy jingles, billboards on highways, ads that specifically target you based on profiling ("addictive") etc. are or can be emotional and mental harm. Ever hear the phrase "stuck in my head"? This happens with commercial jingles all the time. What if I don't want it to be stuck in my head but I happen to hear it? Seems akin to assault, especially if I'm not explicitly opting in to that behavior. It seems strange only because being blasted with advertisements 24/7 is normalized.
I see where you're coming from but I think it's more accurate to call them manipulative. Violence has a different connotation and we should keep them separate. Trying to force one thing into another is also manipulative.
If you asked most people, out of this context, if remembering an ad jingle or having one stuck if their head had a negative, positive, or neutral effect on them what would they say?
I don't have any studies, but this is the first time I've heard anyone state this as a negative. Most people don't seem bothered or might even associate a good time with some jingle.
You can easily draw lines between "I go to Hackernews.com to read the opinions of others and encountered an opinion I don't like" and "I have to listen to ESPN commercials at the gas pump and look at Jesus billboards when I'm driving down the highway". Other states have precedent for banning billboards actually.
If you want to take the other extreme of your extreme example here, you should be ok with people driving down the street and blaring advertisements from trucks at full volume day and night.
The trend to conflate violence and words is dangerous. While words can lead to violence, to say that words are violence tacitly allows physical retaliation for speech that the listener does not like. We learnt as children this is wrong, and it remains so for adults.
Yes, they do. Especially words like "consent". Not even once did I consent to their brands being forcibly inserted into my mind. I feel extremely violated every single time some advertiser manages to get around my uBlock Origin.
At home, I've never connected my TV to my network. The few firmware updates I've needed to do were applied using a thumb drive, and I use an AppleTV as my interface.
When I travel, I bring along an AppleTV and plug the HDMI port into their set. This lets me keep the services I subscribe-to and use them with their display. This has worked great until my most-recent rental, which had a RokuTV -- presumably setup on Wifi.
When content was streaming from my AppleTV, Roku would overlay a panel along the bottom-part of the screen proposing that I can watch what I'm currently watching from a variety of other providers. This must mean that the TV set is analyzing the video or audio signal to fingerprint what the content contained, then matching it against a library of content to feed into its profile of my use.
This is the first time I've seen something like this. I'd always assumed that if you used the TV's UI and if it was connected to the internet, then you'd probably be subject to their ads and data analysis, but it never crossed my mind that they'd perform the same data-analysis over any signal passing through its silicon.
Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same?
> Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same?
As far as I can tell, it's not only commonplace but ubiquitous for any new TV you buy these days.
I recently moved and had to buy a number of TV sets over the years to outfit various guest rooms. All LG and Samsung TVs I've setup over the past 3 years have a "feature" like this you can manually disable if you dig down through menus enough.
Then every firmware update the flag gets reset to enabled of course :)
My LG TV plays movies from USB stick and never tried a trick like this. Not gonna lie, those were mostly relatively old movies, like LOTR or Heat, but also latest Predator installment.
Cynical, sly enthusiasm. I just can't imagine 5G bands devoted to adverts passing invisibly through my skin. It is too much like the adverts in your dreams skit from Futurama.
Again, it is increasingly hard to separate satire from prophesy.
That's why one should never use ISP-provided routers. Since ISPs can update/control devices connected to their network, buy a modem without WiFi: anything downstream of that is your network.
Not everyone lives in higher density housing, so open wifi networks are not always a given. Also a built-in cellular modem would be antithetical to having a lower cost TV set based on ad subsidies.
I would worry more about mesh networks like Amazon sidewalk
> I'd always assumed that if you used the TV's UI and if it was connected to the internet, then you'd probably be subject to their ads and data analysis, but it never crossed my mind that they'd perform the same data-analysis over any signal passing through its silicon.
This is discussed in TFA. It's "ACR" (Automatic Content Recognition), and it applies to anything you watch on that TV, via any mechanism you try. Yes, if you hook up your AppleTV and look at your own videos, the TV is watching what you watch.
Today, it's comparing a fingerprint to a database. Tomorrow a new model or a firmware update will have it shipping your pixels to the mothership and doing things like determining who else watched the same video.
And if this isn't enough, you also have to ask yourself: What is your SmartTV doing with the camera facing your hotel room and the built-in microphone?
If a manufacturer uses ACR on content you brought in through the HDMI port, do you trust them with a camera and microphone pointing into your hotel room or home?
If you do trust them not to abuse that, do you trust them to keep all their TVs up-to-date with security patches to prevent hackers from exploiting them and taking over the cameras and microphones?
---
I can do this all day. Remember, it's not paranoia if there really is a trillion-dollar surveillance capitalism industry out there buying and selling data, and laundering data so that companies can buy it while having plausible deniability that they were knowingly involved in any illegal or brand-damaging shenanigans.
> What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
On some screens, signal processing has been significantly improved in later firmware versions. New features are also not uncommon, such as VRR and HFR being added after release[1]. This is particularity nice for modern consoles.
>What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
My display had an issue where the video modes necessary for the XBOX Series X were not working properly. The display would drop-out in some 4K modes. It's stable now, so I haven't checked/updated anything in about a year.
My Sony TV came with the newest ATSC 3.0 TV tuner hardware. The software wasn't fully QC'd at launch. They put out a firmware update about 2 months after I bought mine to fully enable the tuner software and hardware.
Otherwise, it's been app updates and some improved HDR processing.
I love my ATV 4K. But it’s useless for traveling since hotels require you to login and the AppleTV doesn’t have a browser. The Roku sticks get around this by temporarily exposing a pass through wifi connection that you can connect to from your phone/computer and log in to your hotel’s wifi.
The only work around with the AppleTV is to buy a second travel router.
With tvOS 15.4, "Captive Wi-Fi network support on tvOS allows you to use your iPhone or iPad to connect your Apple TV to networks that need additional sign-in steps, like at hotels or dorms."
For travel, I have a Raspberry Pi with a second wifi stick to transmute hotel wifi into my own local network. This avoids having to modify every phone/tablet/Chromebook/Switch the family has in tow or fight with buggy hotspots. I keep meaning to add a VPN back to home (mostly for performance) but I haven't got around to it yet.
An upgrade I keep looking for is an external directional antenna so I can get a stronger signal when RVing.
For some people, myself included, configuring a Raspberry Pi to do this would be simpler and take less time than figuring out TP-Link's bullshit web interface.
Not even to mention, you can be 100% sure you can get whatever extra features you need working, such as the aforementioned VPN.
I have a spare AppleTV for travelling and have never had a problem connecting it, even before tvOS 15.4. The router suggestions are also overcomplicating it. Just connect your phone to the WiFi, then choose the same network on the AppleTV and stand near it - a sheet pops up on your phone asking if you want to share the password with the AppleTV.
I’m in a Hilton hotel right now. You don’t get a standard Wifi password. You go to a web page where you enter your room number and last name and then your MAC address is allowed for a certain amount of time.
Ahh damn. Does signing in on the phone first not work? I'm struggling to remember what the captive screen wanted last time I did it, it's been a while.
No. It doesn’t. That’s where the travel router came in. It presents itself as one MAC address using one of its radios and exposes another interface for your devices. I was staying in an extended stay and we had computers and a WiFi printer set up. We were waiting for our house to be built.
I was just informed that Apple added support for captive networks in March.
Then you have to use your data plan. At least with the previous AppleTV, you could AirPlay directly from your iPhone to your AppleTV without the AppleTV being connected to an external Wifi network.
It didn’t work with all iPhone apps though. For instance it didn’t work with Netflix.
>When content was streaming from my AppleTV, Roku would overlay a panel along the bottom-part of the screen proposing that I can watch what I'm currently watching from a variety of other providers. This must mean that the TV set is analyzing the video or audio signal to fingerprint what the content contained, then matching it against a library of content to feed into its profile of my use.
My Roku TV specifically said it didn't analyze HDMI inputs, only Roku channel watching
I'm really glad that our "smart TV" just pre-dates all of this stuff. It can't connect to a network - it doesn't have that functionality. Firmware updates? No idea if there are any.
same, except I go even further and instead other online thingy I just use USB driver loaded with movies/TV shows for me and kids, I don't understand nowadays people addiction to streaming, offline experience is much better/smoother, i decide what I wanna watch on computer and just load it to drive
but I guess some people can have moral reasons to pay for some service and/or it's not legal in their country to download and watch video content for free (though many EU countries allow this)
The new Google TV launcher complete with ads on an expensive TV or a Shield is getting a hammering in the ratings, shows how little they care about customer feedback.
Bonus points for making the preview images in the store not show the ads you'll see. If any other app tried to mislead users like that they'd be banned from the store.
Although it's not like we have a choice, they've also disabled the option to change the launcher on the newest Android TV version as well to coincide with adding the ads on the home screen.
I get we need to have ads to pay for services but come on, the TVs they're doing this to are not your cheap Aldi ones, they're high end Sony Bravias. Most of the ads are even for other paid services like Disney+ and Netflix.
I have the same problems and it enraged me. It enraged me to the point where I back flashed the nvidia and blocked all domains to .google.com at the pihole for that mac address. Above that all NAT for DNS and blocking DoH and DoT. I do not need "new firmware" versions as the software I run on nvidia shield is just fine.
I unlock the shield, manually install the apps I want updated and ignore the rest. It has no external internet so meh if its got zero day exploits open.
I don't have time nor the information to second-guess possible future motivations of every company in a supply chain before buying a product. Most people won't even realise Google provide the software for a lot of these products.
Yes because it takes great insight to know that a Google based product probably exists to gather information about you for targeting advertising. It’s not like Google is some obscure company.
The first time I saw a TV advertised with Google as the OS I laughed out loud thinking "who in their right mind would buy that?!", but then again, quite a lot of people buy a phone with it so I guess there's enough people out there who simply don't understand why it's problematic.
Downfall implies a failure or ending, it seems like they're still selling like hotcakes. This is why we need regulation to save us from surveillance, most consumers want cheap and don't understand/care that they're selling their privacy instead.
I don't know if that is true. Everyone I know with a smart TV uses some other device hooked into it (roku, apple tv, video games) to run the actual streaming apps because the TV hardware is so poor. If they could buy a TV that's just a TV and pay a little less to not have those features they aren't ever using, they'd probably do it. Most people just care abut whether a TV is a certain size and only gamers really care about 4k. If you cared about 4k for movies you wouldn't waste that resolution on compressed streaming content; you'd probably have a small blu ray collection.
Aside from a few Apple TVs I don't know many people who do that, especially not Roku which I presume is some American thing, but I know a lot of people who use the apps on their Smart TV. The rest are hooking up the TV to their computer. I also know a lot of people (me included) who wants a 4K TV just to watch Netflix in 4K so I don't think that's generally true. Don't know anyone who uses Blu-ray.
That's the beauty of great click bait. A word or idiom can mean different things now to people from different social nets. "Downfall" here could mean in terms of sales, or it could mean in industry reputation, or even more things even the author isn't aware of. Either way the headline has apparently tested well probably due to its controversial meaning.
At least with the Shield, nVidia wasn't the one that added those ads. It was Google. nVidia was put in a bad situation there, and I'm hoping they'll correct it soon.
I quite like my android tv on my lg display. It’s responsive with a nice solid feeling remote. I think there are ads on the screen but I’ve never given them more than a passing glance except once or twice I was recommended a good tv show. Most people outside of the HN crowd really don’t think about this stuff at all.
Any TV sold in the EU must adhere to the GDPR, so there has to be some sort of opt-out for tracking (and yes, GDPR opt-out also applies for "anonymized" profiling)
My LG TV has opt-in for tracking. That said, a lot of stuff just refuses to work unless I accept it. I refuse to use those features. It's a lose-lose situation.
Then it will be the classic "Do you want to opt-in?" popup with two options: "Yes" and "Ask later" with a lack of a No button. Just show this every time the TV is powered on, and getting "consent" is a matter of weeks at best.
So what legislation? How many consumers even knowing that they are being tracked and advertised to are willing to pay the price so their hardware, software, and services come ad free?
If the US follows what the GDPR did, we will just have pop ups before every TV show asking us will we allow tracking.
Well, given that people make pretty good money baiting companies that don't respect their opt-out, I'd say it's working fairly well. It's not scammers we're battling here, it's companies that need to play by the rules.
Your downvoters don't know that that's exactly what happens. I see cookie consent popups on the TV, every time. I have no idea where they are coming from.
The existing options for monitors, suitable for use as a TV, are extremely limited. For TVs 55" and 65" are common, for monitors there were just a few, which were dumb TVs basically. And then there are bigger sizes, different types of panels (there are no 4K QD-OLED monitors for example) that are not available for monitors.
I think, if telemetry and ads are concern, buying TV without connecting it to the internet (using Apple TV or a homelab media server) is a better choice for many TV buyers.
Frankly at this point I'd just avoid buying anything from Samsung. If there's one company that's displayed consistent disregard for data privacy, it's them.
Your edit doesn’t help. That’s just like giving advice to a straight man who complains about not being able to find a woman - “just find a man. I haven’t slept with a woman in 10 years. You don’t have to date women.”
Its only unreasonable if you need the car for something. By implication, i assume having a TV is a necessity for you.
If you want a TV in your life so badly, you can say just that. Like "But i love Star{gate,trek,wars} and i can't watch it comfortably without a TV/Streaming". The thing with the 95% is a unecessary pretense.
Yes, I understand that. Going back to the 80' or 90' you'd frequently be in a position where everyone had seen the same news, show or movie the night before or during the weekend, leaving you out of the conversation. That's no longer the case, there is so much content that it's not really weird that haven't watch something. Sports is so expensive that it's no surprise that you didn't a particular event. It's almost surprising of two people in an office watched the same thing the night before.
Also there are so many other types of media available, like video games, audio-books, podcasts, online articles, e-books. You can be just as informed and entertained without a TV.
I haven't had one since 2006. I haven't missed it, nor do I watch any streaming services apart from the occasional documentary that generally leaves me disappointed.
Maybe you're just not TV people. That's OK. But plenty of people on the other side would say the Golden Age of TV is still ongoing. There are more shows and productions being made than ever, maybe that's led to an abundance of mediocre content, but there have been many great shows made in the last 10 years.
We are doing that. We have a projector. In its case under the table in the living room.
Setting it up increases the transaction cost of watching a show/movie. The result is that we only put it up for the few cases when we deem it worth it.
I had this idea as an undergraduate. Unfortunately, I didn't consider the geometry and realized too late that a good viewing experience with a projector requires a screen, which I didn't have room (or money) for. As penance I watched most of Inuyasha on a popcorn wall.
I’ve done the homelab media server. I did my first one back in 2006 with a Mac Mini running Front Row. But this is 2022. If you want a set top box without tracking, just buy an AppleTV. It cost more because Apple makes money off of hardware and not advertising.
Yes I know the reports about Apple getting even deeper into advertising. Yes it saddens me.
Digital Signage Displays are basically fancy monitors available as large as you want. But they'll cost you a pretty penny, being designed for 24/7 operation and without the ad-subsidy of smart TVs. Maybe hunt for a used one. Or conference room monitors, as suggested elsewhere in the thread.
Digital signage displays target a market that includes safety information in factories. if the TV there shows an ad instead of the safety content people may die.
And it will probably stay feasible as long as the number of people who do it is relatively miniscule. But economics being economics, we’re freeloading off the customers who hook their smart TVs up to the internet and provide manufacturers with enough revenue that they don’t care about us.
But should the practice become widespread and manufacturers notice a material impact on their revenues, or should growth stall and manufacturers start looking to squeeze more revenue out of customers, they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled, and work out deals with wireless carriers to have a private data channel as Amazon does with its kindles.
my 4K “smart” TV is the first I ever bought, and I believe the last. By the time I will want to replace it, I believe manufacturers will have closed this “loophole” and it will be impossible to keep a new TV from phoning home.
> they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled
Open up the TV and solder the antenna to ground. If the TVs refuse to work when there is no Signal, good luck with customer complaints - here in Germany, we have huge black-spots with no reception whatsoever (mostly rural areas, but people still live in those).
If the % of people who don't connect their smart TV to internet is small, then the % of people who will go through the trouble of soldering their TV (and voiding their warranty) is essentially 0%.
The whole "void warranty if any changes are made" is mostly not enforcable in Europe and as I understand it in some part in the US. In Germany, you would just have to proof that your change is not the culprit of the damage. I.e. if your OLED panel breaks, you can still claim warranty.
they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled
The real reason we "need" 5G, instead of better 4G, isn't so our cars can suddenly drive themselves and every hospital with be magically populated with surgery robots. It's so that every item we ever buy can spy on us.
If I try to reverse engineer the requirements for IPv6 and 5G it really seems like they are just key pillars of a world surveillance apparatus. Certainly IPv6 is completely unnecessary for most cases -- but if you criticize it you will get the hysterical tell tale vax or 'climate' treatment -- you are a bad person for stealing the last IPv4 from children or something!
Samsung and other manufacturers have already announced 5G-enabled Smart TVs. You’re right there’s no need to jump at shadows, but if this looks like a shadow, well…
The news of Samsung's upcoming TV will likely be a blow to Huawei, which is reportedly working on its own 5G 8K TV. Sharp is also working on its own 8K+5G initiative – both companies will need to hurry up if they want to beat Samsung to the punch, though.
5G TVs may not be in our homes yet, but they're on our doorstep.
And this comment is late to the conversation, but with 5G TVs, all of your streaming will go over 5G. No opportunity to use tooling to block ads or inspect what is being "phoned home." There are a good number of people whose primary uses for home internet are streaming and web browsing.
If these same TVs have a "WiFi hotspot app" that turns on a hotspot for an extra subscription, the TV manufacturers and their telecom partners will execute an end-around on the wired connectivity business.
Competition is good, but not when it's offering cheap internet in exchange for stripping consumers of any control whatsoever over their privacy.
TVs will soon, if not already, come with cell phones; the ad revenue is larger than what they are charged for the cell phone IP traffic. TVs also reportedly use any open WiFi they can see, and use DoH to make DNS-based ad blocking impossible.
The "they use any open wifi they can see" myth has been brought up on HN multiple times, and never did anybody provide any credible proof of this rumour (that started as a single reddit comment).
Worth noting that these articles are from 2019 and there hasn't been much talk of 5G TVs since. Aside from plain old 5G hype, SK Telecom wants 5G TVs as part of their envisioned ATSC/5G convergence that would bring more OTT services to broadcast TV (using their 5G network, naturally). This is mostly for the Korean market, since in North America broadcast TV is less popular and 5G networks have less capacity.
I would be surprised if modern TVs didn’t connect to open WiFis; there is literally no reason for TVs not to do this, and every incentive to do it. Even if we discount the ads as a motivator, it’s still a simple solution to get people’s stuff configured automatically.
Legal issues aside, there might be loss of company image and also privacy related matter (I can run an open wifi to see the data that my neighbour TV sends).
And to add to this: There has been no proof ever that modern TVs do this, and it would be quite easy for anyone/journalists/reviewers to check this (just run an open wifi and monitor it).
And I would be surprised if they did... the belief in these sorts of tech urban legends/conspiracy theories that some seemingly techie people have is cringeworthy.
And no, Facebook/Instagram aren't listening to users either, it would need too much bandwidth/server power to process all those conversations, and if you say "they can do the speech recognition on the users' phones", the majority of users use budget phones that don't have that sort of power.
This reminds me of the pre-Snowden times, where people often assumed that governments widely recorded internet traffic, since they had both the capability and the motivation, but people like you dismissed it as “urban legends/conspiracy theories” because there wasn’t any hard evidence.
How do you know what I did in regards to the Five Eyes?
I wonder what's easier to check and verify, a secret government tapping of the Internet, or if the TVs in millions of people's living rooms are trying to connect to open WiFi networks...
(I did not mention or claim anything about you personally.)
You’re right in that this should be easier to find. But I haven’t seen any concerted effort to buy N number of smart TVs and do security analysis on them in order to find something like this.
The asymmetry between the costs for the returns process and the 'happy path' of sales is such that even a relatively small percentage would throw a giant spanner in the works. You need to sell three more to make up for one return or so.
I have a Philips smart TV. I didn't connect it to the internet. Every week it nags me with a popup message telling me how much I'm missing if I don't connect it.
Technically, it's not defective; it still works without the internet. But think about it... What if the nag would pop up daily? Or every hour?
Some vendors are also just less scummy in turning it off and the extent of ad services. Sony TVs are Google TV-based and explicitly ask for Samba (not SMB) TV analytics (and can be declined), and you can just outright disable the APK in settings. No ads in menus like Samsung (you do get the Google TV "recommendations" but that's a whole other problem).
Of course, after all smart TVs have an ongoing revenue stream from ads and analytics. Despite having more capabilities, Smart TVs are also regularly cheaper than equivalent "dumb TVs".
Smart TVs are also regularly cheaper than equivalent "dumb TVs".
Only if you don't value quality.
A did a price comparison about a year ago, using Best Buy and B&H. The plain display panels from B&H were either the same, or only marginally more expensive than the equivalent "smart" televisions from Best Buy.
People on HN too often parrot that Vizeo CEO's claim that his TVs are only cheap because of all the spying they do. While true, it only holds up in you're interested in watching a Vizeo-quality TV.
I'm the opposite of that. I will go to pretty great lengths to avoid ads. They are incredibly annoying and often actively stupid. I am so much happier now that I almost never see a TV ad.
FWIW, mobile ads are worse. Avoiding them is easier, though. I almost always tell it when to show the ad and I can just look away with it muted for a while and do something else. I'm usually already watching TV while I play ad-based games anyhow. But if I had to actually watch the ads, I'd just stop playing those games.
A home served setup can be as simple as a Shield Pro with a hard drive attached. It's a lot simpler than 2009 for me, when I was running FreeBSD desktop with nvidia drivers painfully installed and a wireless keyboard.
I can comment on that. But I get the sentiment. For my setup there always seems to be some small thing that is wrong all the time. Fix - fine for a few months... borked. When you just want to watch something. I currently have to go thru the system and figure out why it is not acting like an appliance. Start up is constantly an issue with my setup. So when anyone in the house wants to watch something they are coming to find me. Current suspect is the hdmi vs the tv I have is not setting up the connection correctly. For the amount of media I own it is not feasible to go back to the old system though so I stay. Also adverts suck. But I totally understand the sentiment.
I ran a home server last year with jellyfin, nextcloud, torrent server, etc. I ended up spending more time and money on the server than watching and paying for the actual content. And then the thing was always broken in some way.
I see, I guess I have been lucky in that regard.. I have my NAS plugged in, libtorrent with autoirssi and just a plex server running for the actual streaming though.
haha - I rec just getting the cheapest option at ultra.cc ($5-6/month) and load whatever apps you want on it (e.g., rutorrent/sabnzbd) connecting that to your media player/app/stick of choice (e.g., firestick with kodi) - haven't tried it with super high bitrate content but seems pretty quick
I interviewed with them years ago. The technological challenges seemed cool but ethically I wouldn't want to work on tracking what people are watching.
Sometimes I have this interesting thought, that someday, when even the oldest people alive will not know or will not remebered how things worked back then. Then someone, or a group of people, will suddenly rediscover, or reinvent (as we always do throughout history) things that today still exist. Maybe someone will come up with "shops where you are served by real people", or paying for content you watch. Or a "shopping mall, but without cameras" ("but who will be watching me?"). Or a vehicle you can drive yourself.
I know it's a silly philosophical thought. But what it points to, for me, is that data harvesting works because it trades privacy for convenience, and even if it's too little, there are ways to opt-out (the trivial case being opting out of convenience). But it's a much too thin line to thread.
People are aware of the massive commercial surveillance. They just don't care. Human society is built upon trust or its lack thereof. When trust can't be established, surveillance arises. It only becomes a moral problem when it is done asymmetrically, and in an unprecedented scale.
When is too much too much? When your TV starts showing ads, even when unplugged from electricity? When you have to watch an ad to start your EV car (unless you purchase the Quick Start+ package for 9.99/mo)? You can take a break from ads today. That, in a way, ensures that you can consume ads for longer. But industry seems to be moving in the direction of eventually leaving you with no way to opt out. Then, the convenience might not be worth it anymore. That means either a market demand for ad-free products, and a subsequent return to pay-for-content business model, or some sort of social turmoil.
Or maybe that's their plan to get us to consume less: just stick everything with insane amounts of obnoxious ads, so we won't buy anything anyway.
One thing I fundamentally don't get: all this endless shoehorning of ads into everything is dependent on there being a seemingly unlimited amount of ad revenue on the table.
Why? Do ads actually work this well if everyone hates them? What about ads shoehorned into marginal spaces and presented in ways that are barely relevant to the material?
The only ads I EVER click on are relevant ads that come up from a search in which I am looking for something potentially to buy. In media and platforms (software, OSes) I usually associate the presence of ads with low-end crap.
Am I weird? Are there tons of mindless ad clickers out there who actually buy based on irrelevant ad spam?
Why are companies so stingy with wages and willing to outsource their core competencies in exchange for small gains but at the same time are willing to piss endless amounts of money away on ads?
> Why are companies so stingy with wages and willing to outsource their core competencies in exchange for small gains but at the same time are willing to piss endless amounts of money away on ads?
Because there's a whole analytics industry that tries to demonstrate ROI for each ad purchased. And as long at that ROI is positive it seems like a no-brainer to throw more money at advertising.
I wonder how much of said analytics industry is bullshit. Especially since these analytics are often provided by the same companies that are selling you the ad space.
I wonder if a good chunk of the whole industry isn't a giant grift against advertisers.
Problem is they have to invade our privacy and ruin our products and media to keep the grift going since the ads have to actually be shown somewhere, even if they're ineffective spam.
I don't remember ever clicking through an ad on Youtube or similar, so I also have to wonder if ads really work so well. I guess I'm not the average ad-viewer since I doubt I've ever purchased anything that I didn't already need or want because I saw an ad.
I run an hdmi cable from my laptop and have a bluetooth keyboard with a scroll pad on it. My wife doesnt like it. But its so much faster than a "smart tv". My issue isnt even the ads. Its that half of these tvs feel like they are running on low memory because of how slow they are. Add in the streaming apps that crash just often enough to be really annoying...
Yeah these threads pop up on HN all the time and everyone starts talking about apple tv and roku whatever and I think they're all... pretty dumb.
HDMI + Computer is just the best answer. Works in hotels just fine. I'm not aware of any smart TVs that push ads over your connected devices feed even if you do let them update for no good reason. Keyboard and mouse is better than remotes. Web search is the best search. You can use streaming sites. It's basically free. You can... use it as a living room computer. Hit up spotify and now it's also your sound controller. Have browser tabs. Play videogames.
Also makes it annoying for gaming because suddenly you need a lot more horsepower to do the same thing. E.g. you need to shell out for the Xbox one series X (not the xbox one X, confusing as it is) if you want "proper" 4k to play the same exact games as the almost 10 year old xbox one can play on 1080p. For PC gamers, you will probably need to upgrade your graphics card if you want to have the same framerate you expect from 1080p gaming, certainly not a cheap prospect these days with crypto people buying up GPUs.
I'm right there with you. Still "only" have a 1080p TV but a living room computer is the most robust option, that you get more control over, and it doesn't even need to be an expensive high-end machine either. Added advantage of being expandable and upgradable too, depending on what you're working with.
I stream games from my gaming PC with Steam too and it works flawlessly. Controllers work great too. I'm lucky to have been able to wire everything with Ethernet though, but modern WiFi has gotten surprisingly decent from what I've heard.
The latest Sony TV's that offer Google TV can leverage "Basic Mode" which disables the 'smart' functionality leaving you with a dumb TV with best-in-class picture quality.
It's perfect to pair to the device of your choice (Roku, Apple TV, Media Server, Xbox, etc).
Does Sony have a history of remotely disabling or otherwise changing their hardware features? Because if they do, this Basic Mode is at their pleasure.
I have a Samsung smart TV but have never agreed to the EULA or connected it to the internet. Not sure if this is good enough but I never see ads or really anything unexpected, just good old fashioned TV. I do worry though that some other EULA I’ve agreed to might give them the ability to connect the TV through SmartThings or something similar without my permission. Doesn’t this seem crazy to even have to consider?
I bought a smart LG TV about a month ago. This is my first smart TV, and I was very cautious about it because of "too smart TV" stories. It is OLED and the picture worth every euro I paid for it (and it was quite a few euro, to be honest). I am downloading HDR 4k movies and playing them from USB stick. I also watching YouTube occasionally, casting it from the phone (TV plays it by itself, not receiving a stream from phone, which is great for quality).
I didn't see any ads yet (including YouTube, because of Premium). What am I doing wrong?
You're not doing anything wrong. I have a 65" LG C9. And nearly everyone at my company has an LG TV. I've never seen or heard anyone mention ads. My parents have used the same TV for several years.
When used with inputs such as cable box, Apple TV, or native apps like Netflix, Amazon, etc., everything works as expected.
I'm genuinely confused as to what people are referring to. The last ads I saw were in the Peacock app to watch Parks and Recreation (and they were surprisingly non-obtrusive mainly Apple and EV ads). But I didn't have a subscription--the ads weren't coming from the TV.
I purchased a high-end Samsung TV in 2011. That was my last Samsung purchase ever. I also had a Sony X900F, and suffice it to say, I'll never purchase another Android-based TV (the UI was slow unresponsive garbage, unintuitive, and user-hostile). The actual TV itself was of decent quality but hamstrung by its operating system.
In general, unless something has changed, stick with LG.
YouTube's advertising strategy is pushing me to get rid of my SmartTV, or at least find a 3rd Party solution to completely block the ads. I was completely fine with one or two 6 second ads randomly playing before a video, or during a lengthy video. Then they added 14 second ads, which was very annoying, but bearable since it's about the same length as the two short ads.
But now they're advertising even if I simply open the app. Furthermore, they're "hiding" 14 second ads behind the shorter 6 seconds. I've even seen 41 minute advertising content. I'm guess they're banking on users leaving the app on "autoplay" to dupe advertisers into thinking that people actually consume this trash.
These days I just cancel every ad out of principle until the video plays. This takes on average 6-7 attempts. But now more often than not I just quit the app completely. So they are depriving their own content creators of views. And then they have the gall to present surveys asking what my advertising experience has been like...
YouTube do have a paid option, which doesn't have ads (unless the content creator has some sponsorship deal). It is the subscription service I get the most value from. Based on a few videos from content creators, it also seems like it's a good deal for them. I think Linus Tech Tips phrased something like: It matters much more than you think. Other have shown data suggestion that Premium customers contribute as much as 20 to 30% of the revenue.
Having used a device, not my own, to view videos while not on YouTube Premium, I do have to say: You can't really watch YouTube without the subscription anymore, the experience is just awful.
The paid option is very expensive. I would pay for an ad-free only Youtube, but this option is not available in my country.
I already pay for Spotify and Netflix. So I don't care about other services of youtube premium except ads-free
If you don't need/want YouTube Music, then yes, it's way to expensive. If I where to buy today, I would get the version without YouTube Music, and replace it with a service where more money goes to the artists.
I pay for YouTube premium and although it stops Youtube's ads, the in-video ads from content creators are much more distracting and annoying.
My brain can easily block a banner ad or tune out until the "skip ad" button appears. But when a content creator spends 90 seconds on message and then jarringly shifts to trying to sell me a mattress or a water bottle (Linus Tech Tips) for the nth time, that makes the video lose all value for me.
Content creators gotta eat, I get that. But the ad-supported model is garbage.
Honest question, how many creators do you support via patreon or similar?
I subscribe to some very niche content creators on YT and am a YT premium subscriber. One of the creators I follow has 200,000+ subscribers and is very open about the fact that without his patreon supporters that his channel would be unsustainable.
This was surprising to me - I (naively?) thought more of my premium subscription would trickle down to my subscription channels and that 200,000 subscribers would be enough to make a channel at least somewhat self-supporting.
I pay for 4 annual substacks, but I don't use patreon.
I generally have a rule where I won't pay for something if it doesn't remove the ads. The podcasts I pay for have private links that have ad-free versions (except for Honestly which I'm on the fence about paying for because of it).
YouTube premium removes ads, but patreon often doesn't.
I think I'd seen some YouTuber with around that many subscribers say they make ~20k/yr? So it's not nothing, but definitely not enough to be full time. The bigger ones with millions of subscribers like MKBHD and such I think do really well (7 figures?), but I'd guess a lot of that is extra stuff like the sponsored deals and merch stores etc.
I don't have a problem with ads in general - I have a problem with how they are currently presenting ads. It was never this bad in the past, and I honestly I'm not sure I want to pay money to a company who uses these predatory techniques.
40 minute ads? Who even does this? The only way someone would even consider watching this instead of the content they actually clicked on would be if someone let it autoplay. This is the kind of thing my 5 year old nephews would do.
Also, you get YT Music for free with YT Premium. I absolutely won't tolerate ad interruptions, but I find that with the amount of content, and utility, I get from YT overall, the family plan is quite a good value at $14.99/Month. Plus, YT Music recommendations are shockingly good. Probably the only recommendation engine I've experienced from any of the FAANG companies that consistently recommends new music I like.
Same. I have Google TV and YouTube in there for me is now unusable due to the number of ads. It feels like it's gotten twice as bad in the last 6 months.
On Android, I use Newpipe (via F-Droid).
On laptop/desktop I use uBlock and SponsorBlock which do a great job together.
I also use NextDNS for my home network. They specifically have a section for native tracking protection (Privacy tab -> Native Tracking Protection) for some of the major consumer electronics brands, including Samsung and Roku. With that option I've never seen an ad on my Roku TV, works great.
Last year I gave our smart TV to a friend as a gift and bought a “dumb” TV for $190 from Walmart. It has two inputs: one for an old fashioned antenna lead, and the other is HDMI.
I plugged an Apple iTV black box into it, and except for a slightly funky remote, it is a fantastic viewing, navigating, and discovery experience. I did give up image quality but I am much happier.
Signage displays are the solution, that is, those big screens used in malls, airports, stations etc. they're sturdy built and guaranteed to work 18/7 or 24/7, so don't expect to pay them like a shiny but crappy consumer Smart TV. However pay attention before buying since manufacturers started to add Android based crap and "smart" features to them as well. Usually the lack of any networking, both Ethernet and WiFi, on their technical sheet is the indicator they're dumb enough to be worth of trust. This arrangement of course requires an external receiver since they're essentially beefy monitors. They also make almost-dumb TVs for the above markets.
As for the brands, I'm aware of Swedx.com in the EU and Sceptre.com in the US. Samsung also makes some interesting products employing the Tizen OS (any jailbreaking available?).
I don't have any direct experience with any of those however.
I bought my first TV as an adult last year. I’m 44. I barely use it…
The problem I had with Smart TVs (Samsung then return to get the LG) are their absolutely abysmal system performance. Jerking, stuttering movement, menus that lag, a counterintuitive controllers, and streaming services usurping the experience; I do not want a permanent Disney+ button!
This is a hyperbolic article that doesn't reflect reality for most people.
I use my smart tvs for two purposes: 1) to use the native apps for streaming services (and I never get ads except the internal advertising of the apps themselves), and 2) to connect my personal devices (computers, game systems). The native apps are much more convenient than using an external device for my non-techy partner. I stream to another TV from my devices via HDMI and a switch.
For most "cord-cutters" that use only streaming services, I expect them to have similar ad-free experiences.
Seconded. I use Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV, Prime, and YouTube on my smart TV at various points in time and I never see ads. And I have my Switch, Chromecast, and Blu-Ray player hooked up. In fact the only place I see unexpected ads is on the stupid Blu-Rays.
I also am not fond of TV's that snoop on everything in my living room and spew out unwanted ads. But recently I had to buy a new TV. Here's my setup.
The TV is an LG 55" model OLED55C1 (could be a Costco specific model number), very good color and sound. I expect to keep it for ten years or more as I did with my previous LG plasma.
Next I got an Asus PN51 Ryzen 3, very cute, small and quiet mini computer (had to add an SSD and memory). I loaded the latest Linux Mint onto it and used an HDMI cable to connect it to the TV. The TV was not happy about not being connected to wifi (that's what the PN51 is for) but eventually it succumbed.
The final piece is a Logitech MX Ergo wireless blue tooth mouse. The result is fabulous all around as a TV and a computer.
So all in it's about $2k USD which is a lot up front but given the hours of use by our household over ten years it's probably the best value I've bought since my last TV.
I hate this too. I got a top end Sony TV and it was covered in ads. I left it in Basic mode but it's still covered in an ugly ad to please sign up for Google TV
Then I finally got a PS5 two days ago. It's also covered in ads with no way to turn them off. I might sell it as I don't want to support such crap and there is nothing I absolutely need to play.
The thing I find most infruiating is that someone else gets to decide what I see every time I use either of them (well the tv works in basic mode tho it's an eye sore)
Often what's being shown to me
is something I find offensive or hate. I hate sports for example. Or it's a TV show I can't stand or a movie with an actor that rubs reminds me of a bad relationship .
I get there are lots of situations in life where other choose what I see but for some reason my TV's default when turning it on is one too many
I feel like these anti-consumer practices by BigCorp can open the door for new companies to emerge on the market: build an ad-free tv, ad-free smartphones etc. Or is it just the effect of me living in a bubble while 99.9% of the customers don't care about this?
Bigcorp has their hands in many cookie jars and don't care if they take a loss on selling the panel in the smart tv if it means they gain in licensing deals from having "Netflix" printed on the remote. You can come in, your offering will just be costlier than the subsidized smart tv and you will be driven out of business before long. Or, no suppliers even want to work for you because they are busy fulfilling orders from bigcorps who will gladly buy up all their capacity to keep people like you from having an easy time starting a small business.
I think there are two reasons. First, most people might be mildly annoyed by the ads at most, and certainly wouldn’t make a buying decision based on them. Second, it’s almost impossible for new companies to compete on both quality and price at the same time, unless they’re subsidizing the product somehow (ads, perhaps? :) or as an unsustainable VC funded business I guess). How often is it that we see a new company that can make a smartphone that has the fit and finish, camera quality, and specs of an equivalently priced iPhone/Samsung/Pixel phone?
I guess this comes down to the balance between the marginal cost of offering an additional product line with a different firmware and the marginal revenue of winning the privacy first market.
Then there’s the constant problem with pay-to-avoid ads… the people who have the spare cash to pay are the ones the advertisers want most. Removing them from the target population lowers the overall value of the targetable group and reduces revenue for your ad-supported products.
You need a surprisingly small number of HN crowd like folks to ruin the market. Most ad targeting - regardless of actual product - goes after people with high discretionary income. If a chunk of those folks self selected out of the video ad market, it ruins the overall economics.
This is an idea I've toyed with - corner the >200K income TV market with privacy features. Make it as easy as Roku to block all this.
Being very bad at any commercial initiatives, most probably I am way off, but I think there could be a market for some "enhanced" versions of those "universal" TV/LVDS boards to replace the internals of new TV's.
I.e. in a perfect world you could be able to buy a (subsidized by ads) "smart TV" and (voiding the warranty) be able to replace the innards with a "dumb" card.
"smart" tv's remind me too much of 3d tv's. those were a fad for a while and the only non-3d tv's you could buy were high end retail displays. they are thankfully gone now.
I wanted a higher quality display than what a retail display could offer me, so I chose a "smart" tv that has oled with an appletv connected. as long as I never hook it up to ethernet or wifi, it acts as a "dumb" display and I can use only the appletv remote.
I really look forward to good displays being panel and sound only again.
Is there anything holding back an OpenWrt-style project for TVs? I can imagine something like that becoming popular among hacking communities if TV manufacturers ever resort to installing SIM cards.
For now I just don't connect my TV to the internet and it works just fine. My laptop, an HDMI cord, and a Logitech K400+ makes for a much better experience than any smart TV interface.
Call me crazy, but I think it's only a matter of time before windows in our living spaces will be monitors with overlaid ads. The in-app purchase will be "allowing us" to remove the ads so we can look at the view in peace.
In the meantime, all my TVs never see the light of WiFi and have ROKU sticks.
1. Bright monitor that looks like a windows, to brighten up spaces that can't have windows. As it gets more popular, production ramps up, its price decreases.
2. Buildings are now built with these instead of actual windows, because now it makes sense economically. Maybe as more affordable housing.
3. Windows monitors get internet connected in the meantime, and now that there's a guaranteed number of eyeballs on them, become attractive for marketers.
4. Windows now sometimes show ads - Landlords get the option to get a cut if they install them, or it could be factored in the base price like how it's done with smart TVs now.
I don't own a smart TV. If I were to buy one, am I forced to connect it to my WiFi before I use it? Can't you just use one without an internet connection?
My dumb TVs have Chromecasts attached. I know I'm handing my data to Google, but I don't (yet) have to put up with injected commercials.
This type of expectation is why I've always gravitated towards Roku sticks.
They're cheap, really well designed, centrally controlled on your account and you avoid any need to over-invest in specific TV vendors to have the same experience across the board.
And it can't do anything that the HDMI port can't do.
There's a part of me that wonders if this wasn't by necessity.
I went into Best Buy just before Christmas and they had Google TVs and Amazon TVs everywhere, prominently displayed and fully stocked. They only had 2-3 little Roku TV's hidden in the back corner that I had to ask somebody to even find.
If I go into Sam's Club or Walmart, I can find Roku everywhere with great options.
It made me wonder if the other vendors were trying to push Roku out and because of that they were forced into a deal with Walmart to remain viable.
You have gravitated toward Roku even though the CEO outright admitted in a podcast interview (referenced in the article) that Roku is an advertising company not a hardware company?
You see those four hard coded buttons on your Roku remote that are shortcuts to streaming services? They went to the highest bidder. You see that non removable banner ad on the right side of your Home Screen? You see the advertisement for the Game of Thrones prequel right in your menu?
Roku is the worse offender. Yes we have multiple Roku TVs and I recommend them to almost anyone because they are cheap, Roku has the best SmartTV operating system, support for every streaming service comes to it first, and it has a long history of updating its software. But, the two TVs I use most frequently also have AppleTV 4Ks attached.
I also take a Roku stick when I’m traveling because it works with captive networks that require a login. With the AppleTV I would have to configure a travel router.
Copying from another comment, in case you didn't see:
With tvOS 15.4, "Captive Wi-Fi network support on tvOS allows you to use your iPhone or iPad to connect your Apple TV to networks that need additional sign-in steps, like at hotels or dorms."
Whoops I think my statement above wasn't specific enough. Roku promises official support in 18 countries across America and Europe [1], but I'm in Asia.
yeah. I've made the 'not going to do nothing but also not going to dedicate my life to self-hosting everything' choice: I bought a dumb spectre generic tv, then hooked up a roku stick, and am letting the pihole catch whatever it can, and hoping for the best from there.
So far, the banner ads in roku stay away, so it probably works well enough?
My current main television is a Sony Bravia I got right before the explosion of smart TVs. For all that it is "limited", it does all of those things very well.
I get much more functionality by plugging in a computer than I do by using any smart TV.
Don't connect a smart TV to a network, ever. Instead, use a Google TV, Apple TV or a RPi running Kodi (and maybe PiHole?) for a Smart experience without all the bloat.
It's cheaper to replace the external device than replacing a TV.
Step 1: Get an LG WebOS Tv
Step 2: Don't connect it to the internet
Step 3: Use a separate device for any smart features, Apple TV, Google TV, nVidia Shield
Step 4: No profit for ad sellers.
It should be noted that Vizos used to not show ads. But now in a firmware update my tv is now forcing you to go to their smartcast input option that shows ads.
Unless you use your television solely to experience encryption-free OTA programming, any cable provider or streaming app has the capability to sell your viewership data to third parties.
Same reason why Facebook still pervades here in Thailand. Facebook offers 'free' internet access to their site. The have discounted 'social' bundles for data plans (providers necessarily have to snoop your traffic to see what you're using). People grow up with it as the 'normal'. Teaching kids that data collection is just a part of the internet does have moral implications—just like we should stop training kids on Microsoft and Adobe software or letting Google's Chromebooks invade the education space.
Is it a "moral right" for companies to use intellectual property laws to force your children to watch ads? Children are legally unable to participate in contracts, should they be allowed to watch any media, with binding licenses and laws, at all?
The media producing individual/group/company could do something else with their time/capital that isn't so casually pirateable, such as building housing or producing actual goods/services, instead of the "produce once then sit on your ass and collect royalties forever for the next century and a half" behavior that media production encourages.
downloading video content copy for personal consumption without owning original is legal in many European countries, uploading/distributing would be very different matter, let alone software
that's certainly not truth in many EU countries and one of the reasons is because downlaoding is legal, so DDL is king, heck even I pirate since 90s and started to use torrents just in recent years, until then was downloading all my movies/TV shows legally from DDL where are illegally uploaded by someone else
> But no it isn’t legal to download content that wasn’t authorized to be uploaded.
wrong, it's legal to download/stream video content for your personal usage and you don't need to care about any authorization, that's problem of the hosting provider and uploader, you as downloader are off the hook
Even when you’re not “seeding” completed downloads, the segments you have are available to other downloads. Many clients also have the ability to downgrade an downloaders ability to get segments if you are not reciprocating.
> 11. Am I infringing copyright if I watch a movie by streaming it instead of downloading it from the internet?
> Films, series, etc. can be downloaded or streamed online thanks to various websites (services) that offer this content legally. *However, users can also obtain this content thanks to various online file-hosting services and websites with embedded videos, which do not have the appropriate authorisation for this kind of communication of works to the public.*
> *Users are not liable for copyright infringement in the case of downloading or streaming the work for their own personal use* — based on the private-use exception and the three-step test.
Three isn't "many", and you're wrong about Spain and Slovenia anyway, Spain requires you to copy the work from a personally owned legitimately obtained copy or for the original to be made legally available online and is subject to the terms not prohibiting it.
The Czech Republic is the only country where what you said could be considered in any way accurate, and their copyright law on this isn't especially compatible with their European treaty commitments and will unquestionably go away at some point.
Perhaps you should consider checking your sources instead.
I have an LG C1, which is an amazing TV, but even after disabling every single ad-related option, I'll still occasionally get a pop-up ad when the TV turns on.
Interesting! I have the same TV and never see ads (I'm on the latest WebOS update). My Pi-Hole actually blocks everything and the only times when I see ads are when I disable the blocking to be able to access the app store.
Edit: To clarify, ads served on the WebOS interface. YouTube ads are still there.
I am planning to migrate from smart tv to just panel + some android tv box. Any suggestions for the box? Needs to be android for some local tv apps to work.
So my genuine question - asking if this post (an advertisement for AdGuard) is within HN rules - got flagged. I've since checked the guidelines and while it doesn't explicitly say product placement posts are verboten, they do seem against the spirit of the site ("Please don't use HN primarily for promotion"). But what guideline makes my comment flaggable?
Users flagged it as well as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554218. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I think they probably just thought the comment was off topic, and not in an interesting way.
The key for whether an article is good for HN is not its "adiness" (if I can put it that way) but its interestingness - i.e. does it gratify intellectual curiosity. In this case plenty of users clearly thought it did. It may be true that an article was written as part of a startup's effort to promote its product, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the content itself is interesting. (Of course, it tends not to be, because content marketing tends to be boring, but that's a different issue.)
I think they're well worth considering, particularly for the HN crowd, granted I suppose for people who truly want built-in netflix or the like without connecting something like a Roku or Apple TV maybe it's less optimal. But even they might change their tunes back to the concept of separate boxes and normal panels if they dislike all the ads and data tracking.
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0: https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays/me501