Manufacturers make recurring revenue by invading the privacy of "dumb" users with their "smart" TVs.
It's probably only a matter of time before TV manufacturers establish their own ad networks.
Why? Because they can. They have the ability to fully control *their* "smart TV" (that you paid for) and show you ads that they control --- independent of any programming.
I heard that some 2024 models refuse to go through the setup wizard without internet access. Not sure what happens if you disconnect it after setup though. But my Amazon Fire Stick already refuses to do anything without internet even though I could stream locally with vlc.
My money’s on a joint venture with Comcast, Cox, Verizon, et al. to use the Wi-Fi access points their routers operate – even if you use your own router and block them, your neighbors almost certainly don’t. Most them already have business ties and would love to have better ad targeting data.
That's highly speculative, but even if that did end up happening, the smart TVs sold today wouldn't magically gain that capability, especially if you keep it off the network and never update it.
I'm cool with it provided I can use it as a very high quality HDMI display. Then I just got a nicely discounted product.
My worry is if they demand connectivity in order to work as a display. Or worse come with some kind of LTE transceiver to phone home then we're in trouble.
There will always beeoptions without. Some tvs are used in industrial settings to show safety information. If someone dies and the tv was, showing ads instead of safety information there will be big lawsuits.
The EU couldn't fix the EU-US privacy framework even for the third try, and when the previous one have been invalidated by the CJEU, nobody bat an eye and continued to do the same thing.
GDPR is simply ignored by any bigger US company, it took 5 years for NOYB to facebook get fined which was less than 0.3% of their income, basically a small tax, not a huge fine.
Also GDPR is full of inconsistency (face biometric data is special data, but a photo of your face from what anybody can get the biometric data is not) and loopholes (required by law, legitimate interest).
They did something, but I wouldn't call that "a long way".
I work for a very large US company and can assure you that GDPR is something we pay a lot of attention to. This isn't the opinion of my employer, but my personal experience is that the big players take it seriously and meet and exceed all their obligations because it's too risky not to, and they have the necessary local legal teams to understand the law as best as is possible.
I think it's the small/medium companies who are where most of the issues are. Small companies write a non-legalese privacy policy because they think that's better for their users, but in fact have written something legally meaningless that gives their users no protections. Some small companies just don't know their obligations because they think they won't apply as they're not in the EU.
Then there are the companies who are big enough to know better, but small enough to know they can get away with it because all the scrutiny goes to big tech. I was asked by a medium sized advertising network to implement a keylogger on our website at my previous company so that the network could enforce their revenue sharing by detecting all user data input into our site and match it against their records. I laughed them out of the room, but they made it very clear this was how everyone did it.
GDPR is closely adhered to by big American companies. They may be the only ones to whom the EU is applying regulatory pressure on this. Chinese and Indian companies, on the other hand, as well as any non-enterprise American company, including start-ups, on the other hand, can and do safely ignore it. (Or follow it in broad strokes.)
Whether regulation is a good or a bad tool for solving problems is an opinion. It cannot, by definition, be "untrue". At most one can say that they disagree and cite evidence as to why.
What do you think about laws? Or lead in gas? Asbestos in your house? Are you one of these free thinkers who don't use seats belts because regulations are always bad?
Your last sentence makes no sense. Something can both be good, and be undesirable for government regulation. For example, it's good for me to eat vegetables. But it would be odious to have a law requiring me to eat X number of vegetables per day. Similarly, a person can be in favor of wearing seatbelts but opposed to a law requiring seatbelt use.
It looks like a lot of people have taken this statement to be proof that the poster doesn't believe in 'regulation'. When I read this I believe the poster is pointing out how the US has a tendency to politicized anything with the word 'regulation' associated with it to the detriment of the issue involved. For what it is worth, I too see the attack on 'regulation' without context or thought and it makes it hard to accomplish things as a society, but it also forces you to think of other ways things could get done. Convincing people to vote with their wallets or just bringing bad press are also ways to influence this issue. I personally do think regulation has a very big place in this discussion but maybe if we explored other avenues more we could make progress as well.
I wish people would stop regurgitating this obvious lie. You can’t walk 3 feet without bumping in to something that is better for you because of regulation.
My motorcycle has a rev limiter for a reason. If you let the motor run wide open it will fail catastrophically. Economies are no different.
If you think regulation doesn’t work then you’re simply ignorant of how even basic parts of your daily life work.
It is indeed. Boys privatize profits and socialize costs. Boys trash the place leading to poisoning, sickness, and suffering relieved only by the sweet release of death.
Men pay their costs. Men don't take shortcuts. Men measure twice and cut once.
I WISH they would make a comeback. Smart TVs are the single worse piece of (shit) consumer electronics on the market. Any time you take anything electronic and connect it to the internet you're asking for trouble. Throw an operating system in it controlled by parasitic advertisers and that's where we are today.
I only ever use mine as monitor ("PC mode") and have a different device drive it. It would take some major market dysfunction to lose large monitors with this feature.
Thinking about it too much makes me furious. We have supercomputers in our pockets and TVs but it all spies on us and nobody gives a shit because everything is cheap. It's a Faustian deal that sucks! Nobody would actually choose this yet here we are.
I have the alternative of just plugging in an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, whatever Google or Amazon makes, any computer with a digital video out port, tons of IPTV boxes that stream tons of pirated channels.
All I have to do is not put my wifi password into the TV.
For now. We are probably going to start seeing manufacturers, shipping, TVs and other devices with LTE chips built into them, so they can go around our Wi-Fi to get the sweet sweet data. At that point, my biggest fear is that all the people (myself included) who thought we were being clever by depriving the TV of the Wi-Fi password are going to be sad that we didn't instead throw our money behind a manufacturer building ethical products.
We already see signs that it might head this way. Numerous IoT junk (Facebook portal and Google Home Minis come to mind), will ignore DHCP-provided DNS servers and use their own (usually 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8 respectively) if they don't get successful connections to their mothership. My devices are old enough that they don't try DoH, but I'd be shocked if most of these haven't moved to that by now.
There are existing brands that sell dumb TVs. Sceptre is one that I'm fond of. They compete on they aren't the cheapest usually but quite reasonable. Most people want to buy cheaper "smart" TVs though and deprive them off the Wi-Fi password, which makes it harder for dumb TV manufacturers to stay in business and get cheaper through economies of scale, which further compound the problem.
MacOS will gladly serve Taboola ads in first-party apps and beg you to use Safari in push notifications. If that's not infiltration by advertisement, I'm not sure what is.
Windows offered me 3 separate subscriptions during setup. After managing to decline all 3 and complete setup, it then re-ran the Windows setup process a week later to help me "finish setting up", where it re-offered all 3 subscriptions.
I don't see the problem here. Badgering you to subscribe to some crap helps make more profit for MS, and this is good for MS shareholders. It might make the user experience worse, but who cares about that? It's not like Windows users are ever going to abandon the platform, so what's wrong with making them miserable in order to increase profits?
> Any time you take anything electronic and connect it to the internet you're asking for trouble.
you said if I have an electronic device and connect it to the internet I am asking for trouble :) phone was AMAZING before some moron connected them the internet and now they are “smart…”
How often does it nag you to say yes, while using it as a dumb TV? are all features usable in that mode? I may need to rethink a Vizio if that's the case and not annoying.
I could imagine a future TV requires phoning home every 30 days or else it stops functioning. Single network source for both the "license" check + the ad network so as to simple deny rules.
You absolutely can. But you'll want to pay attention to how insistent the TV is when it comes to being disconnected from the internet. I have an offline Samsung that will occasionally prompt me to accept the terms of service, which obviously fails because it's offline. I can imagine there are some brands/models that are more pushy.
I’ve been very happy with my Sony in this regard. Its OS is extremely basic Android TV and it doesn’t bug you at all if you don’t connect it to the internet. Newer models than the one I have also come with a “basic TV” mode that disables most of the Android TV bells and whistles.
Yeah Sony means a higher price, so it’s not going to be as cheap as some other options, but peace is worth a lot of money in my opinion…
That's how I setup and use my C2, which is fairly performant and non-egregious as far as smart panels go. It's not strictly necessary, but I even install firmware from USB.
For now (see e.g. [1]), though companies with surveillance capitalist business models are not only abusive but often sneaky and may do things like include a surreptitious prepaid mobile connection to better thwart your wishes. You really can't trust the bastards.
So did I buy a smart TV at some blink of time when the software had gotten pretty good but not yet infested with ads? I have an LG with WebOS.
I guess it might have ads for apps or content if I ever opened the app store thing or whatever it's called. But I never have any reason to do that beyond the initial setup when I installed youtube/netflix/some other apps or when they (very rarely) want an update.
So I'm perfectly happy with having apps for various services and a pretty decent UI with pointer remote, and easy casting and screen mirroring from my phone or laptop.
These homogenous threads make me wonder if I'm alone or got super lucky on the timing of my purchase. But since the OS does update sometimes I don't think that's it?
When TVs started to be computers, they started to have computer problems: bugs, outdated software, freezing, and so on. Recently I needed to buy a smart TV to replace a 2015 one that was OK as a TV, but its operating system (...) was so outdated that it couldn't open the apps anymore.
This is easy: when we buy a smart TV we buy a TV plus a computer. I really would like pay less only for the TV, using the "smartness" of other "computer" (Chromecast, Apple TV, Fire Stick, videogame console, an old computer, etc). If the TV or the computer stopped working, it's just a matter of buying _only_ it.
If you don't mind paying more, they do exist in the form of digital signage / commercial displays. They're usually either completely dumb or support "smart" features via standardized pluggable modules, which can host a normal x86 computer, amongst other options.
They probably meant "a reasonable amount more". My understanding is that the digital signage/commercial displays are substantially more while often being lacking in features that are important to most consumers. I'd probably also be willing to pay a little bit more, but not very much since, at the moment, unless you are really paranoid about your privacy/spying to the point that you don't want the TV to even have the connectivity hardware at all, most of these issues can be solved by just never connecting it to the internet, having it default to immediately selecting on of your inputs (I don't know how common this feature is by my TCL can do it), and using whatever device you choose on that input.
You would have to. The smart features are there to generate ad revenue. It's part of the reason that TVs have gotten absurdly cheap over the past decade.
Why not just... do the thing you want? IE, the solution you alluded to in your comment: have a dumb [which here exclusively means not internet-connected] TV with an externally "smart" device like a Chromecast?
This is essentially your own preferred solution to a problem that just cost you several hundred dollars when you "had" to replace your 2015 TV
It's not so simple. It's almost impossible to separate the "smart" side from the "dumb" side. Just like trying to use a smartphone and use only the phone, it won't make Android or iOS (and their pros and cons) disappear.
I wouldn't mind smart TVs if they were as serviceable as most computers. There was that Sharp M551 panel that had a Pi CM4 as the onboard CPU and that seems ideal: a modular, replaceable, upgradable board.
The fact that this both exists and is utterly unrealistic in the consumer space just makes it more infuriating.
While I agree that smart TVs are a marketing ploy by the manufacturers to increase the revenue by shortening the lifecycle, I'm not buying the premise that I can protect my data by using dumb TVs. Everybody's using AppleTV, Amazon, Google, or Roku devices, which are perfectly capable of collecting that information and using it themselves or feeding it to various vendors (for a reasonable price). Not to mention that all content providers (ie Netflix) are doing exactly the same.
Who is this article for? I don't disagree with it, but manufacturers aren't somehow unaware of any of it. They don't want to manufacture dumb TVs. They're the ones _currently_ manufacturing smart TVs.
Plus, there is the problem that the vast majority of consumers want smart TVs due to a combination of subsidized lower price and "simplicity" (e.g., they may be worse but they are simpler)
Maybe I'm not being creative enough, but for the average living room setup that would currently have a TV (e.g. (couch with a coffee table facing a TV stand), where exactly do you put the projector? You could put in on the coffee table, but that takes up space and doesn't look great. You could mount it to the ceiling, but that's more of a pain than just putting a TV on the stand you already have. And either method makes it significantly more difficult to connect anything, including power, to the projector.
Don't get me wrong, I think projectors are cool, but I'm not sure about their applicability to a large percentage of TV use-cases. Aside from expensive home theater type setups or janky dorm room style installs, both of which I'm a huge fan of, I'm not sure how the average person is supposed to use a projector. I would love to be wrong though, especially if it means I can use a projector in my fairly average living room layout.
I think this is going to be the "hacker" answer for a long time to come. Hardware that by most metrics is technically better, it's a little more expensive (but not commercial signage expensive) and a lot more inconvenient to set up which puts most people off. Functionally immune to ads
being a serviceable business because selling cheap and making it up with ad revenue requires volume they'll never have.
> Hardware that by most metrics is technically better
I think that's a hard one to sell with projectors. Picture quality is substantially worse, and images are substantially less bright, than with TVs. People buy TVs on 3 axes: price, image, and smart features. Here we explicitly don't want the smart features, but TVs are much cheaper and much better image quality (even at that much cheaper price) than with projectors. Brightness matters a lot for where/when you can use them.
Projector image quality is great, what kinds of projectors are you referencing? Image quality per dollar is a win for TVs but it's not that bad. $3k for a nice movie projector isn't crazy especially given the screen size.
And I agree that brightness is an issue but if you "only" want a 65-80" screen then even modest ceiling mount projectors can pump out enough light to compete with daylight.
Projector image quality depends on the surface you're projecting onto, the angle you're projecting at, and the light in the room. Maybe the difference is less around $3k, but that's not most people's budget for a TV. Personally I have disposable income and care about image, and spent A$1k on a TV that I'm very happy with. I don't believe there's any comparable projector for less than twice that price.
Came here to write the same. I got an Epson LCD projector used, 2m wall. Works great with an ipad mini and bluetooth box (although Apple ios is kind of dumb, I need to tell it every time I turn it on to not use the speakers in the projector). Watching happens mostly in the evening/night.
LCD (vs DLP) are kind of hard to find these days, which is unfortunate. Proper lens shift isn't so easy to find either. And you need to make sure you get a reasonably quiet one (so a movie projector, not a presentation one).
Here's a dumb 43 inch screen. It's sold as a gamer monitor. It's a UHD TV display with HDMI in and no onboard smarts.[1]
Here's another Samsung dumb screen, at 55 inches.[2] This is supposed to be for digital signage, but it's really a UHD monitor with HDMI in. But the next size up has "Alexa built in".
Sceptre, which mostly supplies Walmart, has a whole line of dumb TVs, including some big ones.[3] They're a little company in City of Industry, CA, which seems to have found their niche in dumb TVs.
There are lots of "digital signage" displays available. They're usually very bright, reasonably rugged, OK for 24/7 operation, immune to burn-in (they may spend their whole working life displaying mostly the same fast food menu), but not that good
I raise Sceptre every time I see this sentiment, but folks just don't seem to know about them. I got a humble 54" 4k from them a couple of years back for a few hundred bucks. Used it every day since, works great. Zero bullshit.
There are always many hundreds of options for "dumb TVs", the secret being that they're called "commercial [TVs|monitors|displays]". For example, B&H lists 2,105 so-called commercial displays as I type this (which you can easily filter to your specifications).
I would love to see this happen. In some ways, it's a story of the wrong system boundaries and modules. A mismatch between component age, manufacturer expertise, and how long software needs to keep being updated or patched.
You can see a similar phenomenon in car media systems, where the solution is an interface (e.g. Android Auto or Apple CarPlay) allowing the vehicle to be "dumber" but more reliable and robust over time. [0]
Televisions can be rescued even more easily, since we already have standards and conventions from the past to use.
[0] For folks unfamiliar with those systems, basically the car's touch-screen becomes an extension of your phone.
The author already mentions the benefits of streaming devices. What difference does it make whether you have a dumb or smart tv if the only functionality you use is from a streaming device?
It is still creepy to have tech in my home that is trying to betray me, even if it isn’t successful. Also you never know if some well-intentioned person might connect it to wifi.
I have a smart TV but drive it externally, if you even visit the wifi menu, it will nag you about not being connected until it is rebooted. It has never touched the network.
Just do your homework before purchasing to make sure this is possible.
In this vein, I just bought a Hisense QD6 series TV from Costco. I run it in "store" mode connected to a PC and it serves well as just a big, dumb 4K display.
Or they start to require internet access before you can use the device. Even if it's periodic. Once a month you have to connect to the internet to validate your license and agreement, wherein it uploads your watch history and downloads new ads.
The box will still be warm from the warm of the store I bought it from when I take it back for a return. How’s that thing going to work at my remote cabin?
I bought a dumb tv some 2 years ago. 4k, 50ish inch and it has a chromecast v2 attached. Works great.
The funny part is when younger family members come over, they get frustrated there's no netflix button on the remote! Last time that lead to a drawing sessions instead of some paw patrol nonsense.
I bought a 4K 240Hz OLED gaming monitor a week ago and it connects to the internet & has streaming services on it. By default, it has annoying popups on startup that can't be turned off in the default menus[^1]. It's extremely frustrating, but it is on me for not doing my research and just getting the highest-rated monitor across review sites...
This is not true. There are tons of set top boxes out there are underpower piece of garbage. Unless you are getting your hands on Google Streamer/Apple TV.
“Smart TVs are, unfortunately, more like smartphones: designed for frequent replacement.”
Except unlike smartphones, these TVs are not built with high-end components due to the razor-thin margins that have to be optimized for. So you end up with underpowered hardware and janky software that benefits only these companies through ad revenue.
I love this idea. I'd even do the "buy a smart tv and refuse the agreement so it acts as a dumb tv" if it were certified to be dumb. Otherwise I have absolutely no reason to trust a goddamn television.
They're not even promising me anything; the agreement is a bunch of commitments that I'm making, and they're refusing to provide me their "smart" features because I won't agree to those commitments. That tv can still do whatever it wants to as long as it doesn't break the law in a provable way.
Some dumb TVs still exist, only they’re called computer monitors now. And they’re a lot more expensive than TVs because TV-sized monitors are a niche product, and because manufacturers don’t subsidize them in exchange for your data.
However important, this is a niche problem. Most users will not be able use a dumb TV. Everything becomes more clunky for them. Instead of fighting the uphill battle of making legislation, more people should be made aware of the issue and the - not that complicated - ways to counter this.
Pihole, not giving internet (only local network) / and/or only use a trusted device via HDMI to display content.
I've been fairly happy with the Google/Android TV versions, but the primary feature I bought them for was the ability to pair bluetooth headphones with them. Bluetooth seems to be hard to get, but all Google TVs support them.
The lower end TVs can barely do the Google TV features, often being flaky. The higher end ones tend to implement the features much better, though not perfectly. My TLC 6xxx series is much less flaky than the 5xxx series, but I do sometimes have to reboot it at the beginning of every watching session, depending on the app.
Can’t you just pair your Bluetooth headphones to the device that is providing the video stream? That is the source, the TV should just be the output device.
LG owner here. I won't connect it to wifi, lan or BT. Once in a while nags me to do it, I might do it eventually, in it's own VLAN and without Internet access.
Here in Portugal all ISP provide a smart box, most of them also have common services like Netflix and so on, no need to any "smart" feature from the TV itself. Completly useless.
Just turn off the privacy invading features. LG’s options are pretty great, I’ve seen little bloat, and get the native apps for streaming services just fine.
Can we just get some physical buttons back! My tv came with a single multi-purpose button. It’s literally the premise of a dilbert comic. Then the button broke from over use. Just volume, power, change inputs. Not that complicated!
I bought my 65" TV for $299 recently, including shipping to my doorstep. Clearly all the bullshit that's baked into it is subsidizing the price by a lot.
I just never gave it network access and I use it like a dumb TV with a streaming box, so I get to benefit from a price subsidized by the the other 98% of the population who are getting exploited. The whole thing is kinda gross.
It's like there's this enshittification tipping point that you can't come back from. Realistically, who is going to buy a dumb TV at a much higher cost? People who are already savvy enough to get around a smart TV? People who aren't? I don't see it working.
>Realistically, who is going to buy a dumb TV at a much higher cost? People who are already savvy enough to get around a smart TV?
Exactly, that's why all this "I want a dumb TV!" stuff is, well, dumb.
It doesn't cost any less for a mfgr to make a dumb TV, in fact it would cost more. Modern TVs need a lot of computing power to make them work properly, so making the thing connect to the internet and show you ads really costs them nothing for hardware. Then they get to subsidize the TV with all the ad revenue, the kickbacks from the various streaming apps pre-installed, etc. A dumb TV would end up having the exact same hardware and a higher price tag. What kind of idiot would buy that? Not enough to make it worthwhile for the mfgr. If you don't want ads, just don't connect the TV to the internet.
It's a lot like modern Windows laptops that are cheaper than the same laptop with Linux pre-installed. MS and/or the laptop mfgr get a bunch of kickbacks from the crapware vendors to pre-install their crapware, so you end up paying less than you would for having the mfgr pre-install Linux (a free OS).
Now... when I decide to blow the money, it's going to be replaced with a 100" TV. For now I'm assuming that I won't have too big a battle to use it as a plain monitor.
But I bought a Harmony remote a while ago and returned it after finding out that, to maintain it, I had to set up a BS account with Logitech. A bunch of apologists on Reddit mocked those of us who called out this despicable nonsense.
Just a couple months later, we had the last laugh when Logitech pulled the plug on the whole thing.
This come up every time, and yet I have never seen an actual demonstration or example of this. HDMI can carry Ethernet, sure, but you honestly think an (for example) Apple TV is going to let arbitrary devices use its network connection? You gotta show that it even implements the spec first.
I removed all of the broadcast channels and it's now an excellent TV. The apps just work, it doesn't show me ads for anything, and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Am I just lucky to have found a good manufacturer?
My Hisense with Google TV has proven to be decent. I never connected the TV to the internet and went with an external Apple TV instead. It always starts on the last video input. I was able to refuse all the EULAs and was still left with all the visual niceties that I don't use like upscaling and motion smoothing.
Reminder: They make them, they tend to be "monitors", "digital signage" or "commercial". You do have to pay a premium for them, for a variety of reasons.
There may be other options, I have a friend that 6-10 years ago got a TV, then opened it up and removed a USB stick that implemented all the smart features.
Another data point: Before all the smart TV stuff you would tend to pay significantly more for an A/V monitor (basically a TV without the tuner) than you would for a regular TV.
You seem to be downvoted by ad haters - ads being a sensitive topic - but in the context of a device made specifically for delivering ads, I agree it seems like a good idea.
In the context of being a reasonable human going about my business - I wouldn't want one anywhere near me.
What’s my best bet if I just want a normal computer monitor hooked up to some sort of sound bar, and I’m happy using something like a Chromecast for all TV needs? Or are there monitors with good enough speakers now?
There used to always be some smug commenter in these threads pointing out that life's better without any TV at all... Guess it's my turn.
Really - why bother? Can't you feel how it dominates the room? Don't you resent being constantly programmed by a handful of giant companies hiding behind different brands? Not to mention the ads shouting muck into your brain.
The main benefit of a giant HD TV - and please correct me if I'm wrong on this - is that the bigger and brighter the TV, the heavier the mental domination. After a long day/week working, you get to subside into the minima of mental and physical effort.
Relaxation and escapism are valid human pastimes, and we have 'choice' over what to watch to a higher degree than ever before... And it's a golden age for TV in many ways. But I can't help but feel that TV's hooks into people's minds are also more cunning than ever.
There isn't a nice way to say this, but... I can't help but notice that people who watch cable news, for example, become quite predictably wrong on important topics, and get very worked up over whatever the weekly outrage bait is. It's a toxic brew..
And the same goes for all kinds of other 'programming', from reality shows to celeb gossip to sportsball. Doesn't it ever feel like you're being... Subdued? Or even herded?
Okay but who uses a tv for cable news or any of that?
I want to put youtube channels on it while cooking in the kitchen, or play video games on it. Does anyone actually watch "TV" tv anymore? Isn't it mostly streaming services?
Can we generalize this point to the idea that the user might want to manage the complexity level of products?
It's great to have the fully-integrated television that can be controlled by a phone app. This may seem great, until the spyware implications come to mind.
In a similar vein, I like all of the gadgetry on the recent car purchase. The sensors are nice; we can all back in an "park tactically" like a pro with these rear cameras.
But part of me longs for a purely analog chariot with 1960s-level tech that, sure, requires more skill on my part to operate, but I'm OK with that.
This invites the question: if there were a market for a brand new, but de-gunked car, could it even be legally built? Would there be a market? Why not?
So what's the best solution? Suppose you have a dumb TV, or a smart TV locked to a single input. It seems like there are big downsides to most approaches. Rokus and Fire sticks have the same downsides as smart tvs, with ads and laggy interfaces. I currently have one output from my desktop hooked to my TV, but the UI leaves a lot to be desired and of course now I have two input devices to deal with, one for the TV and one for the PC. What's the best way to do it?
Find a decent media remote you can single hand with built in keyboard, i.e. lenovo n5902 (discontinued) - a bunch of cheap airmouse works pretty well. Setup macro for browser, boomarkts , microphone use etc. Adjust desktop UI scaling.
I own a smart TV that was at least partially subsidized by the mess of ads I see on the home page. But when manufacturers make a high quality panel, I’m not really convinced there’s a market for dumb TVs - people just use their own box if they want, and the marginal cost of the electronics required may even be negative now that Android/Google TV can also handle TV settings while providing a new revenue source.
I've an old dumb 1080p Samsung TV. Apart from the panel not being up to date everything about it is better than the smart version that I bought 8 years later.
I've owned several lcd tvs and several tv boxes. A big problem with smart tvs is the difference in lifetimes between the two.
Tv boxes have a maybe 3 year lifetime before they get kind of junky. Lcd tvs go at least 5 years, sometimes much longer.
If you have a smart tv, around year 3 or 4, you're going to want to hook up a (new) tv box, but you're still going to have to fight the built in OS anyway, at least a bit.
Economics of ads subsidizing the tv aside, it makes more sense to have the tv firmware be focused on the essentials like responding to user input quickly and if it has a tuner not locking up on poor or malformed signals, and the user can choose between the tv box ecosystems they like.
Separately, it'd be nice if the tv box ecosystem got some more longevity... Maybe that will happen soon. 4k@60fps with dolby vision and/or hdr10+ seems like a likely plateau of streaming video for a while... if they'd start regularly putting in 1g ethernet to handle peak bandwidth of 4k BluRay rips, things would be pretty good. 8k seems unlikely to get mainstream adoption (but I could be wrong)
I looked into this briefly. Many TVs run Linux under the hood, and can be flashed, as the firmware is available because of the GPL. (Sometimes. Vizio had to be sued into doing so iirc.) so "all" that has to be done is to repackage and rewrite some firmware, reflash the TV to only ever use HDMI1, and Bob's your uncle.
The problem (aside from the fact that redoing the firmware isn't trivial - but that's the fun part) is that TVs are big and bulky, and come in multiple sizes and resolutions. And then shipping them around the country gets expensive, limiting reach, and then that means that taking returns also becomes difficult too. Especially because you'd be reboxing existing televisions to begin with. But maybe you could open up a storefront to sell these from and serve a local area first.
Anyway, this is more a comment on the issues with this as bother me, and not an indightment of the whole idea. Someone else with a lot more capital to bootstrap could pull it off - assuming there really is enough of a market for such a product. It might be like the support for a small phone contingent or light truck. There's a vocal crowd that does exist, but they don't exist in great enough quantity relative to the rest of the market, leading to not enough sales to support a business built on that singular premise.
The other issue is HDCP. If the Apple/Google TV won't play high res content to your modified firmware,
the idea's dead in the water without an additional device like from hdfury, but at that point, how many customers are just going to put up with a "smart" tv?
Manufacturers make recurring revenue by invading the privacy of "dumb" users with their "smart" TVs.
It's probably only a matter of time before TV manufacturers establish their own ad networks.
Why? Because they can. They have the ability to fully control *their* "smart TV" (that you paid for) and show you ads that they control --- independent of any programming.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/tcl-tvs-will-use-fil...
reply