> Panasonic has been experimenting with showing ads when you adjust audio volume and European broadcasters have started using HbbTV to serve targeted ads.
Who ever thought that would be a good idea? Do these people have no common sense whatsoever? People will dump TVs and TV watching and switch to PC set top boxes, internet streaming, large monitors before they accept this sort of nonsense.
Well that does get very difficult with TV since a large number of people stream, the app on my LG is actually better than my Apple TV but it is toss up with the Roku on the other TV.
So I am going to say, for the technically inclined its time to chase down your router firewall logs and find where the TV is going to for ads and block the IP or port range. Would be curious what the TV does, properly engineered it should just act as if its not connected at all.
Integration brings unneeded obsolescence and reduces choice and control. May be hard to avoid in space constrained phones but should not be needed on tvs.
I have also a LG TV, and I used to keep it disconnected at all times as all my streaming comes from the nVidia Shield anyway.
However recently I wanted to setup my home automation system to automatically turn the TV off when I go to bed or outside, and for that I needed to connect it to the home network.
I solved this by confguring the router firewall to drop any package from the TV to the internet. It works!
It's just a matter of time until Smart TVs deactivate themselves if they can't connect to their telemetry and ad servers -- or the manufacturers enter into agreements with streaming services to proxy ads through the same IPs used to stream video.
This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP to make sure that they're being used in the country they're sold for.
The best solution for streaming is a low-end PC with hardware video decoding and the ability to run Ublock Origin.
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Edit: I see from other comments that Samsung TVs already go into degraded functionality mode if they can't connect to their ad servers, and already serve some ads from endpoints used for necessary functionality.
Anything that requires Internet connection (i.e. Youtube, including casting from mobile device).
I just found out this weekend; with an older, cca 2013-ish samsung tv, connected to a network that has OpenWRT router with Adblock, and forced redirect of all port 53, 853 traffic to the local resolver. It cannot resolve its mothership (the rules were already in the Adblock list, I didn't add anything). The TV shows up a messagebox that it cannot to the Internet and asking the user to check the connection.
I recently built a HTPC/home server based on a Gemini Lake Celeron ITX board in a compact case. The CPU/GPU is passively cooled and can decode 4 simultaneous 4K streams in realtime. It has hardware decoding of x264, x265, VP8/9. All-in, aside from the storage disks (for a Btrfs RAID1 pool) that I took from my desktop PC, it cost me less than a QNAP/Synology NAS with room for a similar number of disks.
I still use my Chromecast for Youtube, because the UI in a browser isn't great for couch use. On the CC, multiple people can add videos to the playback queue, I haven't found a good replacement for that yet.
For anything longer than a typical Youtube video, it's not an issue finding a movie and starting it from a wireless keyboard.
Our current TV is a 42" LG that I got for free from work. It's old enough to not have any "smart" features, it has no networking at all. The picture quality is great and no ghosting unlike a lot of older LCDs. I am not looking forward to the day I eventually have to replace it.
This was my setup recently too but then Amazon disabled their cast button inside their prime website a few months ago which meant we had to switch to the app route. Despite their fuckery, we've found streaming from the phone apps (Amazon, Netflix, + Plex for torrents) is actually a better experience than the laptop on the couch or wireless keyboard option. Also YouTube Vanced + nextdns.io takes care of YouTube ads.
I'm guessing that in addition to them pushing their data stats to AWS they don't make that data available to you for free or indefinitely? (kinda like how Nest only lets you see 10 days' worth of thermostat data via their own service with absolutely no option or ability to download a CSV of all data since day 1 even though they have that data in a SpannerDB somewhere in a Google datacenter)
it's an interesting point you make, but perhaps companies should make these trade offs transparent.
You can get the version that phones home or you can pay extra for the version that doesn't.
I suppose the problem is that they'd make this transparent and there would likely be a bit of backlash ... thank goodness that regulatory agencies have our best interests at heart /s
Precisely Amazon is one of the few companies that make this explicit with their Kindle, here the Paperwhite without ads costs 10€ extra. I'm curious, does anyone know other examples?
I'm curious how many people pay extra for no Kindle ads.
I originally bought Kindles without ads, but for my third Kindle I decided to buy it with ads to see how bad they were. You can pay the extra later to get rid of ads, so if it turns out buying the version with ads was a mistake it is easy to fix it.
I don't see the sleep screen except briefly between the time I open the cover and the time the Kindle wakes up. I'm rarely on the home screen. I do almost all book shopping on my computer rather than on my Kindle. Thus I almost never actually see an ad, and when I do it is almost always not interfering with what I'm there to do.
The few ads that I do briefly see in those rare times I'm not in a book or in my library are static images without sound. For the sleep screen it is usually an ad for a book and the image is the book cover, which is often actually nice to look at.
After actually seeing the ads, I now feel like I wasted my money buying the ad-free versions for my first two Kindles.
My Kindle is old so there wasn't ad-supported versions back then, but my GF's Kindle does have ads, and they're almost always terrible, terrible books, displayed full-size in the sleep screen. We joke that they try to shame you into paying the no-ads upgrade (or for a cover!).
After a couple months of nothing but ads for bodice-ripper romance novels with semi-clothed, entwined bodies on the cover (based on my consumption of biographies and Fantasy?), I went to Amazon support to pay for the ads to be removed and they did it for free and gave me a rather large credit for kindle books.
I've done this with one other Kindle and several other people have done it based on my experience and they've all gotten ads removed for free and some have gotten store credit in various amounts.
I didn't even mention why I wanted the ads gone, I just asked how to remove them and they gave me free books and a typically $20 upgrade for free.
After a couple months of nothing but ads for bodice-ripper romance novels with semi-clothed, entwined bodies on the cover
There was a time that the Kindle ads were actually appropriate. I've even purchased the odd sci-fi book that showed up on the wake screen. But that's been a couple of years. Now I get the same bodice-rippers you're seeing. What a waste; Amazon has my book purchase history going back 20 years, and that is what you're showing me? Do your advertising customers know this? Because, shallow guy that I am, I read sci-fi, philosophy, and books on distance running. That's pretty much it. I did read part of a Danielle Steele book (imagine GPT-3 wrote a romance novel...) 35 years ago when I was married to a woman who read those, but I doubt Amazon knows that.
In the case of TVs I think it also has to do with there being no real hardware difference between a fancy Smart TV and a dumb TV. A dumb TV nowadays is going to be implemented as essentially a computer and monitor running a set of TV applications, just like a Smart TV. The only difference will be that fewer programs will be loaded onto the dumb TV.
Do you? Manufacturers can easily require an Internet connection to make the device work. They can also include their own radios and modems. All in the name of being user friendly!
Not that I know of, I always skip the smart TV bullshit. Another commenter pointed out that a Philips model pester you with a pop-up to connect it every two weeks or so but that seems like the most manufacturers are attempting at this stage.
Exactly, we bought my 75ish year old father in law a new TV because he was using a small SD flat panel and his eyesight is going.
But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers.
It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing until we drove 150 miles to accept the update for him
We just wanted a TV that receives terrestrial TV and has a couple of HDMI ports for his DVR which he knows how to use without over complex menus, is that so much to ask?
Just looked at a price checking site, checking the oled and "no smart tv" boxes. Zero hits.
It is not a question about affordable TV. The only ones that does not have smart features (as far as I can identify) are the cheapest LCD ones at the bottom of the price list.
The best alternatives that I can find is projectors or monitors, as those seems to so far not expect an Internet connection.
Let's play a hypothetical game. Your TV attempts to literally control your life. And is ultra HD and really cheap. But you have to keep its front facing camera uncovered or it blares an alarm saying that its front camera is covered. The alarm also activates, but more quietly, if it loses its internet connection.
Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.
So say the sponsor is Coke and it sees a 2 liter bottle of pepsi in your home. It displays something literally equivalent to (not in exactly so many words) "we are punishing you for bringing pepsi into our home, because our sponsor is coke." It then counts down a 30 second punishment timer. As a shopper you dont have THAT strong of a preference between coke and pepsi. So the next time you need to watch a movie on the dictator (name of TV set) you buy coke that night instead of pepsi.
Does that cross a line? How would you legislate against it? Devices shall not act as slave owners over humans who have bought them?
yes, you're right. (Though I think it wasn't about a TV watching your food choices.) So what happens legally if, today, a company literally does it? How do you legislate against this?
It is literally possible for a television to include a punishment timer (as in, it is pretty trivial to code up, if the device isn't rooted.) What happens if a company sells one that literally identifies shopping and uses a punishment timer for people who buy a competitor to their sponsor instead of their sponsor? can you make it illegal?
My TV can connect, but is happy to live without. Though I've never used the smart features, just terrestrial digital TV, a PC over HDMI, a Pi running Kodi over HDMI, and an old DVD player via SCART. The TV doesn't enforce an interactive menu to pick those sources from, it is a simple selection on the remote, so it doesn't have anywhere to force ads.
If it becomes impossible to buy a TV that doesn't just display what I chose by the time this one is due for replacement, I'll take a device sold as a computer monitor instead. Or a projector. Maybe I'll pay extra, but I'll be fine with that.
LG still makes them, if you carefully navigate to their Business "Commercial Lite" or digital-signage options. I love my 55" 4k dumb TV. But you might not get some high-end features like HDR.
Expect more of this as users hold onto their devices for longer and services become increasingly important as a source of recurring revenue. Apple is uniquely positioned to weather this transition. The best way I can see forward for Samsung here is profit sharing with Google and Microsoft.
Do they wait with showing ads, say a month or so, until after the common return policy for most stores have expired? That would be a really evil thing to do, just struck my mind.
Also, sounds like a case of optimization creep - "I know a way to get even more revenue, we just sign up with this $more_shady_ad_network!". Displaying more and more creepy ads, no-one decreasing ads since they don't want to be the one decreasing ad revenue.
Sorry, don't where you're at. Over here, it's commonly a month return policy of most stores (no law setting this, it's a voluntary thing).
Then there's quite generous warranty for 2 years, up to 3 years, but that's when things break.
In addition, I think this also includes if a sold item is unfit for advertised use, or perhaps even if substantially changed during ownership (eg Samsung mandatorily introducing ads), but I've never had to use that so don't know).
> Then there's quite generous warranty for 2 years, up to 3 years, but that's when things break.
I disagree with describing this as 'generous'. A TV manufacturer should guarantee that the TV will not develop a manufacturing defect for a minimum of 3 years, if not longer. I have CRTs that lasted decades (plural) without issue, while I've had multiple LCDs fail in under a decade.
There's nothing generous going on here, they're systematically making inferior products in order to drive an increase in sales.
Do they have the right to do that? Do customers in any country have a right to demand a product's firmware be restored to factory-state (on the grounds that what they received isn't what they were sold)?
Sure, but we're on HN. The discussion here definitely doesn't reflect the general audience where 99% of the people aren't tech savvy and don't even know what a firmware is.
I’ve used Australian consumer affairs laws to return products well outside the return date when they’ve been updated to remove/modify features I specifically wanted.
I returned a Bose speaker when it stopped letting you cast to it without their app, and have returned my Ring external camera when they removed customisable motion zones (I need to block a specific tree that moves in the wind). Plus more.
I’ve never had a problem doing so, I’m always polite and just explain that it’s no longer as advertised and print out the product update notes showing that they removed/changed x or y feature.
When I wrote about phones "Mass market is demanding products nonsensically thin to the detriment of other properties, because it was told to. It could be told otherwise." I got laughed off. That the market isn't going to serve my fancy preferences.
But this is the same thing, the market is repeatedly told to ask for smart devices, even when dumb TV is all the users need.
Seems like, there are a lot of opinions out there. I often hear, what i can do on my phone i also want to see on tv. May it be playing music, movies, series, etc.. So a seamless integration from the start without another device like apple tv is a plus.
Personally, I would pay more for a TV without this functionality. I'm running one of the last "dumb" consumer TVs, from 2015.
But the overwhelming majority of consumers just want smart TV stuff built right into their TVs.
It's like power windows and air conditioning in cars. They used to be premium features. Now, you really can't buy a car without them, at least in the USA.
(Pedantry note: As late as ~2014, you could still buy a Nissan Versa with manual windows; perhaps it's still possible)
It’s TLS so I don’t know what it’s attempting to log but the highest blocked device in my house is the roku. I even have a Samsung TV (which I’ve never seen an ad on btw but I set it to boot directly to the HDMI port with the roku)
Only thing I’ve noticed is the Home Screen ad location is a big grey box as opposed to an ad. I only use it for Plex and PBS Kids. Both apps work perfectly.
You were able to block everything in the past but no longer. Samsung catched on and now serves some ads over the same domains they distribute their firmware updates, install apps, get the program guide, and check the online status.
If you block those domains the Samsung TV loses most of its internet features and also seems to go crazy and requests all domains multiple times per second, defeating deep sleep of the TV.
Hard but doable. So far everything hardcoded of that sort has been successfully extracted (or leaked). I don't think they'll be adding expensive TPM chips.
You will be disappointed to find out that SIMs that you get with IoT devices these days often only connect you to a private network without access to the wider Internet. At least if the point of the SIM was to just distribute firmware updates/download ads/talk to the cloud services of the vendor.
This is why I see that the push for 5G as some kind of magic everyone is (supposedly) asking for, to make their lives better, is a fraud.
It will be the end of privacy completely. EVERYTHING always on and serving ads, collecting telemetry and logging everything. There will be no way to shut them down.
My TV has been relieved of all internet connection privileges, and it's staying that way.
Most people already don't care and happily connect everything to their Wi-Fi. Those that do care and now setup firewalls/piholes/etc. on their Wi-Fi will learn to snip the coax/desolder/drill out the 5G antenna in the future.
Yes, this works actually. I recently bought a Samsung Frame and was very annoyed by the ads in the interface. I now have a Raspberry Pi running PiHole and it removed almost all ads. Sometimes I still see an ad, then I know it's time to update the block-list of my PiHole. When looking at PiHole's logs, it's unbelievable how many requests the TV sends to Samsung servers. These are blocked now luckily, but this TV (and I suspect other Samsung TVs as well) is a real nightmare with regard to privacy. It's the first time I actually read all the privacy statements on the TV. The remote has a microphone (for an 'assistant' called Bixby[1]) that I absolutely do not want turned on, but it's very unclear how to disable it. I wish I could buy a dumb TV.
It's even worse when the ad server is down: it will completely lock-up your TV and you can't even watch it anymore. In the best case it makes it excruciatingly slow. That's why I turned off networking on my SmartTV already a year or two ago. No ads, works as a TV should.
AFAICT this works over the same pin that could carry ARC which is arguably more useful to most people and usually available at least on one port. However, devices could also communicate via DDC or CEC too although rather low bandwidth is available it could be enough for some telemetry. Its probably possible to do this via HDMI info frames too somehow... or via direct wireless connections between these devices or infrared or.... the point is there are quite some ways to achieve communication between connected devices already without it.
I've had my Samsung TV for 3-4 years, it works just as well as well today as the first day that I bought it. I've never connected it to the internet and get streaming capabilities using 3rd party devices. Dumb TVs are much better than shit ones.
This. Just buy an NVidia shield and use your TV as a monitor. The UI and the fact that it uses AndroidTV and not some shitty Samsung OS is reason alone to buy it. Also my Samsung TV gets a start signal from my NVidida Shield so I do not even have to bother with using 2 remotes :)
That's exactly what I've been doing with my 2019 Samsung TV and and a Shield Pro. The TV is unplugged from the internet and all my streaming is done from the Shield, which is even better because:
1. The Netflix/Prime Video etc apps are snappier because of the beefier SoC
2. Content looks better, because DLSS does a better job at upscaling than the TV's native upscaler
3. I can use it to stream games from my PC, which is making me reconsider buying one of the new consoles just for couch gaming since I could spend the money on a new GPU to upgrade my rig an just stream from there.
And as you mentioned, the presence of HDMI CEC makes remotes rather interchangeable
I also didn't connect the antenna cable and didn't even notice during the entirety of the (Italian) lockdown since I never watch "normal" TV. At this point I wish it could be possible to get TVs without a tuner, I could stop paying the TV taxes!
Have you streamed yet or it’s just an option right now? Something I’m considering but I’ve not looked into. Wondering about lag, and if I have to run upstairs to my pc to start games etc.
Tried just once (the whole setup is rather new). I tried the first part of Hellblade running on my PC, which is in the same room, at 1440p & High settings. I played for about half an hour, with no noticeable glitches or lag. Both the PC and the Shield are connected using cables (each to a different switch, both switches go directly to the router).
I hope I have time to try it more before the weekend, but the results are promising.
Oh, I thought it was obvious since we're talking about a Shield Pro but now I think it's worth mentioning that my PC has a Nvidia card (an RTX2060), so I'm using nvidia's native streaming support. It's also worth noting that an OSS client exists (Moonlight), so the Shield could be replaced by, say, a Raspberry Pi 4
Interesting, thanks for the reply. I’ll research for sure.
With the PS5 controller having a microphone array built in, I won’t be purchasing, which makes me sad as I’ve been gaming since the ZX Spectrum. Also Sony injecting their ads into the PS4 home-screen which will no doubt carry over to the PS5. Gah. But on a positive note, those new AMD offerings...
Can only speak for Steam's streaming here, but your mileage will probably vary. Your system needs to be fairly beefy (you will get a bit of a performance hit from streaming games). I run a geforce 1060 and it'll stream any new games at 1080p / 60fps but I'd go beefier for 2K/4K streaming. I'm still on a dumb 1080p TV so that'll be more important if your TV is >1080p.
Biggest obstacle here was the wifi in this house is unreliable. We tried getting a wifi extender and even a new wireless router but we kept getting latency issues. We opted to get a powerline adapter for a stable connection. MOCA is also worth looking into if connectivity is a problem.
And finally, running to the other room to start games. Again, this is steam, but I'm guessing shield has the same limitation: if your system isn't logged in or the screen is locked, you will probably have problems starting games remotely in those cases. You'll want to setup remote desktop almost for sure (you can VNC or there's a way to logout of RDP too without locking the screen automatically). I also have a Wake on LAN shortcut setup to wake the PC up remotely.
Finally, sometimes games won't pipe audio remotely because they don't switch to the "virtual streaming audio device" these apps use properly. As far as I can tell this is on a game-by-game basis and depends how they coded it, but for that I have a pretty ridiculous work around (I remotely start a command line tool via openssh to force the audio device to "steam streaming speakers" then restart the game after that). The games with these problems seem pretty rare though, I'd say maybe 5% of the games I've tried.
Overall it's awesome and I glad I spent a day or two figuring it out. I don't get noticeable lag and I can stream pretty much any game to my living room on the TV now. Also got a "Couchmaster" for a kb/mouse setup. I can also emulate things like Wii U games and stream them remotely to the TV like having an actual system.
You can launch the games directly from the Shield if they appear in GeForce Now on your PC. They usually show up automatically, the only issue being UWP games (like Hellblade I mentioned early), the workaround there is to create a normal shortcut to the game and add that to GeForce, manually.
I use an Nvidia Shield with a GTX 1080 graphics card. The PC is wired to the router through a switch, the Shield is on 5GHz wifi, I use a wired controller. My router is an Archer C7. I feel like there's a slight but noticeable input lag when playing on TV and my framerates are a bit worse. For most games it's ok but for twitchy games, say, Furi or Dark Souls, it's annoying.
The Shield network troubleshooter tells me I have 1ms latency even on wifi but still, maybe it would be better wired. I have no easy way to run an ethernet cable to the TV.
Update: turns out Gamestream forces the resolution to 1080p, I'm looking into ways to try 1440p or even 2160p.
It's still the best gaming-on-TV experience out of the stuff I have in my TV cabinet (PS4 Pro and Xbox One).
It's not an higher resolution, but render quality is way better and it has a much more stable framerate. Too bad it's noisier than even the ps4 :D
I have an extremely similar setup as you, however I will note that the quality of android TV apps seems to be rather lacking. Specifically Spotify will randomly disconnect from my phone and stop and Prime Video cannot play UHD video properly (displaying a warning saying to update the app when I’m on the latest version). These are two apps I tend to use frequently on other devices so it’s super annoying that they don’t work. Of course I can use my Samsung TVs built in apps but that defeats the purpose of owning the shield.
While I’m at it I may as well complain about the google assistant support using my home mini. While nvidia advertises this as a feature, it often works much worse than it did on my cheap old chromecast so that’s quite disappointing. For example, the shield will launch the Netflix overview for a show when asked to play it but won’t actually start the show until you wait for the auto preview to start or you explicitly ask it to press play.
Overall, I guess I’m just not as thrilled with this device as everyone else seems to be. I kind of wish I had just gone with the Apple TV at this point so that I could ditch airplay on my TV which is the only reason I have it connected to the internet at all.
I had my ks8000 for 2 years before it hit the dreaded green lines which seem to be common on Reddit. 1500 dollar top of the line TV that hardly lasted.
Luckily, Samsung was awesome about it and I was able to RMA through Best Buy, who just gave me my money back. I took that cash, put a bit on top, and bought an LG OLED. Best decision ever. OLED is absolutely dominant in TVs these days.
Can those "smart" TV do ACR on content provided via HDMI? i.e. if I connect my apple TV to my intrusive smart TV, does it do ACR on the signal it receives via HDMI?
At home I don't have a smart TV (I use a JVC video projector and they've resisted adding those kind of useless feature so far) but my parents use a smart TV connected to an apple TV and so I'm curious what happens there.
Whatever has the best panel for the best price, then strap an apple TV (or your choice of NUC) onto it and completely ignore whatever on-board smarts exist.
And that the YouTube app forces its ads and shitty recommendations down your throat. A NUC running Kodi sounds nicer. (Yeah, yeah, pi-hole. It’s a bandaid, IMHO)
Also, Apple‘s streaming services being ever more annoyingly shoved in your face on menu screens.
This requires accepting their ToS & "privacy" policy and providing validated billing data to Google, an advertising company already stalking everything you do on the web.
Some people might not be comfortable with this, or not even trust them to begin with. I personally don't mind paying but there's no way in hell I am providing any personal information to Google.
I think a simple Youtube-dl + web based front end that can run on a Raspberry Pi would be a great way to help lots of people bypass YouTube.com/apps, make it as simple as PiHole for users to get going. Have it organize files in a way that would allow clients like Plex to easily access that content. Easy 4k + ad-free content on any device.
This is the only reasonable solution. I've got an OLED LG "TV", connected to an Apple TV and a receiver for proper audio (using HDMI ARC).
To turn everything on, I press a button on the Apple TV remote and everything is up and running within five seconds or so (from standby/sleep mode). Powering off the Apple TV also turns off the display and the receiver via HDMI CEC.
I found that my receiver was still using 50W while in "CEC-ready standby", while it's only 2W in normal standby, so I never use it. I'll just press a few more buttons.
Indeed unacceptable. That figure is quite comparable to S1 sleeping state of a desktop. Whereas a computer consumes ~10W in S3 state and can even wake up out of that when triggered by LAN.
Commercial TVs aimed at the digital signage market are an alternative option to a large monitor, especially at larger sizes. They're less likely to spew advertising than consumer Smart TVs, but are probably less likely to stay clean than a monitor with no Internet connectivity.
I use a Linux PC as a media decode device. It works, but I have no interest in 4K (hardware video decode is sketchy on Linux, which makes 4K difficult) or paid streaming services (if I wanted to watch sewage I'd take up urban exploration into wastewater facilities).
Commercial TVs aimed at the digital signage market
are an alternative option to a large monitor,
especially at larger sizes
Do you have experience running one of these? I'm very curious about the pros and cons.
I've seen it mentioned that they tend to lack features like HDR and may not have remote controls. Any other downsides?
I would be fine with the lack of a remote, and probably even HDR. I would also be willing to pay a bit of a premium over consumer TVs.
However, information on these displays is pretty tough to come by. I browse home theater type forums/subreddits from time to time and don't see people really talking about using them in the home.
They are extremely expensive (however they are built tougher and are designed to stay on 24/24 for years) and indeed lack a lot of consumer-grade features like HDR. They are also hard to actually find & buy, you need to get them shipped and that will add another ~100 bucks to the price.
I guess image quality and response time might be sub-par too compared to a top-of-the-line consumer-grade TV.
They often have serial ports behind them, that serves as the remote control. They may support HDMI CEC for it as well?
No experience running them, but looking at samsung digital signage, HDR looks to be a feature of their high end models and extremely expensive. ~$4,500 for a 55" 4K TV [0]. The more competitively priced displays[1] (~$1300 for 70" 4K) don't seem to offer it.
Any TV, as long as you don't connect it to wifi/ethernet. I've been using Roku throughout my house with a home DNS server set to block all roku analytics/log servers. No interface/app issues thus far (about a year now on 4 TVs)
edit: Also, aside from netflix, a local plex server with rtorrent/irssi to auto-download tv series I followl
You should absolutely never give your 'smart' television the wifi password or plug it into a cable that will give it a DHCP lease. Use the things as dumb displays driven by an xbox or PS4 or a home theater PC.
Yes, the xbox and PS4 home screens have 'ads' (promoted games and stuff mostly), but they're not 1/10th as annoying in my opinion. And Microsoft and Sony have a much higher likelihood of keeping the operating systems properly patched and up to date on a 5, 10 year time scale.
This maybe true, but Google Ads even on YouTube is way less invasive than Samsung ones. And BTW, YouTube Premium disable all ads, while there is no way to have a ad-free experience on Samsung.
> You should absolutely never give your 'smart' television the wifi password or plug it into a cable that will give it a DHCP lease. Use the things as dumb displays driven by an xbox or PS4 or a home theater PC.
1. why?
2. the ps4/xbox pale in comparison to my lg's apps. functionalities, quality of streams, the voice search. they're all much better on the lg apps.
Fuck the guy who wanted to suck up to the management in some stupid meeting projecting estimated revenue out of this to ask for a raise later because he "contributed to a revenue increase" to the company.
There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the context or reasoning is.
This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet, and I don't use smart features on the TV anyway, so I don't plan on updating the software either. Hopefully they face backlash over this stupidity and this doesn't go on to become a norm.
I also bought a Sony Android TV for this reason. Then last month Google pushed an update for the "Android TV Home" app and now there are many people complaining about ads on the home screen [1].
This is not really Sony's fault but rather Google's but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth…
It's so much better than the "Smart" Samsung TV it is plugged into that it's not even funny.
The remote control has touch. I can use my phone to type text input. It's fast. It's elegant and slick. It has no ads. It has options that I care about. It doesn't waste my time with options I don't care about.
The Samsung TV on the other hand was a flagship model. Top of the line. Best of the best. Just a few years ago.
Now? It is unusable. It is beyond slow. Two to three second response time. Text input is just torture. Netflix crashes. YouTube mangles HDR in some weird way that makes people look like they were drawn by a kid with crayons.
It's shocking to me that you can pay thousands of dollars to Samsung and have them destroy your investment with "updates", whereas you can pay a few hundred dollars to Apple and have a slick product that improves over time.
What I don't understand is the executives at other companies. Companies that aren't the #1 biggest in the world. How do they not get it!? Just copy Apple! Stop fucking over your customers, and maybe they'll give you more money! I know I give Apple more money every year!
There is one thing Apple TV has so backwards that I can't even.
Text input.
All the letters lined alphabetically with only left-right movement allowed. Takes ages to input anything.
Also no corrections allowed.
I actually exit appleTV and use the built in TV apps for when I need youtube and the like, because their input mechanism is not insane.
I know there is a remote app for iPhones, but you do provide an actual remote, make it work ffs.
This is a company supposedly famous for great user interfaces and usability. Why not try to live up to it?
There are actually many times I don't have my phone with me while watching TV. I carry it with me everywhere all day, but I try to keep it on the table most of the time when at home.
Why can't they just fix their user interface?
Nobody in the world I have talked to thinks this is the best choice of interfaces.
I don't need a dedicated TV keyboard. As I said, I work around it by using the TV apps, but it's annoying, and the most annoying part is that it's probably annoying on purpose to get people more on their phone.
I don't think it is on purpose to get people on their phone. Most people just don't use the keyboard much, I would guess. I never do, except for signing up for new apps.
So I would agree with their design decision: make an elegant remote, use voice dictation for search and the like, if you need a keyboard, use your iPhone, and if you are not happy with that, get a dedicated keyboard. If you are not happy with THAT, well ...
I am spending way more energy on this thread than is healthy :D
But I can understand where you're coming from, I am just very frustrated that this user-interface-design-genius trillion dollar company can not change the input mechanism of one of their most used product from the:
a b c d e [f] g h i j k etc... Backspace
model with only <-> movement and no way to make an input correction other than backspace, to something like:
a b c d Backspace
e f [g] h forward
i j k l backward
m n o p
Which is the way almost all other TV-centered apps I use function and works much better.
I doubt it's annoying on purpose to get more people on the phone. I could be wrong about that, but that's not usually the way Apple's particular kind of hubris tends to manifest. There's almost certainly people at the company -- and it only takes one or two in the right places -- who like the current UI for text selection, and would probably explain why they think so. Now, they may literally be the same people who think the Apple TV remote is good in the first place, so I want to make it clear I'm not saying they're right. :)
And, Apple should be better at UI design than this. They were once, and not that long ago, but I think the UI team they've had for the last, oh, let's say seven or eight years -- going back semi-arbitrarily to iOS 7, but steadily infecting all other platforms -- have prioritized aesthetics over usability.
Except it doesn't. Maybe it works in English speaking countries watching only English titles. But in the other 90% of the bi-lingual world it doesn't. Set it to non-English (e.g. Dutch) and you cannot dictate English titles, or the other way around. Very annoying and frustrating.
Just FYI the remote app is baked into iOS. Whenever there's text input on the AppleTV the iPhone will show a notification in the drawer that can be used for text input. It's very convenient and works well.
Good thing to point out and the Remote app is worlds better than the hardware remote, but...not everyone that buys an AppleTV owns an iPhone. When I watch TV, I want to leave my phone on the desk. But most of all, Apple can make the fucking remote UI work properly rather than rely on me having a $400 device lying around. Especially if Apple is going to make me use that crap piece of hardware they call a "remote".
I assume they made the letters one row because of how sensitive the touch pad is on the remote. For example, when picking a show on Netflix I constantly go down a row when I am just trying to go right on a column. I assume keeping the letters on one axis is a not so great work around.
Very strangely enough, the original 2D keyboard still exists in the OS. If you have one of those old silver Apple remotes from the Apple TV 1/2/3, clicking anywhere replaces the crappy long keyboard with the nicer grid one. Very bizarre Easter egg
If they had a 2D text input they wouldn't be able to do momentum in swiping as well as horizontal (side effect of the horrible remote), but more importantly, the primary text input on Apple TV is voice, in the moment just hold the Siri button. It takes in letters over voice too. Worlds faster than any other input on tv. No wonder they prioritized on it.
Yes, and my 2019 model recently started showing this:
>Support for the Ambient mode Headlines Service is scheduled to end on September 30, 2020. We thank you for using the service and we look forward to providing an improved alternative in the near future
I'm not going to buy a new TV every year. "Smart" features that are discontinued after ~1 year are worse than worthless, it's just clutter in the menus at this point.
Also crazy are hardcoded "Netflix", "Rakuten" and "Amazon" buttons on the Samsung remote, you just know that they will stop working at some point.
Those extra buttons are requirement by those companies, to integrate those services in the TV.
Now you could argue as to whether you want Netflix preinstalled on your TV, but while most smart features of smart TVs are useless, having Netflix is useful for many users.
I have a bunch of aTVs, and while they’re the best boxes I’ve used, there’s definitely some ads baked in, and in prominent placements.
- The TV app started out as a directory + recommendation engine for services you had “connected” to the app; it’s turned into a series of pitches for Apple TV+ and Apple’s “Channels” feature. These placements are below-the-fold, but the default behavior has the “TV” button on the remote bring up that app (although you can change this to display the home screen).
- In the top banner, the TV & Music apps will (by default) auto-play trailers and music videos (on mute). You can disable that behavior for the TV app, and it’ll revert to displaying your watch queue.
I have ads on my Apple TV, don't you? Some movie trailers running in the background that I really don't want to see. And every time I miss-swipe somehow the Apple TV remote in an application, I get to that "home" screen watching another movie trailer :|
No. I don't use the "TV" app though, so that may be the difference.
Unless you mean trailers for whatever the cursor is on, inside of an app like Netflix? If so, some of those can be disabled, but I actually like them—they're "ads" for content that I already have access to but may not have known about otherwise.
Smart TV manufacturers are relying on the ongoing revenue from their software side nowadays, so they’ll usually mandate setting up an internet connection as part of the device setup process, and then only give you the option to change networks instead of disabling it outright.
If you’re tech savvy, you can take measures against this, but it’s not going to be simple for most folks.
You also have to worry about ethernet-over-HDMI unintentionally exposing the TV to the wider internet.
How "usually" is this, actually? I bought an LG TV about a year ago, and it did not force me to connect to the Internet. I just turned it on, skipped the crap, and it works fine over HDMI.
During guided setup, it will scan for wireless networks, but one option is always "I do not want to connect" where the TV continues in unconnected mode.
If anyone else is dealing with this you can try temporarily setting up a new SSID (on your phone or existing network) and then getting rid of it after setup is finished.
Those "ads" are not nearly as intrusive as the ones being displayed in the article, second I have found them to be mostly useful in that I've found a couple new shows because of those "ads".
Disabling them is also fairly easy, and if you don't use the TV app, they go away entirely.
Maybe not an economical choice but you can buy digital signage displays. They are typically more expensive but are built for maximum durability and don't include consumer features like streaming.
I bought an LG OLED Wallpaper signage display; it wasn't cheap, or easy to get, but it makes a fantastic TV, with no "apps" or "ads", just one HDMI input for an Apple TV (which I run through a Denon HEOS A/V receiver). 1080p, not 4K, but I'm 55 and couldn't see those pixels from 10 feet anyway ツ It doesn't have CEC, but it does wake on signal. Well worth the cost and trouble.
A lot of them have RJ45 and RS232 ports and you can send commands through them to make some DIY CEC. You'd need to do some hacking and I don't know if they have public APIs, but it's possible.
They're not hard to find. Just search for "signage display". They sell on Amazon, Newegg, B&H, CDW. There's a lot of niche manufacturers, but LG and Samsung are probably the two biggest producers. One other warning, these are frequently built with sturdy casing and can be heavy and they typically sell without any mounting hardware although they can accept any VESA stand.
Or my preference is a Chromecast, whatever TV you like. Then you don't have to deal with Apple's UX or Google's. At that point your phone is the remote.
I tried that, but didn't like how the Chromecast phoned home all the time to make sure I was authorized to play the phone was also authorized to be played on a TV. I was surprised that some apps specifically disallowed this.
I ended up with an AppleTV. So far, if it plays on my phone, it will play on the TV, too.
> Subscriptions in a snap makes it easier for you to watch a must-see show from an app that you haven't subscribed to.
Honestly, that's the thing I hate most about the Fire Stick, and why I don't use it's discovery feature at all... I don't want to see promotions for 4,000 services I don't subscribe to. Sure, if I search for a specific show, I don't mind results from those services ... but as general adverts for shows? No thank you.
I keep hoping someone will file a class action over this. These dumbfuck ads just appeared one day on my Bravia X900E, about a year after purchase. I didn't opt in to this and I wouldn't have bought the damn thing if this "feature" existed at the time. Sign me up for the class!
"Ethical decisons" from a company made out of thousands of individuals caught up in the rat race is a bit much to expect.
For users it doesn't really matter why an annoying feature hasn't been implemented, they don't have a say in that anyway. Most likely Sony is just lagging behind a few months or years in that regard. Enjoy while it lasts ;)
Totally agree, my Bravia was worth every (numerous) penny. I do update to get features like Airplay, but have never seen an ad. The $400 Samsung in my bedroom, however, starts streaming an ad-laden TV Guide equivalent automatically when I turn it on. Beyond awful.
Worth noting that Sony also produces Android TVs AFAIK which I guess have the same prob. My older Bravia doesn't, but then isn't all that smart ;) and the lcd technology is outdated.
Mine is an Android OLED model from 2019 — I guess it’s more correct to say I haven’t _noticed_ an ad. I use my Apple TV exclusively for “smart” functions, and the TV wakes up and goes to the correct input whenever a connected device wakes. I never see the Android TV home. It’s still a far cry from the Samsung.
> I use my Apple TV exclusively for “smart” functions
That's the difference then. I have a Bravia and use the Android TV functionality. It started showing ads on the home screen earlier this year and I can't figure out a way to disable them and still be able to use the apps I actually want to use. If the ads had been there on day one, I would have been tempted to return the TV.
I have a Sony Android TV from the 2015 generation.
It always had a row to advertise random app I don't use (Netflix, Playstation Video, Disney something etc...)
It also always advertise content from those platform, you have to disable "recommendations" from apps one after one as you can only disable recommendations for an app that pushed its crap at least once.
The last update also broke hardware video decoding for a whole range of h264 videos as well as pushing some kind of weird 3rd party that seems to be something that basically monitor everything you do with your TV. It was advertised as a feature to access the TV guide.
My next TV will not be a so-called "smart" TV and not certainly not a Sony.
What TV’s fall into the “dumb” category these days? I can’t go back from OLED and I don’t think anything at that price point will lack the “smart” features, unless it’s a commercial offering.
You can install it without an account, plug in an antenna and go to town. You can even connect it to wifi then use Youtube or Netflix. Haven't seen any funky ads.
My only peeve is that the controller doesn't have a full number pad which makes it a little derpy for the older generation.
My only annoyance with TCL is that once you connect it to the internet, and then disconnect it, the activity light (a quite bright, white light on mine) will flash constantly. Forever.
Solvable by tape, but doing that blocks the IR sensor.
I also went the tape route for that reason; haven't really noticed an issue with the IR sensor. Ended up configuring a firewall rule via OpenWRT that keeps it working on the LAN but not the WAN, so I can still use my phone as a remote with RoMote or the official app, and it's offline (still will blink though, hence the tape).
Nice thing about OpenWRT is being able to block homescreen ads when the TV is online with the adblock package since DNS filtering will do the trick fortunately.
You can take off the back plastic with a screw driver and disconnect the light if you want. Modern TVs are actually pretty modular. You can unhook the roku board, the t-con board, the speakers and multiple other things pretty easily. They are just wires with plastic clip connectors, a lot like a PC.
This is not a rationalization for garbage design, but at least it isn't as much of a black box as people might think.
I found this list of TVs that have ads or not[0], and the first item in the list with ads was a TCL Roku, accompanied with a screenshot of a Home Screen background ad[1]
I actively avoided a Samsung TV for this reason a few years ago. They weren't even cheap for their capability level compared to their competitors given they included ads and the other TVs didn't. You could get equivalent TVs for the same price without the ads, I am not remotely seeing the value to a purchaser.
I scream with laughter because most Samsung TVs are sold at MSRP which is 50% more than the competition and you see moron tv buyers going bananas for a trivial discount which makes them 35% more than the competition!
> If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it
Just don't connect it to the Internet.
The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.
Then I'll start selling a little $50 box to emulate internet and route all update / advertisement requests to /dev/null :)
Or maybe we (the tech community) just agree on one model and produce an open source firmware. If you look at MagicLantern for Canon, you'll see how amazingly far people will go to control their hardware.
As an older comment mention, they can easily add an delay that makes it work without an connection only for the duration in which an return is possible.
I agree with you it's hard to win against hostile design but there are options for now.
If it stops working after return period I call under warranty that it stopped working (2 years), they are forced to fix the issue.
Explain the issue, explain you cannot connect to the internet.
If it doesn't work, forward the whole info to the customer protection bureau if you're in the EU.
Edit: I will test this out by setting a date far in the future when I buy new equipment (will also hopefully cause SSL failures due to expired certificates internally in the firmware)
It is called a monitor. Works just fine for whatever and people use it for work.
The factory I work at had large one scattered around to show line information. Some of the information is safety critical and so if it is inyeruped with an ad there will be legal issues.
Oh no, you'll pay the subscription AND you'll get ads. That's what Amazon Prime feels like atm, preroll ads for other shows at the start of everything you play (even next episodes).
I've wondered about this. The TV I have (a Sony Bravia) is now almost a decade old (works fine). We got it specifically because it has a slot for a DVB-T module (terrestrial broadcast). DVB-T is now gone (replaced by DVB-T2, but I doubt this will remain in the air long), so we have no broadcast TV now, only our HTPC connected to it with Netflix, local media files, and a browser.
Frankly, we don't miss the TV channels. Streaming works okayish for the public channels, but we rarely bother.
The TV is just a dumb screen connected to a receiver, which has the HTPC as input as well as record player.
So the only thing a 'TV' offers me is its screen. Is that any different from a high end computer monitor these days? Is there a difference based on the viewing distance perhaps?
Historically monitors has better pictures at the expense that you couldn't look at them off angle, while TVs you could look at from anywhere in the room. I think that is gone today but it might be something that comes up again... Though in the safety critical application I brought up off-angle viewing is a requirement.
Another difference between a typical TV screen and a typical monitor is many TVs will dynamically adjust brightness depending on what's displayed, and maybe other factors. Sometimes this is on by default and you can turn it off in a menu, but I've met TVs where you can't turn it off.
Using a TV which adjusts the brightness depending on what's displayed can be very unpleasant when trying to do computer work on it. E.g. opening or closing a window may cause other windows to abruptly change brightness. Scrolling through a document may cause the brightness to vary.
> The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.
We're closer to that than you think. My Philips Ambilight television (purchased this year) throws a popup every few weeks already complaining that I've not completed setup and connected it to the internet.
As sold as I am on Ambilight (it is actually brilliant), I wont be buying another Philips television.
I should see what happens with my Philips TV if I block it from accessing the Internet. It's currently plugged in because it's also connected to my Hue lights but I don't really ever use any Internet features on it.
I’ve said it in the past: commercial displays are the new “dumb” displays. Unfortunately, they’re not full TVs — no speakers, no tuner — so they’re not as “idiot” friendly as a regular TV while being more expensive.
Got any recommendations for a good 4K panel in the 40" - 60" range that won't break the bank? I have my own speakers and I can buy an external tuner if I need one
Also https://nextdns.io/ on the cloud. I run my ios devices with no ads thanks to this honest service.
Can i modify the DNS resolver on a samsung tv (i do not intend to have one ever)
Yes, this happens. But then you make a firewall rule to route outbound port 53 traffic that doesn’t come from the Pihole to go back to the Pihole.
It gets rather elaborate.
> you can but if it cant resolve it will fallback to googles resolver automatically. At least this is what happened on my model.
I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns server configured via my DHCP. Letting pi-hole block the requests helps prevent errors from dns request timeouts.
I set my router dns to use the custom values nextdns provides for my account, which enabled it for the entire residence. It was fun to see the flotsam in the nextdns logs. I love this service.
Ads on my Samsung TV is the entire reason I decided to finally pi-hole my entire home network. It's wonderful. No ads on my TV and much less on my tablet, phone and PC. Too bad pi-hole doesn't stop Youtube ads.
The only complaint is from my wife who sometimes Googles stuff and clicks on the top result, which is often an ad and will end up blocked. She now has to scroll down a bit to the real results.
It does exactly what you would hope, at least for Samsung TVs. Ads disappear, other functions are not affected.
Upon discovering the ads I was gonna return mine for a comparable LG, until I learned LG also have ads—at least this way I can pretend I'm not being taken for a ride.
At the time I didn't have any external devices capable of 4K Netflix or YouTube; now I do I should factory reset the TV and set it up without network access,
The NVIDIA Shield TV, which runs Android TV, can no longer be initialized without signing in with a Google account, the setup screen will refuse to get past that step, even if you don't have an internet connection.
The forced login is likely illegal, because there is no mention of a requirement for a Google account in their marketing materials or on their sales pages.
The device stays perfectly functional if the the network connection is cut off within seconds after signing in, and the account can be removed after the setup is complete. The only drawback is that you can't update apps from Google Play, unless you add a Google account again.
That doesn't sound right. You do need an iCloud account to enable some functionality, for example to enable seamlessly switching AirPods between different Apple devices.
Sounds like you picked up the SE used and it had an activation lock. One of the more annoying things Apple has done was to take down the page for checking that before purchase.
That or you put in an iCloud account at some point but it did not get removed successfully.
Okay, good call, they merged this into "forgot password or don't have one". It still tries to talk you out of it with a pop up with a highlighted button of "sign up now".
Dark patterns... I can see why the older generation is scared of the hardware.
JVC does this for their video projector (which are also pretty damn good). I've seen people complain about that though so not sure how long that'll last.
Market opportunities are for companies to make more money, not less. If everyone is doing it, it’s because the market, us, told them they could get away with it, and therefore will, because two revenue streams will always be better than one.
This power of the market to vote with dollars is highly overstated. "We" have no say in a hypothetical nine figure, back room wine and dine deal between ad execs and TV execs, when the ad money can afford to be in every back room.
Commercial TVs (and video/signage displays, if you don't actually care about the TV tuner) are out there from most of the major brands including Samsung, but they tend to cost a fair bit more than the equivalent consumer TV.
Can't you just yank the internet connection afterwards?
I did a firmware upgrade and just disconnected from the internet right after. I also don't use the built in apps, because let's be honest, compared to an AppleTV, all SmartTV apps are basically garbage. I understand that the AppleTV is somewhat expensive, but it's my baseline for the quality I'd expect from a SmartTV.
Netflix on the AppleTV, starts instantly, and you're browsing the content endlessly after 20 sec. Start Netflix on the TV it self, that will take a few minutes.
On mine I was able to do an offline firmware update by loading the new firmware onto USB flash drive. Was hoping the new firmware would fix a bug in the built-in video player, but it didn't.
This is not the solution. Adding a PiHole to your network is not the solution. Disabling features in other places of your network is not the solution.
What if Samsung decides that it will try to connect to open networks for updates or what not? What then? Ask your neighbour to install PiHole on his network? No. This is an example of a game of cat and mouse that shouldn't exist - you pay money for a TV and that's not enough? You giving them your money is not enough and so they decide to shove ads down your throat because profits.
All starts with us accepting the idea that the device you paid for still isn't your property, and if tomorrow samsung decides to show porn on all samsung TV's, there is nothing you can do.
I’m concerned that in the future devices I do not want to be connected to the internet (let my TV) will come with 5g or some other technology and be able to connect itself. I think with IoT and a desire for ease of setup this might be possible if the price of mobile internet drops enough.
I think the always-on IoT thing actually makes sense for life-and-death fields such as automotive/medical. There are cases where if an update does not reach the device in time human lives could be at stake.
It's definitely not for the consumer's benefit in most cases. No one is going to die because your Smart Keurig or 5G-TV goes unpatched for a month. Hopefully we can avoid the slippery slope and realize that these devices' internet capabilities are not for us - they are primarily for data collection/advertising purposes.
> actually makes sense for life-and-death fields such as automotive/medical.
I cannot imagine a worse idea.
IoT devices are the richest source of hosts available for botnet operators to compromise because they are numerous and famously insecure. Today it's lightbulbs and security cameras. Tomorrow you wish it to be pacemakers and Toyotas?
We already know it is functionally impossible to write bug-free code which is also useful. We also know that attackers relentlessly probe systems until (that is a _when_, not an _if_) a weakness is found to exploit to gain control of that device. It is possible to write provably-correct code, but so far only for somewhat trivial applications.
Until this fundamental problem of software security can be solved, an air gap is the _only_ reliable thing that can protect life-critical software from external remote attack.
>I think the always-on IoT thing actually makes sense for life-and-death fields such as automotive/medical.
But critical components should be designed as simple as possible, and be thoroughly tested before device release. Releasing garbage and then patching it OTA doesn't really work for safety critical things. Not so long ago cars didn't have capability to upgrade (firmware on mask ROMs) and I don't think something horribly bad happened.
Disconnect may not be enough, best is to wire a resistor in place of the antenna, of the same resistance of the antenna, which will shed the attempt to use the antenna as heat.
(I disconnected the antenna on my OnStar, yet found it still connecting to cell towers successfully from time to time. The resister solved that.)
In practice, the samsung TV won't connect to your neighbors wifi if its already connected to yours. So you can firewall away and the TV will be none the wiser. For now, at least.
Maybe in about 10 years, or even sooner, when 5G is everywhere, and the IoT-chips are so cheap that it doesn't matter anymore, they are built into every appliance like in new cars now. Always connected by whatever means. What then?
Faraday cage?
I bought a used projector some time ago. Couldn't be happier. I usually watch something after it's dark and I also have very good blinds. It probably warms up in similar, or better, time that many TVs boot up nowadays. I just have a Chromecast connected to a soundbar connected to the projector. VLC handles Chromecast, although somewhat buggy, so I can watch things from my computer in another room.
Also Netflix experience with Chromecast is mostly superior to smart TVs, because it will not play anything while you just try to find something worth watching.
Connecting Chromecast to the soundbar also gives ability to listen to music from Youtube, without running display. It wastes bandwith however.
EDIT: I wrote "beamer" instead of "projector" at first
I run mine on it’s own network so at least it can’t spy on my NAS and network infrastructure. If it tried this ad nonsense I’d filter it through a pihole or something similar. I will not go down without a fight with these snooping gadgets.
not an option for some recent samsung TVs - if you don't connect the TV to a WiFi AP, the TV "grows up" and will try and connect to any open WiFi APs itself.
I actually ran into one of these recently. I stayed at an AirBnB which had a super-cheapy small-ish TCL+Roku TV in the living room, with a super-cheapy thin antenna thing. The internet was "acting up" (95% of packets dropped, unusable) so we tried to watch some broadcast TV. You had to either sign in with a Roku account, or as "Guest", but "Guest" had to accept a couple long EULA, and it needed internet for that to work, but the internet was fubar ... I had to use my phone as a hot-spot for the TV to get it to display broadcasts! That left the TV's wifi config such that it definitely won't work for the next person, lol ...
I would love to do this, but dumb TVs pretty much top out at the upper-mid range. If you want a high end panel you're getting all the bullshit too, unfortunately.
Look at "digital signage" TVs built for business are available that don't have the consumer software. They are of course more expensive and optimized more for continuous usage (16hr/day 7days/week for samsung), but as of now I don't believe they get ads pushed to them.
I don't own one, I looked into it the last time I purchased a TV and just couldn't justify the price over the sale price of a regular "smart" TV. The more feature rich digital signage (from Samsung at least) with HDR10+, HDMI CEC, etc. is much more expensive than a consumer TV, i think 3-4x. It didn't fit my valuation so I just have a normal Samsung TV with no networking configured.
I do digital signage as part of my job. We use Samsung TVs. They do work better, but they do run hotter. Much hotter. We use Yodeck Raspberry Pi players (4K) using HDMI, Ethernet. ADA now says TVs in public places have to be very close to the wall. This means that the players have to sit atop the TV, either in the small gap between the TV and wall or hook & loop to the TV. The older TVs (we replaced them this year) were OK. The new ones, because they run hotter, melted the glue off the back of the hook & loop and let the player slide down.
We were actually working on writing a scheduling system for the LG webOS ones for a time, I joked about taking one home with me.
If I'm not mistaken the LG ones were significantly more expensive than their consumer counterparts, but those Samsung ones don't seem all that much more expensive.
There are Samsung ones that are 4-5x more expensive with more features (HDR 10+, HDMI CEC, etc.) so its definitely important to make sure they have all the features you want. As with anything it may or may not fit your use-case
A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.
B: People don't like ads on their TV.
A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: No.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.
C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?
We're in the middle of transitioning from making decisions based on pure intuition to being purely logical and data-driven... I wonder if that's such a good idea.
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
There’s something rather extraordinary about this community, in particular, throwing a fit about advertising in products. This discussion has gone from “fuck that guy” — overlooking that almost every employer represented here has one and the larger employers have entire divisions of them — to “capitalism is bad” in three messages. That’s impressive. It’s almost as if the root cause of why these business models are horrible is slowly becoming more obvious to the people who engineer more clever ways to collect data and serve advertisements to enable those business models (or who work in a cost center orbiting such an organization).
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
Fairly sure HN has been complaining about this for years. We're not a hivemind; it's not even the case that most posters work for FAANG, ycombinator or even "startups" per se.
Hm. Maybe. Maybe capitalism in its current form is bad nonetheless? Or an exploiting sham? How do you explain companies like BlackRock, Inc. and similar being on the boards of almost any important corporation? Isn't that a conflict of interest?
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
Was this the essay you were referring to [1]? I think you’re bang on with this comparison. My dad and I have long complained how (for example) grocery stores seem to constantly cancel our favourite products. We know it’s not the manufacturer because the product is still on their website. My dad and I even have a term for the people in the head office who make the decision to phase out our favourite products: spreadsheet guys.
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
Number driven vs. people driven is how I usually delineate these things. I find myself strongly in the people driven camp and dealing with purely numbers driven people is highly frustrating.
Hmm. I feel like there's a spiritual connection between your spreadsheet guys and the apocryphal product expert at Campbell's Soups or wherever that tried to focus-test "the perfect soup" that would optimize sales. In the story, they realized that there's no one "perfect soup" and they had to create different varieties.
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
> Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket.
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
That's probably their thinking, but unless their aggregates include all of the other products that each customer who buys an item also buys (which it should, they have the data thanks to fly-buys schemes) they can't properly assess the overall impact of a given product.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
That's a fair point. But I'd imagine it's a multi-step process. Step 1: group products into families, like "milk" or "ketchup". Step 2: optimize shelf space with whatever rules you have applied to product families. Within a product family, pick the N best-selling products.
The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are: Having 8 kinds of lemon yogurt, each someone's favorite, while disposing of the products past the expiration date leads to either some of the highest prices in town, or closing down. Profitability in very small supermarket chains is small.
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
Supermarkets also need to stay open so they can sell you your beloved products, and you'd not believe how thin the margins of some supermarkets are
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
I worked in a store in the early 90s with the registers set up that way. It is so much more efficient to pick directly from a cart so you can plan the best sequence of items for bagging. The IBM scanners of the era were much faster and more reliable than today's garbage. You could blast through, pulling items out with the right hand, tossing into the left, and blind scanning while reaching for the next item.
Seems to be a common thread in the past 20 years. The ergonomics of the product is garbage now. Partly because more compute is put into them, and with it comes bloated software that seems to be written by people who don't understand that their avoidance of "premature optimization" is just stealing people's lives by making the work go slower.
Where I live we are behind that point now, as in everything is OK and working fast again. Though sometimes it happens that when a cashier opens a new line, and the POS-thing boots for the first time that day, showing some update process running under Windows and makes my day, because I can't stop giggling.
Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.
Some technologies would be better off not existing, but I think the root problem is just unrestricted market competition. Without something to keep the bottom from falling out (<cough> <cough> regulations), a competitive market is a fearsome optimization force. It will suck out all joy and happiness from any activity, as everyone gets increasingly more creative and willing to sacrifice to squeeze out just a little more marginal profit, for however brief a moment before the competitors catch up.
Those optimizations make it possible for prices to keep dropping, for food to be very cheap and plentiful. Global hunger has dropped to an all time low, since 1950 or so, because of that.
Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.
Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.
And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.
There is more than one factor to consider. Food is already way past being cheap and plentiful. Further optimizations go into enabling variety. Meanwhile, some prices are way too low, which is a serious problem in the climate crisis. What's the point of dining on a dirt cheap meat and 15 different flavors of the same yogurt today, only for our grandchildren to starve on a devastated planet?
I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.
I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.
There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.
Maybe independent grocery stores are the wrong model for a globally connected world? It's not that they are the producers of anything they offer, even if branded as such.
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
There's a chain of supermarkets around here that are the size of a Super Walmart, but all groceries. They carry for example 15 flavors or more of PopTarts, just to give one example. And they have low prices, and have seemed to figure it out (they were even apparently mostly immune from the TP shortages earlier this summer). I wonder how they manage, yet other chains don't (not that they have a lot of stores in their chain, they are spread out to no more than 1 or 2 stores in any county).
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
It's called Woodman's Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodman%27s_Markets. Mostly in souteastern Wisconsin, and some in northeastern Illinois. My favorite part of it is the fact that you don't have to take the food out of your cart, put it on the belt, then take the bagged groceries and put it back in your cart again. The front of the cart flips down, and it gets pulled up in front of the cashier who can either bag it after ringing up the items, or typically there is a dedicated bagger.
It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.
Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).
Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.
Am I missing something, I thought big grocery stores where the normal in the states. the Krogers all around us is so big they actually started carrying clothes shoes and outpacing Walmart.
That's exactly me! The reason I know that everyone else has bad taste is because all of my favourite products end up failing in the marketplace and getting pulled off the shelves.
oh god, I just broke my last xperia compact that stayed with me for years(x compact) and it's impossible to find something small again, not even getting into android updates and a cleanish android experience.
well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
Damn, am I a harbinger customer? I loved my Motorola Droid, Droid 4, and Droid Turbo, none of which saw nearly the success of the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies.
I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
So long as a human remains in the loop somewhere no decision is "purely logical and data-driven", although you make a good point about the risks of chasing efficiency over all else
in what world is removing poison to an acceptable level unreasonable? If the process is complicated and convoluted, but people don't die, then that seems reasonable to me.
I think he meant that the process wasn't explained as 'removing poison' but as 'this is how we do things' or 'it's to appease the spirits'. If the poison was something that's slowly acting (years) 'rational' way that would remove 'superstitions' would poison everyone.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
It would be more correct to say that today, decisions are being based on increasing short term gain. I think that's the issue more so than transitioning decision making to be based on logic and data and also supports your conclusion about the economy better.
I suspect that a large part of this ad- and marketing-driven economy is based on this.
The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.
Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).
The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.
I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).
Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.
> The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product
"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"
I think this is also the psychology behind those pop-up like/share button bars at the bottom of web pages, that on mobile just so happen to sit exactly where your navigation bar hides, and if you tap one pixel too high you hit the share button instead of pulling up the navigation bar.
The best method I've found to increase positive engagement is actually to just have a fake 'x' such that clicking it just triggers the ad. I've noticed this more frequently on the web nowadays, and based on the click through rates, the target demographic is absolutely _obsessed_ over this feature.
Don't get me started on dialog boxes that put the "cancel" button on the wrong side. Much like toilet paper, there is one way to display it, all other methods are heresy worthy of nothing less than immediate exterminatus.
But there isn't only one way to order it. Some OS' (I forgot which) had convention dictate that the positive confirmation button was in the rightmost corner, with other lesser buttons to the left. In this order, "Cancel" appears first, but further from the corner.
Apps which lay their buttons out contrary to the conventions of their platform are evil. Apps which randomize the positions of their buttons are unspeakably worse.
If you have cats, the 'proper way' to hang the TP is the opposite way of what you absolutists think is the One True Way.
I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.
Cats are the devil, and I have reasons to believe they've recently entered into an alliance with the human infant community.
I begun suspecting that one day when my wife was preparing dinner. Soon after she took the meat from the fridge to work on it, our baby started crying and making noise for absolutely no reason. My wife immediately dropped everything and went to investigate, and the cat used this opportunity to attempt to steal our dinner meat.
Ever since, I've been noticing many more cases where the baby and the cat are either simultaneously attempting to do things they're not allowed to, or the baby starts distracting us while the cat goes out to carry out some mischief. It's all coordinated too well to be happenstance.
My friend had a pug like this once. Dog was as old as father time. Needed help making it outside to relieve himself before he finally left us. But I SWEAR that dog moved like greased lightning if you left a plate on the table to go check on the kid, as he'd make it from one side of the living room to another in the time it took you to take three steps and check in on the other room, hop up on a chair and your dinner very rapidly became his dinner.
I thought our cats were generally stupid because they could never do the jigsaws I assigned to them, solve a Rubiks cube or see 2cm in front of their faces (they are long-sighted).
But I have come to believe they are far smarter than me, particularly with scheming methods of sneaking around to quietly appear when they can get food. One used to push donut boxes off the side so that they would burst open, and would then run off with a donut. I have no idea why he wanted to eat donuts. He also tried to eat bread through the wrapper.
Or they fein illness. Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.
They're really clever, just not at jigsaws or sudoku.
>Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.
The problem is cats are really good at hiding pain - being physically able to jump doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable or painful for him.
We have a pair of very senior cats (18/19ish years old) and make sure the house has little staircases dotted around to make getting on to their regular lounging spots easier, as we noticed they prefer to use a step if something happened to be available - while they are still fairly mobile, I suspect they are developing some level of arthritis. Given they've been good companions for nearly two decades it's the least we can do to make sure they're comfortable.
This is a good point. Sadly our fluffy friend had to be put down due to FIP and I hope we made him as comfortable as possible during his life - we didn't take away his step anyway. I still miss him and it has been years.
I've seen a lot of clickbait pages where the next button shows up and 10 seconds later at the end of the page load there's reflow and then an ad is placed where the next button used to be! So you end up clicking through an add on every page unless you wait for a long and random amount of time!
There are a ton of dark patterns in web design about this.
- same color background
- in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake
- I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just opens the ad
- Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad
- I don't remember what company did this, but they would pop the ad and after three seconds, it would reload, all but a few pixels higher so when you're in the process of closing the window, it would reload and then you'd open the ad by mistake because the "X" is in the wrong place now.
I've seen a lot more devious stuff but the sad thing is, I have decent vision. How do these dark patterns affect people who have impaired vision or other issues with their vision? How infuriating it is it for them to deal with this BS? I can't imagine.
An overlay that covers the whole area opening an add onClick. After some time the overlay is added again (incredibly annoying for video players you might want to pause)
If your ad blocker can't deal with these, set z-index on the main content with a userstyle, so it stays on top. Then you might also want to use a css style to just make everything else invisible:
The god damned cookie consent popups do this. The "Decline" buttons are small and grey, the "Accept all and save" are big and green. They'd show empty checkboxes/iOS-style sliders at the off position that show that you won't be getting non-essential cookies, of course when you click "Accept all" these settings get overridden.
Not only an ad problem, but the sliders reminded me of a really bad UI feature I see everywhere: ambiguous highlighting when there are only two options.
I find some of the sliders for on/off are impossible to read. You can't work out what is on or off.
Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...
My dad is colorblind, and the red off/green on looks the same to him; the slight shadow showing the side the toggle is on often isn't dark enough to be obvious, especially when someone gets cute and makes the slider pill-style (the button part takes up exactly half the space, with a vertical line down the middle). I expect this to be less common with mobile OS downtime features that encourage users to get off their screens by going grayscale.
What kills me is that the only app that I actually engage with ads is an app that has a voluntary button to see ads to support the developer. You click the 'watch ad' button, you watch a 15 second ad, or see a banner ad, and then return to the app when you close the screen.
The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).
More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.
Actually the minimum number of pixels to render a close box is three times the number of close boxes (ie. 3x3 for 1 close box). Any fewer pixels will not allow a functional close box to be reconstructed. This is referered to as the 'Nah-quist limit'.
For the moment, running a Pi-hole in the cloud and pointing your mobile devices to it works. As you say, how long? When the adholes start doing ads as part of the content, this may break, but I'm sure the Cold War between the adholes and the blockers will heat up. There is always a way. God bless all the creative programmers who help to keep this crap at bay.
Just this week I had an ad popup with no button. Before I gave up and left the site I tried clicking where the button was supposed to be. Sure enough it worked.
Of course now I'm part of the problem, because some asshole has a graph that shows that (a suspiciously small fraction of) users are able to opt-out so there's no legal liability for having the ads that way.
The truth is noone buys anything from any ads... however brand awareness is a real thing. If you see a fancy ad from a company, they must be a profitable company that has a great product so you might be inclined to buy it or suggest it next time you're looking for this category of products.
- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.
- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.
I wonder how true the old saying about all publicity being good publicity really is any more. I can't speak for anyone else, but as I've become older, I've also become much less tolerant of unwanted interruptions and distractions. I don't mind a relevant ad that is tastefully integrated into whatever I'm looking at or listening to, but the patterns of behaviour I've developed online or when watching TV or listening to radio are definitely geared to minimising interruptions and disrupting the kinds of security- and privacy-threatening tracking that supports the big ad networks. Pushy ads that manage to break through tend to result in instant closing of browser, changing of channel, etc. so definitely aren't doing the host site/channel any favours, and they tend to leave a bad impression of whoever was advertising if they leave any impression at all.
The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.
That's who i bought a Panasonic. They cost more but don't have a shitty track record. In fact, my washing machine was the last Samsung here. It broke and got replaced by a German machine. These days I try to avoid the cheapest offering and try to buy quality instead. Upfront cost is higher but I really value my time too much to bother fighting with nonsense like ads on my tv.
I have a Panasonic TV too. Back like 8 years ago, it had an unremoveable ad/app square in it's app menu. Of course, they let me reorganize the apps, and I put it way back on a screen I'd never see, and I haven't noticed it since.
Also, as a side note, Vudu is like the one app from that era that still works.
Does your Panasonic stop loading any smart apps if their servers go down too? Mine refused to load anything (eg. Netflix) if it can't get in touch with Panasonic.
Check what network activity it is engaging in. You'll be disappointed, I am sure. Seems dialling home is the new thing to do on every single device these days. Data vacuuming the entire human population just because they can.
I agree, if we have to have ads for whatever reason, do it in an unobtrusive way that the user is asked about during setup. Now the ads in lg's smart home app are a different matter...
Just disconnect it from your network (change the wifi password or remove the Ethernet cable) and it will be unable to auto-update.
You may want to get an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, or other media server) and plug that into your HDMI if you use the network from apps on the TV.
What can the apps on your TV do that a $40 Amazon Fire stick ($50 if you want 4K) can't?
I'd rather hook up an old laptop to my TV and use that to watch media than use the apps on my TV and deal with all the bullshit that TV manufacturers are doing when you connect the TV to the network.
Just wait 'til they get a blanket connection to Amazon Sidewalk for their nefarious deeds, and the only way to disable it will involve a soldering iron.
On my old Samsung TV, if I inadvertently push the "Smart Hub" button in the center of the remote, the bottom 20% of the screen gets overlaid with what looks similar to a MacOS Dock with the default apps from 2012. Worked OK in 2012 when I bought it and used Netflix a few times, but a month later I bough the original Google Chromecast, plugged that into HDMI 1, unplugged the Ethernet cable, and never intentionally pushed the Smart Hub button again.
I didn't push it again because in about 2015 I found that if you push it, it locks up for exactly 30s, which is how long it takes to hit the network timeout and say "Updates are available for your Samsung Smart TV." and then allow you to use the ancient web browser or Netflix or other smart apps. I did try a couple years ago, on a whim, but apparently the update servers have moved and even when plugged into Ethernet it can't actually update.
Everything currently runs through the Roku, the Blu-ray player, or a component-to-HDMI dongle for the Wii, but if I didn't have the Roku I'd have a motivation to update so that Netflix would work without a 30-second delay (and I'd be unsurprised if Netflix wasn't backwards compatible with their 2012 client from a Samsung TV). However, the picture is fine, so it keeps on chugging.
While I love my LG tvs, they have had ads on their smart tvs for nearly a decade.
The difference from Samsung is that the ads on the LGs are in the same place they've always been (on the smart tv menu overlay), they've never been obtrusive, and they're always in some way connected to video content (usually VOD movies that you can purchase through one of the streaming apps, or adds for streaming apps you can install on the TV).
I'm extremely happy with my HiSense - it runs Roku, so the "smart" stuff is actually maintained by a company that does a pretty good job of it. The only thing you could call ads are promos for shows. I think their revenue is kickbacks from subscriptions people get through Roku, rather than direct advertising.
My old LG "smart" TV would send a web request to LG every time I pressed ANY button on the remote control.
I took that stupid TV off the network as soon as I could.
I think the manufacturers are all as bad as each other. My current Panasonic TV will refuse to load any of the "smart" apps (even Netflix) if it cannot reach Panasonic's servers, which means the entire TV becomes useless as an Internet device (no Netflix or ANY streaming services) if Panasonic has a server issue (which they sometimes do).
Honestly, there are plenty of complaints about LG around, and I wouldn't trust Sony on about anything...
I have a Philips smart TV, so far it has no ads and just mildly annoying bugs, nothing really disruptive. But mine is an old model, it looks like the new ones aren't like that anymore.
A few years ago I brought some TVs to use as monitors because they were much better fit than the actual thing. Now it looks like the trends reversed, and I'll have to start buying monitors to use as TVs. Is there a good TV receptor that I can plug in a Raspberry Pi?
I mostyly agree, however i recently clicked on a beef jerky ad on instagram and bought a pack, but that is one purchase over the course of 20+ years of seeing online adds, so I think your point still stands.
OT question, but what the heck is a keto cereal? i tought keto means no/low carb. and I mean everything in cereals has carbs. I mean classic cereals use tons of oatmeal, fruits, differnt types of wheat, joghurt, etc.. like everything with carbs?! so basically the bread and butter ingrident of cereals is oatmeal which has like >60% carbs with other types of carbs?!
> looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money
Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them
It's incredibly sad that it's even possible to bid for the top spot above a competitors trademark. The worst blow to the health of the web was likely google's merger with doubleclick.net.
Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.
Not the original commenter, but before Google fully pivoted to their present focus on monetizing search, the results were often strikingly useful, even for obscure searches. DuckDuckGo can’t (yet) replicate this now-lost magic.
> looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money
There are a few good reasons to do this:
1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.
2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.
> (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money)
Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.
If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.
This happened today to me. I searched for the “DigiD” app which is the 2FA app for your social services account with the Dutch government. The app was the second app. Even though it matched fully on the query. The first app was some other document scanning app from some vendor. I can imagine someone paying less intention would install the wrong app.
I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...
The ad/marketing driven economy is based on something simpler: consumers don't have any money, but corporations do. So you don't sell to consumers. You sell stuff at break even or a loss or even give it away to consumers and then sell the consumers to those who actually will pay.
The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.
You're right about most of it, but companies by AdWords on their own brand name so that competitors won't get that spot. Basically, the first 2 results listed by Google are paid ads. So if they don't buy AdWords for their own brand the top 2 displayed results could be any similar item. So that case isn't about increased conversion, it's about not letting competitors snipe their sales by offering a lower price for a comparable item even when searching by brand name.
I worked on a very popular free desktop product (BitTorrent/uTorrent) when a major revenue stream was the bundling of crapware in the install path, depending on people clicking the dialogs without reading them. I remember an executive announcing in a meeting that "search engine replacement" (reconfiguring your browser and/or system to a shadier alternative that made us money) was viable because the telemetry data showed that not very many people uninstalled in the 2-3 weeks after this was done to them, so, yay! another revenue stream people don't seem to totally hate! But they had read the tea leaves wrong and the backlash eventually caught up with them. It shows that reading mountains of data (100 million+ active monthly users) and reaching solid conclusions about user sentiment is a black art and numbers can be presented to show whatever point of view you want.
There is a sizable middle ground between "basic intuition" and "black art".
I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.
Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.
Yeah, the sizable middle ground is I believe what props up most of the adtech industry. The sizable middle ground is occupied by people with minimum understanding of statistics, who bullshit themselves and each other with data - but as long as nobody can obviously tell they're wasting money, they're all happy and the money keeps flowing.
>I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit.
The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.
> at least in the short term until the market adjusts
This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.
Well it's more like "people hate ads, but next time they buy a new TV, the ads will make our TV $10 cheaper than the other guy and they'll buy it anyway"
It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
I'll bet the difference that my $50 projector was way cheaper than whatever TV this is and it doesn't have ads (although it also doesn't seem to have working DPMS but that might just be my Xorg config.)
Airlines are controlled and limited by regulation to where its no longer "free" and you can't vote with your dollar cause you are a guarantee. There are very few airlines that offer more legroom and even then it's not comfortable. Same with telecoms. TV industry lacks competition in this regard as well but largely due to the centralized manufacturing. I also blame modern ip law as many of these companies have rediculous protections increasing cost of entry.
Isn't that because most of the people that fly multiple times a year aren't the ones paying for the tickets? Instead their company has policies on getting the cheaper flights. And people that fly for a vacation once every few years, they may not have enough experience flying to realize the benefit (or, if they do want a better experience, they go all the way to first class).
I don't if that's true for most air travel, but it's definitely true for my business travel. Corporate policy is the ticket has to be within a reasonable range of price (average price +/- some amount, not sure exactly). This means I can usually select between 2-3 airlines, 2 airports, and plenty of times, but I am always limited to basic economy without prior approval (which has been granted for international travel and if I need to be on a specific flight for some reason).
Back two jobs ago, we had international customers with somewhat high demand to ship our people all across the world on, sometimes on a moment's notice. I had to fly out 4 or 5 times in the span of two years, but some of my colleagues could do more than that in under a year. Somehow, the flights were almost always the cheapest airline available, and the cheapest seats available. The co-workers who flew frequently, including my boss, were all using the accumulating miles to bump themselves a class up.
> There are very few airlines that offer more legroom
United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...
AFAIK, most of those aren't available on domestic US flights. If you're flying internationally, it's almost always been possible to spend more to get more space and service, sometimes up to rather eye-watering levels, but flights within the US tend to be limited to economy and first class. (Some economy seats do have more leg room than others and carry a premium charge, but the OP may still be technically correct based on the "very few" condition.)
I'm not sure I see the connection you're trying to draw between your first two sentences. Airlines are regulated, but their price and service are much less regulated now than they were about 40 years ago. Their prices are much lower, as perhaps expected, and their service is much worse, as perhaps less expected than easily predicted if you're a realist rather than an optimist. The vast majority of airlines nickel-and-dime customers on domestic flights, making virtually everything they can from baggage to legroom to boarding time into for-pay options, because they learned that no matter what customers say, they shop on base price. Since deregulation, various airlines have tried to offer better seating, service, etc., as all-inclusive and more expensive tickets, and time after time, customers just click on the cheapest thing they find on Priceline.
tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.
When I fly I definitely pay more to avoid certain airlines. For instance, when flying to the US, I avoid any US-based airline, as they all always have noticeably worse service and seats, and will pay maybe 10-20% more to fly a EU or asian airline.
But, do people actually know that when they purchase? If it were clearly stated anywhere on the box/sales copy that "you will see ads on this device" while the other one says "we won't shove ads on your device" I would wager the $10 more would be a bargain to nearly everyone.
But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.
I’d have less of a problem with this if they went about it the way Amazon sells ads on their Kindle e-readers:
- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)
- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”
This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.
The "Special Offers" also have the advantage of being super unobtrusive, especially when the device is actually in use. That's not really the case here.
While it may not appear that way in the HN crowd, the number of users who actually jailbreak their devices is effectively zero when you're determining revenue models. Especially nowadays, when most of the features people care about have been implemented.
That depends on how easy it is to do the jailbreak. If you can package a self-contained solution, or provide simple to follow instructions, the word will spread, and a lot of people will be doing it.
When I was buying my Paperwhite, I just ordered the ad-free version from amazon (.com or .co.uk, don't remember which). And then a couple co-workers (agreed, computer people, but very much not the type that's into tinkering or cracking software) looked at me with surprise, because it turns out everyone does the "standard" route - order "special offers" from amazon.de, and save money while getting an ad-free Kindle, because AFAIR initially the special offers didn't even display in Poland, and when they did, apparently everyone knew how to jump some hoops to get rid of them.
In the Kindle case I did pay the extra for the advertising-free version and they happily advertise on it anyway, including push notifications in the middle of the night that make noise. Infuriating.
Amazon has offereed their Kindle devices with and without homescreen ad's at different price. I don't have the information on how many people chose the cheaper version with ads but I can say anecdotally that it what I went with.
Do Amazon tablets and phones still show adverts on the lock screen? They seemed to sell a lot of them despite this being a "feature" of them back when they first launched.
This is true, I expect to be shafted unwillingly and the manufacturers will face no accountability or be required to show any transparency for a long time. Consumers need information symmetry guarantees.
> It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.
If the flight-booking website offered a "sort by legroom", I'd click that. The trouble is there's no good way for me to know as a consumer which planes from which operators (and which affiliates) have which legroom, so it's not a meaningful choice I can make.
If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.
United had economy plus which was exactly the same plane with more legroom. It was nice the one time I got it (my boss wouldn't pay, but I got an upgrade... otherwise I rarely take flights longer than an hour so it isn't worth $20 or whatever the difference was)
US mainline carriers unbundled the legroom for folks that didn't want it.
The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).
I think it’s a different reason. These products are perceived as commodities and the expectations are rather low in the first place. So why wouldn’t you try to spend as little as possible on a commodity when you know it’s likely to be borderline shitty or at best barely adequate? I have this strategy when buying cheapo China made crap on eBay or aliexpress: I expect it to be low quality, not last, or not even fit the purpose because the specs are fiction so I try and find the cheapest of these widgets I can buy.
Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?
I think a better (less cynical) way of interpreting that is this:
Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.
This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.
Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.
We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.
I've met marketers and product people of both kinds. The cynical ones seemed to half hate their jobs, and justify the SOP clickbait as keeping up with the negative sum game they have to play. The less cynical ones seemed to be kind of detached from externalities, and described their marketing copy as "standard marketing puffery" to justify it to legal.
It took seemingly forever, but eventually we (mostly) got HN commenters to stop saying "LOL Betteridge's law of headlines!", along with a Wikipedia link as if we hadn't heard it a hundred times before, to every article. Hopefully we can get to that point with this stupid quote too.
I guess I don't read HN enough that I don't recall ever seeing it here, but a quick Google search confirms your impression: this quote has been super prolific on the site. I hope I at least reached a few readers who hadn't seen it before.
Absolutely. Can I have a few minutes before I come to your office in order to come up with a list of things I least like when I see an ad? This is a great opportunity to increase engagement from the likes of me by considering what improvement can be made in your ad campaign.
There's a practically throw-away line in Ready Player One where the Bad Guy says, "And research has found that we can cover 49% of the screen before our customers begin to experience seizures."
I think the reason is slightly different. I worked for a web company that made most of its money on ads. Companies have an army of marketing "specialists" whose job it is to find "incremental revenue". Their performance is rated on how much revenue they can add to the company. The possibility that it may cost users in the long run is not part of their calculus. I learned to hate meetings where someone mentioned "incremental revenue".
Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.
This is too real. I had discussions like this about a big fat cookie wall we needed to track users.
“Why do we need to track users?”
“To give them recommendations!”
“But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?”
“Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind”
“Where is the decline button?”
“...”
“There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!”
“Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”
If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.
"No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors." is absolutely how marketing turns evil. Basically taking advantage of people that don't know how to avoid ads, etc.
> This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet
Oh they have. Many times over. Two instances affected me[1][2] and that was enough to swear me off all Sony products for the last 10 years. Only now am I contemplating buying from Sony again (a PS5). I don't think any multinational company is above trading their customers needs for a few extra quid.
Not sure if it changed, but my 1-2 year old Sony with Android TV was fine with not being connected to the internet at all.
No idea if it's full of some sort of baked in ads because, after the initial setup, I've used it exclusively as... a TV. It turns on, shows me things I give it over HDMI, and turns off. I haven't actually seen the menu/apps/whatever after the first day.
It's not optimal, I'd rather it just be a dumb TV obviously, but in a sea of bad options it's been... fine.
I think the best way to fix this before it creates legs is to have a huge backslash.
They should feel social pressure to backpedal this stupid decision by hurting their marketing for fear to be known as the brand that has ADS in their television sets.
That rarely works. For each consumer that has the time and understanding to not buy the brand there is a thousand that are not aware. The way to go is lobbying for stronger regulations and to limit where Ads and recollection of data can be done.
Day after day we have more and more connected devices. Samsung is the tip of the iceberg, even if there was consumer backslash for one company the problem will still be there.
Ads are not shown, when the TV is asked to "reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it". And the TV is sold on its ability to show all sorts of things that are not just the signal passed to it. Like Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the menus related to those services.
The Ads are shown when the TV is asked to show its menu of applications and features.
Still not great, but not at all what you are implying.
The thing with TV panels is that they're essentially a commodity, right? Once every TV from a large brand becomes "smart", would the next logical step be for a small privacy-minded collective to go to an OEM and commission them to start making dumb TVs?
Usually I disagree about niche hardware in this way (for example, usual mentions about a similar approach for phones and laptops), but the dumb screen might just be dumb and cheap enough to make work at this limited scale?
In theory, that's how the free market should work; in practice, it's very hard for a new player on the market to get brand recognition and a share of the market.
It can be done, I think, but it has to be VERY well funded - you need to send salespeople / lobbyists to the various on- and offline shops selling TVs, you need "SEO experts" to try and beat the competition's "SEO experts" on the internet and e.g. Amazon's search results, and you need a legal team to help with the inevitable heap of lawsuits you'll get (patents, design infringement, etc). And then you'll have to deal with the competition pushing the prices of their devices below yours; Samsung can afford to sell TVs below market value for decades if need be, JUST to push out that shitty newcomer that does ad-free TVs, and they'll make money off of the ads + subscription services they offer in the meantime.
I mean, marketing's my background so I get that. But you see small brands like Pine64 and System76 doing it for specific types of (often generalised OEM, "off the shelf") hardware.
If they can pull it off for more sophisticated integrated solutions like phones, tablets and laptops, I'd have thought that a TV brand would be even easier.
Surely buying a commodity panel off of an existing OEM would negate a lot of the legal issues, and going DTC to the kinds of people who are specifically looking for a dumb TV is quite a decent niche to market to?
I feel like a pre-order or KickStarter type situation might work. Do a small batch initially, get good reviews, do another, larger batch next year, keep cycling until you have enough cash to maintain an inventory.
In practice, there are already people who need dumb screens - airlines, railways, offices, and so on. Those people will pay a premium to get "industrial grade" products, but it's not always an enormous premium, and most people on HN could afford to pay it.
Pi-hole. Works like a charm. Also does the same for every device in your house. Moreover, if you don't mind spending an additional $5 a month, set up your Pi-hole in a Digital Ocean droplet and you can blocks ads everywhere YOU happen to be, even on your mobile device.
I run one and it works very well, but I fear the rise of DoH and devices just bypassing your network's DNS settings to query the manufacturer's DNS servers. I think Google devices do this.
A sad world we live in when you have to fight the devices you paid for.
I sometimes wonder if someone at the top is trying to drive people away from TV/film/video. Yes there's more content than ever before but as regards drama etc. the writing is generally dreadful and the stories lack originality, on YouTube the adverts are becoming obnoxious and if extremely one-sided political messaging isn't to your taste, well, good luck finding a single programme that isn't stuffed to the gills with it.
YouTube adverts have been obnoxious for a long time, but it's got far far far worse this year. Unfortunately, I think it is necessary to support the media industry thanks to the diminishing returns from sales of music/film due to the proliferation of "art is disposable and very cheap" $9.99-a-month streaming services, plus the fact that every new album ends up on YouTube within a week these days as an "entire album" upload.
The sheer amount of content available these days is probably what you are noticing regarding dramas / films; I can remember very few decent Hollywood films recently as utter garbage seems to make billions of dollars, so the studios believe it's what people want.
It isn't a new issue though - "Penny Dreadfuls" were the old poor-quality entertainment of yesteryear where I suspect people were saying the same things that we are saying now. The only difference now is the availability of immense volumes of instantly accessible tripe.
As for political messaging, I am entirely apolitical but do see a lot of ideologies being promoted/pushed in programmes, with an opposing stance on any "modern" issue descending rapidly into a shouting match instead of a reasonable, logical debate; it then turns into a witch hunt regarding the opposing party's behaviour instead of a balanced discussion of the first issue raised. Exercise your free will and turn the rubbish off like I do!
Unfortunately, showing ads probably does increase long-term profit. Take a look at the randomized experiments measuring long-term retention & profit with various ad loads: https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication
Often, despite the ~10% user/activity loss, profit is increased by increasing ad load. And this is in tech contexts like web browser/smartphone/music-streaming where switches and upgrades are pretty easy and often done anyway. The loss from equivalent ad burdens on TVs is probably much less. (People replace their smartphones more often than their TVs!) The ad revenue also lets them discount the upfront price of TVs (I think I saw an article on HN that the discount due to advertising is at least $50/set?). And then there's the time-value of money: $1 up front in exchange for $1.10 of lost sales 10 years from now when they (maybe) buy an alternative brand is a pretty sweet deal for the seller.
Some consumers may hate ads like poison. But most of them are just fine with it, and prefer the micropayments to the macropayments, as it were.
> Some consumers may hate ads like poison. But most of them are just fine with it, and prefer the micropayments to the macropayments, as it were.
It seems like the smart thing would be to have ads by default but allow the customer to turn them off. Most consumers would leave them on and be fine with it (like you said) and the haters would be happy too.
If you want a dumb box, can't you just un-network the TV itself? I don't see the point of smart TV's personally. It's way easier to just use a Roku or AppleTV or w/e. We have Sony's and the built-in smart TV platform is a horrible experience compared to Roku.
Well you see Google selling Pixels which is supposed to be an idiot box to reproduce voice signals but it turns out it's loaded with ads and trackers. Samsung probably followed along the lines that Google pioneered
All of that is disableable, so the user can make it as "dumb" or as "smart" as they want, unlike the iPhone, which has tons of data collection that you can't turn off and survives in the face of much better competition only through luxury marketing or tricking people into believing it has reasonable privacy.
Exactly!, our down stairs Samsung's TV UI looks like it was designed by a group of toddlers who over dosed on E supplements and decided to use all the crayons in the box
It would be great if it were just one middle level manager. But, this sort of behavior seems to permeate a their offerings. For me Samsung and all of it's products have gone from mildly annoying (bloatware with a couple cool features) to something I won't even consider when making a new electronics purchase. It was frustrating for a while, because I like the hardware, but I'm past it now.
I have an old (like 2015, not that old) Vizio TV with a built-in Chromecast, which was always handy. Saves me a couple bucks and an HDMI port.
The "home screen" of the TV (where it goes when you turn it on) was always the chromecast, which as I'm sure most people have seen, is rather nice; just endless pictures of art and landscapes, like a screensaver.
One day it updated without my consent, and that screen was replaced with Vizio's, I dont know, some piece of shit interface no human being on the planet wants. Ads for Crackle and other Vizio tvs mostly. Its so bad.
The PS4 is full of ads for apps. I find it to be less enjoyable of an experience than the PS3. It's good to hear that their TVs haven't been corrupted yet.
NEVER buy a TV. Even better. They are all horrible. I thought that TVs would be a thing of the past like landline phones, but looks like I was wrong. It's incredible that the gullible are swarming to "smart" TVs.
In fairness, how would people even react? Almost all major TV platforms have ads and all of this is on products long after sale. If everyone is guilty, how does anyone get punished?
Well we aren't just consumers, we are also citizens. Forcing ads into your devices sounds like a collective action waiting to happen, especially if it's done via an update. And further down the road some sort of advocacy group/lobbying may be in order.
Sony support within my region (Asia Pacific) is 10x better than any of their competitors too. They ship new TV's when there's a minor defect, and they price match directly so you don't have to worry about the retailer going out of business if your TV breaks. Admittedly I've yet to use Sony support personally - nothing has broken.
I own a 250$ 4k TV that doesn't do this. Samsung does this shit with their cell phones too. Rocking a cheaper brand Android phone now. Also helps I'm not being forced to keep Facebook installed
I have an LG Smart TV. I didn't consent to any of the tracking features and haven't seen a single ad for years. I strongly recommend it as an alternative to Sony.
> This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead
I went with the opposite approach- I paid the small bucks to buy an Avera display, and connect it to my own media box. Also, a decent soundbar, because the built-in speakers are terrible. Now I have better sound than any built-in speakers at any price, a decent display, and the best "smart" features (with no ads), all for a price much lower than a "Smart" TV.
> Fuck the guy who wanted to suck up to the management in some stupid meeting projecting estimated revenue out of this to ask for a raise later because he "contributed to a revenue increase" to the company.
I knew something was fucky when smart TVs started to be sold for less than the dumb ones - all things being even, smart TVs had to cost more to produce, so something had to be subsidizing the prices.
I have a huge Vizio Smartcast display (no tv tuner) and it doesn't have any advertisement displaying dark patterns. Crossing my fingers they don't sell out with ads.
when i was looking to buy an oled tv, i never even considered samsung because of this problem. I went with lg c9. ads are there but very very minimal compared to samsung tvs.
you'll be thrilled how much data these "smart" tvs collect when you plug it to your local DNS server.
Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance.
It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR and such. The manufacturers, of course, know all about it, but it's not in their interest to share the information - specifically, to do so in a way that empowers the consumer to make an educated decision at purchase time. (Or am I wrong and they do in fact explain everything "on the box"? I haven't had to buy a TV in a long time.)
i tried blocking DNS or whitelisting and you probably see that large amount of blocked requests because it tries like every second if you refuse the response.
I do this and it's been somewhat useful - you need to disable blackhole rules periodically to get app updates though (and the TV will send a storm of DNS queries your way if you dare to block queries)
Frustratingly, recently the latest Plex app stopped working with the block rules I had in place, so I've had to allow through a lot more of the TV's traffic to samsung domains than I'd like.
My primary annoyance is Samsung's monitoring of what I do on my TV, and secondarily their IPTV service, which it seems to default to on startup (I only use apps and PC/game console sources, the TV isn't plugged into or tuned for any channels).
Realistically I need to switch to a Shield TV and hope that nVidia's privacy policies are better... and never buy a samsung tv ever again.
Given the privacy angle, I expect they won't do ACR in Europe. Because that would require asking permission and the courts have ruled that "free and explicit consent" means the user must be able to say no. Otherwise it doesn't count as consent and the massive GDPR fines come into play.
For all the bad press it got, I'm happy to have GDPR because it very firmly puts the consumers in control of their data.
Enforcement isn't fully there yet, but with Oracle getting sued and pulling the plug on the European side of their Blukai data sales business things are moving in the right direction.
My new LG CX tv has an option in the settings for this (in Norway) so I can just turn it of.
My old Sony Bravia with android tv didn't even honour my DHCP DNS settings so I made the firewall reroute all the requests to my internal dns for "pi-holeing".
GDPR is a massive win for consumers, enforcement will come it just takes time :)
Unfortunately, it's worse than that. It's more like a case of the consumer coming first.
The vast majority of consumers don't care about this. They're trying to get the biggest screen for the least money. And TV manufacturers are giving it to them.
However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue. So, we get TVs with ads.
This isn't a dystopian thing forced upon us by evil TV manufacturers. This is a dystopian thing we've asked for.
> The vast majority of consumers don't care about this.
You may be right, but how exactly is someone meant to make an informed decision when they don't know what their TV is doing? It's unreasonable to expect the average person on the street to be an expert on the subject and to have fully researched everything before walking into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say anything about the subject, how do they learn?
> However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue.
Which other TVs are you referring to? And is this really the case or are you speculating? Surely a company the size of Samsung can be competitive without having to resort to this sort of activity?
It's unreasonable to expect the average person
on the street to be an expert on the subject and
to have fully researched everything before walking
into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say
anything about the subject, how do they learn?
I 100% agree with you that the current solution stinks and is unfair.
The solution depends on who you ask.
Some would say that it's up to the consumer to be educated. Like you, I don't think this is realistic. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to become an expert in the nuances of every single thing they might buy.
Others would say that if it's really important to customers, we'll vote with our dollars and demand alternatives to the current situation.
Some would say that the government should ban the practice or at least require some sort of very clear disclosure.
How do you know that? I am going to go out on a limb here and say you have not done background research on TV manufacturers who focus exclusively on inexpensive dumb TVs, so how can you know it's not worth it to them?
It is entirely possible there are other factors as to why we are not buying from them right now, such as supplier-related issues unbeknownst to us.
In short, the economy is more complex than claiming "demand" and saying we are done.
I have almost never heard anybody outside of the tech world express concern about this sort of data collection, and even most tech-savvy people I know explicitly reject the idea of caring about it.
Yes, admittedly this is anecdotal, but I am talking about an extended family/social circle of hundreds of people over the course of quite a few years. The odds of it being a massively unrepresentative sample are rather low.
Let's turn it around. How do you know that people are concerned about data collection?
All available evidence points to my assertion being correct. All sorts of "smart" devices, chock full of phone-home tracking, are flying off the shelves. There are alternatives, but they are quite niche.
I am not talking about the demand for privacy, I am talking about the demand for dumb, inexpensive TVs. You are saying it is impossible to find a market that needs dumb, inexpensive TVs. But suppose all of those people saw an option for a cheaper TV that happened to be dumb. This line could even be sold by a major brand. Call it something like a "SimplySmart" line.
The "smart" functionality is how they achieve low prices. They subsidize the cost of the TV by selling your usage data. They may have deals with app providers as well - similar to how the price of a consumer laptop is subsidized by preloaded crapware.
One tip I've found useful - most TVs have a so-called "Hotel mode" (or a Service mode) where they can have most of their smart features disabled and can be locked to a single HDMI input (e.g. AppleTV / ShieldTV / Chromecast). That makes them into rather dumb panels that usually also disable those ads.
At least I know it's possible on all Sony AndroidTV models and most Samsung models (not sure about their latest Tizen).
well, people cant test easily, just press mute + 1 + 1 + 9 + enter and you are in the service menu. I have only hospitality tvs, so can't test that on the domestic ones, hospitality tvs are charged a premium, so if the hotel menu is present on all tvs, i don't know what are they charging for.
LG TVs also have a "display mode" that's used for live restaurant menus and the like (think: the TVs above the registers at McDs). We had to flash a special firmware file via USB to enable it though.
Obviously you can buy "commercial signage" displays which are panels without the crapware.
Anyone have recommendations for units they've bought this way? I've avoided upgrading my super old LCD because at least my current one is somewhat stupid and so long as I don't connect it to the network it mostly does what I bought it for: display the pixels.
Unnecessarily expensive. Just use any TV without allowing internet. Not connecting some (maybe not newest) TV vs not connecting commercial panel should be about same amount of work.
I use few year old Sony like that, couldn't care less about any of these complaints. It requires trips to PC to manage content, which I think is the biggest hurdle of this approach for lazy couch potatoes.
It does not matter if it's China, Hawaii or Timbuktu, it's wrong in any case. I can understand somehow western people sinophobia as they will be displaced as "owners of the world" in the next 50-100 years but if I were a "western" citizen now and were given a forced choice between China or my government having my digital data I would choose China every single time. Same reason for a Chinese citizen to choose Germany and not China for example.
While I agree with you, the traffic to China did stand out in my router log enough for me to notice this. Had they used Amazon Aws, I might have never investigated.
Plus, this is how I learned that Phillips is just a brand of a Chinese company now.
And where the regions do get relevant again is for the legality of it. If it's an EU company doing such data extraction, they would be swiftly punished for it. Same I presume for the US. So I would assume that they are using a Chinese intermediary for the data to avoid / delay the legal consequences from it.
> If it's an EU company doing such data extraction, they would be swiftly punished for it. Same I presume for the US.
I love your optimism. Will a random company be punished? Probably, will a powerful company or more importantly a government agency be meaningfully punished and forced to desist? Never in a million years.
Exactly this. I was surprised by the ads that they apparently shove down your throat but outraged by the fact that samsung knows what you watch. Most people that have a new TV will probably not even know this, only mentioned in some small letters in an eula that nobody reads.
How is that even legal?
In EU I think a "consumer complaint/guarantee" would work (the law, not a warranty given by the producer). As in: the product is no longer working as advertised/expected, so I want my money back.
For instance, when an older PlayStation (3?) in an update made it so that one could no longer run Linux (which was advertised as possible), I know of people that got to return it and get their money back after the Norwegian Consumer Council ruled against Sony.
I concur. This is also likely the reason why Oculus stopped selling the Quest in some EU countries. Their planned EULA update will make it impossible to use the device without a Facebook account, which might make them legally liable to provide a refund in case anyone complains about it.
It would be nice if there was a right to get back the product you paid for (i.e. revert the adware update), rather than being forced to either accept the ads or return the product.
There used to be open source firmware for Samsung TVs called SamyGo, it would be great if it were ported to newer ones so the ads could be replaced with Kodi or similar.
this is merely a modification of the original software on the TV which is achieved by gaining root access on it which is currently not easily possible on more recent models.
959 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadWho ever thought that would be a good idea? Do these people have no common sense whatsoever? People will dump TVs and TV watching and switch to PC set top boxes, internet streaming, large monitors before they accept this sort of nonsense.
Never buy a consumer product that expects an Internet connection.
So I am going to say, for the technically inclined its time to chase down your router firewall logs and find where the TV is going to for ads and block the IP or port range. Would be curious what the TV does, properly engineered it should just act as if its not connected at all.
Integration brings unneeded obsolescence and reduces choice and control. May be hard to avoid in space constrained phones but should not be needed on tvs.
However recently I wanted to setup my home automation system to automatically turn the TV off when I go to bed or outside, and for that I needed to connect it to the home network.
I solved this by confguring the router firewall to drop any package from the TV to the internet. It works!
This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP to make sure that they're being used in the country they're sold for.
The best solution for streaming is a low-end PC with hardware video decoding and the ability to run Ublock Origin.
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Edit: I see from other comments that Samsung TVs already go into degraded functionality mode if they can't connect to their ad servers, and already serve some ads from endpoints used for necessary functionality.
I just found out this weekend; with an older, cca 2013-ish samsung tv, connected to a network that has OpenWRT router with Adblock, and forced redirect of all port 53, 853 traffic to the local resolver. It cannot resolve its mothership (the rules were already in the Adblock list, I didn't add anything). The TV shows up a messagebox that it cannot to the Internet and asking the user to check the connection.
The local DLNA sources work.
I still use my Chromecast for Youtube, because the UI in a browser isn't great for couch use. On the CC, multiple people can add videos to the playback queue, I haven't found a good replacement for that yet.
For anything longer than a typical Youtube video, it's not an issue finding a movie and starting it from a wireless keyboard.
Our current TV is a 42" LG that I got for free from work. It's old enough to not have any "smart" features, it has no networking at all. The picture quality is great and no ghosting unlike a lot of older LCDs. I am not looking forward to the day I eventually have to replace it.
If they want to collect air quality stats from my location they should pay me for that data.
From their perspective, they probably gave you a discount for your data. See also https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-tv-data-collection-adv...
You can get the version that phones home or you can pay extra for the version that doesn't.
I suppose the problem is that they'd make this transparent and there would likely be a bit of backlash ... thank goodness that regulatory agencies have our best interests at heart /s
I originally bought Kindles without ads, but for my third Kindle I decided to buy it with ads to see how bad they were. You can pay the extra later to get rid of ads, so if it turns out buying the version with ads was a mistake it is easy to fix it.
I don't see the sleep screen except briefly between the time I open the cover and the time the Kindle wakes up. I'm rarely on the home screen. I do almost all book shopping on my computer rather than on my Kindle. Thus I almost never actually see an ad, and when I do it is almost always not interfering with what I'm there to do.
The few ads that I do briefly see in those rare times I'm not in a book or in my library are static images without sound. For the sleep screen it is usually an ad for a book and the image is the book cover, which is often actually nice to look at.
After actually seeing the ads, I now feel like I wasted my money buying the ad-free versions for my first two Kindles.
I've done this with one other Kindle and several other people have done it based on my experience and they've all gotten ads removed for free and some have gotten store credit in various amounts.
I didn't even mention why I wanted the ads gone, I just asked how to remove them and they gave me free books and a typically $20 upgrade for free.
There was a time that the Kindle ads were actually appropriate. I've even purchased the odd sci-fi book that showed up on the wake screen. But that's been a couple of years. Now I get the same bodice-rippers you're seeing. What a waste; Amazon has my book purchase history going back 20 years, and that is what you're showing me? Do your advertising customers know this? Because, shallow guy that I am, I read sci-fi, philosophy, and books on distance running. That's pretty much it. I did read part of a Danielle Steele book (imagine GPT-3 wrote a romance novel...) 35 years ago when I was married to a woman who read those, but I doubt Amazon knows that.
This is a nice trite trope, but getting an affordable TV without these features might be nearly impossible for most people these days.
But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers.
It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing until we drove 150 miles to accept the update for him
We just wanted a TV that receives terrestrial TV and has a couple of HDMI ports for his DVR which he knows how to use without over complex menus, is that so much to ask?
If you don't plug it into the internet it's not going to be a smart tv
Could replace the remote with a Old Person Remote perhaps.
Just looked for a random tv, it has a normal remote to me https://ao.com/product/vel50fo01uk-veltech-tv-black-66496-10... scroll right on the photos
It is not a question about affordable TV. The only ones that does not have smart features (as far as I can identify) are the cheapest LCD ones at the bottom of the price list.
The best alternatives that I can find is projectors or monitors, as those seems to so far not expect an Internet connection.
But you can forget about common TV features like HDR support, DTS/DD audio decoding, usable remotes and other useful features.
Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.
So say the sponsor is Coke and it sees a 2 liter bottle of pepsi in your home. It displays something literally equivalent to (not in exactly so many words) "we are punishing you for bringing pepsi into our home, because our sponsor is coke." It then counts down a 30 second punishment timer. As a shopper you dont have THAT strong of a preference between coke and pepsi. So the next time you need to watch a movie on the dictator (name of TV set) you buy coke that night instead of pepsi.
Does that cross a line? How would you legislate against it? Devices shall not act as slave owners over humans who have bought them?
Well, um....
There was literally a Black Mirror episode about something very similar.
It is literally possible for a television to include a punishment timer (as in, it is pretty trivial to code up, if the device isn't rooted.) What happens if a company sells one that literally identifies shopping and uses a punishment timer for people who buy a competitor to their sponsor instead of their sponsor? can you make it illegal?
On what grounds would a punishment timer be illegal?
If it becomes impossible to buy a TV that doesn't just display what I chose by the time this one is due for replacement, I'll take a device sold as a computer monitor instead. Or a projector. Maybe I'll pay extra, but I'll be fine with that.
Also, sounds like a case of optimization creep - "I know a way to get even more revenue, we just sign up with this $more_shady_ad_network!". Displaying more and more creepy ads, no-one decreasing ads since they don't want to be the one decreasing ad revenue.
What? A month? Sale of goods act.
Then there's quite generous warranty for 2 years, up to 3 years, but that's when things break.
In addition, I think this also includes if a sold item is unfit for advertised use, or perhaps even if substantially changed during ownership (eg Samsung mandatorily introducing ads), but I've never had to use that so don't know).
I disagree with describing this as 'generous'. A TV manufacturer should guarantee that the TV will not develop a manufacturing defect for a minimum of 3 years, if not longer. I have CRTs that lasted decades (plural) without issue, while I've had multiple LCDs fail in under a decade.
There's nothing generous going on here, they're systematically making inferior products in order to drive an increase in sales.
I returned a Bose speaker when it stopped letting you cast to it without their app, and have returned my Ring external camera when they removed customisable motion zones (I need to block a specific tree that moves in the wind). Plus more.
I’ve never had a problem doing so, I’m always polite and just explain that it’s no longer as advertised and print out the product update notes showing that they removed/changed x or y feature.
But this is the same thing, the market is repeatedly told to ask for smart devices, even when dumb TV is all the users need.
Same happens to screen in cars.
for myself, having no 4k hdr, no netflix, apple tv, youtube, bbc, and many others is a deal breaker when it comes to buying a new tv.
Personally, I would pay more for a TV without this functionality. I'm running one of the last "dumb" consumer TVs, from 2015.
But the overwhelming majority of consumers just want smart TV stuff built right into their TVs.
It's like power windows and air conditioning in cars. They used to be premium features. Now, you really can't buy a car without them, at least in the USA.
(Pedantry note: As late as ~2014, you could still buy a Nissan Versa with manual windows; perhaps it's still possible)
You were able to block everything in the past but no longer. Samsung catched on and now serves some ads over the same domains they distribute their firmware updates, install apps, get the program guide, and check the online status.
If you block those domains the Samsung TV loses most of its internet features and also seems to go crazy and requests all domains multiple times per second, defeating deep sleep of the TV.
I think: monitor + DVB decoder + Raspberry PI.
It will be the end of privacy completely. EVERYTHING always on and serving ads, collecting telemetry and logging everything. There will be no way to shut them down.
My TV has been relieved of all internet connection privileges, and it's staying that way.
Most people already don't care and happily connect everything to their Wi-Fi. Those that do care and now setup firewalls/piholes/etc. on their Wi-Fi will learn to snip the coax/desolder/drill out the 5G antenna in the future.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/tv-audio-video/how-do-i-u...
These only flow in one direction though - from the source to the sink
1. The Netflix/Prime Video etc apps are snappier because of the beefier SoC
2. Content looks better, because DLSS does a better job at upscaling than the TV's native upscaler
3. I can use it to stream games from my PC, which is making me reconsider buying one of the new consoles just for couch gaming since I could spend the money on a new GPU to upgrade my rig an just stream from there.
And as you mentioned, the presence of HDMI CEC makes remotes rather interchangeable
I also didn't connect the antenna cable and didn't even notice during the entirety of the (Italian) lockdown since I never watch "normal" TV. At this point I wish it could be possible to get TVs without a tuner, I could stop paying the TV taxes!
Have you streamed yet or it’s just an option right now? Something I’m considering but I’ve not looked into. Wondering about lag, and if I have to run upstairs to my pc to start games etc.
I hope I have time to try it more before the weekend, but the results are promising.
Oh, I thought it was obvious since we're talking about a Shield Pro but now I think it's worth mentioning that my PC has a Nvidia card (an RTX2060), so I'm using nvidia's native streaming support. It's also worth noting that an OSS client exists (Moonlight), so the Shield could be replaced by, say, a Raspberry Pi 4
With the PS5 controller having a microphone array built in, I won’t be purchasing, which makes me sad as I’ve been gaming since the ZX Spectrum. Also Sony injecting their ads into the PS4 home-screen which will no doubt carry over to the PS5. Gah. But on a positive note, those new AMD offerings...
Biggest obstacle here was the wifi in this house is unreliable. We tried getting a wifi extender and even a new wireless router but we kept getting latency issues. We opted to get a powerline adapter for a stable connection. MOCA is also worth looking into if connectivity is a problem.
And finally, running to the other room to start games. Again, this is steam, but I'm guessing shield has the same limitation: if your system isn't logged in or the screen is locked, you will probably have problems starting games remotely in those cases. You'll want to setup remote desktop almost for sure (you can VNC or there's a way to logout of RDP too without locking the screen automatically). I also have a Wake on LAN shortcut setup to wake the PC up remotely.
Finally, sometimes games won't pipe audio remotely because they don't switch to the "virtual streaming audio device" these apps use properly. As far as I can tell this is on a game-by-game basis and depends how they coded it, but for that I have a pretty ridiculous work around (I remotely start a command line tool via openssh to force the audio device to "steam streaming speakers" then restart the game after that). The games with these problems seem pretty rare though, I'd say maybe 5% of the games I've tried.
Overall it's awesome and I glad I spent a day or two figuring it out. I don't get noticeable lag and I can stream pretty much any game to my living room on the TV now. Also got a "Couchmaster" for a kb/mouse setup. I can also emulate things like Wii U games and stream them remotely to the TV like having an actual system.
Hope this helps.
You can launch the games directly from the Shield if they appear in GeForce Now on your PC. They usually show up automatically, the only issue being UWP games (like Hellblade I mentioned early), the workaround there is to create a normal shortcut to the game and add that to GeForce, manually.
The Shield network troubleshooter tells me I have 1ms latency even on wifi but still, maybe it would be better wired. I have no easy way to run an ethernet cable to the TV.
It's still the best gaming-on-TV experience out of the stuff I have in my TV cabinet (PS4 Pro and Xbox One). It's not an higher resolution, but render quality is way better and it has a much more stable framerate. Too bad it's noisier than even the ps4 :D
While I’m at it I may as well complain about the google assistant support using my home mini. While nvidia advertises this as a feature, it often works much worse than it did on my cheap old chromecast so that’s quite disappointing. For example, the shield will launch the Netflix overview for a show when asked to play it but won’t actually start the show until you wait for the auto preview to start or you explicitly ask it to press play.
Overall, I guess I’m just not as thrilled with this device as everyone else seems to be. I kind of wish I had just gone with the Apple TV at this point so that I could ditch airplay on my TV which is the only reason I have it connected to the internet at all.
Luckily, Samsung was awesome about it and I was able to RMA through Best Buy, who just gave me my money back. I took that cash, put a bit on top, and bought an LG OLED. Best decision ever. OLED is absolutely dominant in TVs these days.
At home I don't have a smart TV (I use a JVC video projector and they've resisted adding those kind of useless feature so far) but my parents use a smart TV connected to an apple TV and so I'm curious what happens there.
I do wonder what kind of content it can detect and in which modes.
Also, Apple‘s streaming services being ever more annoyingly shoved in your face on menu screens.
Some people might not be comfortable with this, or not even trust them to begin with. I personally don't mind paying but there's no way in hell I am providing any personal information to Google.
To turn everything on, I press a button on the Apple TV remote and everything is up and running within five seconds or so (from standby/sleep mode). Powering off the Apple TV also turns off the display and the receiver via HDMI CEC.
Edit: http://www.eiman.tv/misc/power-on.mov
I have a Chromecast and have never seen an ad.
Commercial TVs aimed at the digital signage market are an alternative option to a large monitor, especially at larger sizes. They're less likely to spew advertising than consumer Smart TVs, but are probably less likely to stay clean than a monitor with no Internet connectivity.
I use a Linux PC as a media decode device. It works, but I have no interest in 4K (hardware video decode is sketchy on Linux, which makes 4K difficult) or paid streaming services (if I wanted to watch sewage I'd take up urban exploration into wastewater facilities).
I've seen it mentioned that they tend to lack features like HDR and may not have remote controls. Any other downsides?
I would be fine with the lack of a remote, and probably even HDR. I would also be willing to pay a bit of a premium over consumer TVs.
However, information on these displays is pretty tough to come by. I browse home theater type forums/subreddits from time to time and don't see people really talking about using them in the home.
I guess image quality and response time might be sub-par too compared to a top-of-the-line consumer-grade TV.
They often have serial ports behind them, that serves as the remote control. They may support HDMI CEC for it as well?
[0]: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/displays/pro-tv...
[1]: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/displays/4k-uhd...
Amazon has a bunch of affordable models from Samsung. Haven't clicked through them all but here's a 65" with HDR for $600.
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Business-Software-Speakers-LH...
However, it's probably not the sort of "dumb" TV we want:
Seems like this is interfacing with some sort of app on the TV, so I suppose it's not a dumb display.edit: Also, aside from netflix, a local plex server with rtorrent/irssi to auto-download tv series I followl
They are not "smart", but less is better, so in terms of OS functionaliry, privacy, and user experience; they top the charts.
Yes, the xbox and PS4 home screens have 'ads' (promoted games and stuff mostly), but they're not 1/10th as annoying in my opinion. And Microsoft and Sony have a much higher likelihood of keeping the operating systems properly patched and up to date on a 5, 10 year time scale.
1. why?
2. the ps4/xbox pale in comparison to my lg's apps. functionalities, quality of streams, the voice search. they're all much better on the lg apps.
There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the context or reasoning is.
This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet, and I don't use smart features on the TV anyway, so I don't plan on updating the software either. Hopefully they face backlash over this stupidity and this doesn't go on to become a norm.
That would be really, really terrible.
This is not really Sony's fault but rather Google's but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth…
https://9to5google.com/2020/08/18/android-tv-homescreen-ads-...
It's so much better than the "Smart" Samsung TV it is plugged into that it's not even funny.
The remote control has touch. I can use my phone to type text input. It's fast. It's elegant and slick. It has no ads. It has options that I care about. It doesn't waste my time with options I don't care about.
The Samsung TV on the other hand was a flagship model. Top of the line. Best of the best. Just a few years ago.
Now? It is unusable. It is beyond slow. Two to three second response time. Text input is just torture. Netflix crashes. YouTube mangles HDR in some weird way that makes people look like they were drawn by a kid with crayons.
It's shocking to me that you can pay thousands of dollars to Samsung and have them destroy your investment with "updates", whereas you can pay a few hundred dollars to Apple and have a slick product that improves over time.
What I don't understand is the executives at other companies. Companies that aren't the #1 biggest in the world. How do they not get it!? Just copy Apple! Stop fucking over your customers, and maybe they'll give you more money! I know I give Apple more money every year!
It's not that hard. It really isn't.
Text input.
All the letters lined alphabetically with only left-right movement allowed. Takes ages to input anything. Also no corrections allowed. I actually exit appleTV and use the built in TV apps for when I need youtube and the like, because their input mechanism is not insane.
I know there is a remote app for iPhones, but you do provide an actual remote, make it work ffs.
But what if I need to input a language that's not supported or I just don't want to yell at my TV to search a video?
Of course, if you don't have your phone nearby it might suck but let's be realistic, how often you don't have your phone close by when watching TV?
P.S.: Yes, I know, if you are an Android user there is no way out and Apple sucks for that, not defending them at all.
There are actually many times I don't have my phone with me while watching TV. I carry it with me everywhere all day, but I try to keep it on the table most of the time when at home.
I don't need a dedicated TV keyboard. As I said, I work around it by using the TV apps, but it's annoying, and the most annoying part is that it's probably annoying on purpose to get people more on their phone.
So I would agree with their design decision: make an elegant remote, use voice dictation for search and the like, if you need a keyboard, use your iPhone, and if you are not happy with that, get a dedicated keyboard. If you are not happy with THAT, well ...
But I can understand where you're coming from, I am just very frustrated that this user-interface-design-genius trillion dollar company can not change the input mechanism of one of their most used product from the:
a b c d e [f] g h i j k etc... Backspace
model with only <-> movement and no way to make an input correction other than backspace, to something like:
Which is the way almost all other TV-centered apps I use function and works much better.And, Apple should be better at UI design than this. They were once, and not that long ago, but I think the UI team they've had for the last, oh, let's say seven or eight years -- going back semi-arbitrarily to iOS 7, but steadily infecting all other platforms -- have prioritized aesthetics over usability.
That could be a movie about absurdity and meaninglessness of life...
(Even so, what you describe still happens on occasion for me, but it helps)
If they had a 2D text input they wouldn't be able to do momentum in swiping as well as horizontal (side effect of the horrible remote), but more importantly, the primary text input on Apple TV is voice, in the moment just hold the Siri button. It takes in letters over voice too. Worlds faster than any other input on tv. No wonder they prioritized on it.
The last glyph in the row of letters is the delete key.
>Support for the Ambient mode Headlines Service is scheduled to end on September 30, 2020. We thank you for using the service and we look forward to providing an improved alternative in the near future
I'm not going to buy a new TV every year. "Smart" features that are discontinued after ~1 year are worse than worthless, it's just clutter in the menus at this point.
Also crazy are hardcoded "Netflix", "Rakuten" and "Amazon" buttons on the Samsung remote, you just know that they will stop working at some point.
Now you could argue as to whether you want Netflix preinstalled on your TV, but while most smart features of smart TVs are useless, having Netflix is useful for many users.
I have a bunch of aTVs, and while they’re the best boxes I’ve used, there’s definitely some ads baked in, and in prominent placements.
- The TV app started out as a directory + recommendation engine for services you had “connected” to the app; it’s turned into a series of pitches for Apple TV+ and Apple’s “Channels” feature. These placements are below-the-fold, but the default behavior has the “TV” button on the remote bring up that app (although you can change this to display the home screen). - In the top banner, the TV & Music apps will (by default) auto-play trailers and music videos (on mute). You can disable that behavior for the TV app, and it’ll revert to displaying your watch queue.
No one uses the trackpad on their playstation controllers, why did apple run with the same idea?
I'm a big fan of the Roku boxes.
Unless you mean trailers for whatever the cursor is on, inside of an app like Netflix? If so, some of those can be disabled, but I actually like them—they're "ads" for content that I already have access to but may not have known about otherwise.
- Remove the “TV” app from the top bar. - You can change the behavior from the “Settings” app to show your “TV” app’s watch queue instead of trailers.
You can’t disable the Music app videos, though.
Also great solution for cheap subsidized TVs where they are banking on your connecting to your network so only charge $100.
Plug in an apple TV and you are set.
Smart TV manufacturers are relying on the ongoing revenue from their software side nowadays, so they’ll usually mandate setting up an internet connection as part of the device setup process, and then only give you the option to change networks instead of disabling it outright.
If you’re tech savvy, you can take measures against this, but it’s not going to be simple for most folks.
You also have to worry about ethernet-over-HDMI unintentionally exposing the TV to the wider internet.
https://tidbits.com/2020/01/16/why-is-the-apple-tv-constantl...
Disabling them is also fairly easy, and if you don't use the TV app, they go away entirely.
I ended up with an AppleTV. So far, if it plays on my phone, it will play on the TV, too.
I found the support article from Sony on this:
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00225587
If this is a TV that is used by very young children, ads with blood splatter as shown in their example seem pretty tasteless.
Google's page on the introduction of ads has the same thing - an ad for Sesame Street followed up with the ad containing blood splatter.
https://blog.google/products/android-tv/find-new-faves-faste...
Honestly, that's the thing I hate most about the Fire Stick, and why I don't use it's discovery feature at all... I don't want to see promotions for 4,000 services I don't subscribe to. Sure, if I search for a specific show, I don't mind results from those services ... but as general adverts for shows? No thank you.
> A3: No, the suggestions cannot be removed.
I keep hoping someone will file a class action over this. These dumbfuck ads just appeared one day on my Bravia X900E, about a year after purchase. I didn't opt in to this and I wouldn't have bought the damn thing if this "feature" existed at the time. Sign me up for the class!
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208511
I plugged in my Apple TV instead.
Every now and then the Android TV pops up when I turn the TV on and asks me to complete the set up. I always tell it to fuck off.
So far, no ads. It'll stay that way till the TV eventually dies - without ever connecting to the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2998251/sony-bmg-rootki...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_roo...
For users it doesn't really matter why an annoying feature hasn't been implemented, they don't have a say in that anyway. Most likely Sony is just lagging behind a few months or years in that regard. Enjoy while it lasts ;)
That's the difference then. I have a Bravia and use the Android TV functionality. It started showing ads on the home screen earlier this year and I can't figure out a way to disable them and still be able to use the apps I actually want to use. If the ads had been there on day one, I would have been tempted to return the TV.
The last update also broke hardware video decoding for a whole range of h264 videos as well as pushing some kind of weird 3rd party that seems to be something that basically monitor everything you do with your TV. It was advertised as a feature to access the TV guide.
My next TV will not be a so-called "smart" TV and not certainly not a Sony.
You can install it without an account, plug in an antenna and go to town. You can even connect it to wifi then use Youtube or Netflix. Haven't seen any funky ads.
My only peeve is that the controller doesn't have a full number pad which makes it a little derpy for the older generation.
Solvable by tape, but doing that blocks the IR sensor.
Nice thing about OpenWRT is being able to block homescreen ads when the TV is online with the adblock package since DNS filtering will do the trick fortunately.
This is not a rationalization for garbage design, but at least it isn't as much of a black box as people might think.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
[1] https://i.rtings.com/images/reviews/tv/tcl/s405/s405-ads-lar...
I retract my statement.
Edit: I purchased a 2019 TCL 50S425 and also don't see any ads...
Just don't connect it to the Internet.
The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.
Or maybe we (the tech community) just agree on one model and produce an open source firmware. If you look at MagicLantern for Canon, you'll see how amazingly far people will go to control their hardware.
1. Order TV.
2. test if it works without agreeing to anything and without internet.
3. return if that's not the case.
I have yet to accept EULA on samsung on anything and it works...
Right now the ACR is troubling. Telling a remote server what you're watching... Only solution I found - not connected + hdmi to Linux box I control.
It is very hard to win against hostile design.
If it stops working after return period I call under warranty that it stopped working (2 years), they are forced to fix the issue.
Explain the issue, explain you cannot connect to the internet.
If it doesn't work, forward the whole info to the customer protection bureau if you're in the EU.
Edit: I will test this out by setting a date far in the future when I buy new equipment (will also hopefully cause SSL failures due to expired certificates internally in the firmware)
In any case, all you need is one model with a decent screen and broken certificate pinning and I'm good for the 3-5 years that the TV will last.
And until then, I'd assume that Nvidia sees the market demand for big TV-like PC screens and outcompetes the TV manufacturers.
The factory I work at had large one scattered around to show line information. Some of the information is safety critical and so if it is inyeruped with an ad there will be legal issues.
You'll get the first month for free, when you sign up for the 2-year plan for 19.99$/month right now!!
Frankly, we don't miss the TV channels. Streaming works okayish for the public channels, but we rarely bother.
The TV is just a dumb screen connected to a receiver, which has the HTPC as input as well as record player.
So the only thing a 'TV' offers me is its screen. Is that any different from a high end computer monitor these days? Is there a difference based on the viewing distance perhaps?
Using a TV which adjusts the brightness depending on what's displayed can be very unpleasant when trying to do computer work on it. E.g. opening or closing a window may cause other windows to abruptly change brightness. Scrolling through a document may cause the brightness to vary.
Sort of makes sense because a lot of people don't care about or plain don't want speakers on their monitor.
We're closer to that than you think. My Philips Ambilight television (purchased this year) throws a popup every few weeks already complaining that I've not completed setup and connected it to the internet.
As sold as I am on Ambilight (it is actually brilliant), I wont be buying another Philips television.
Also, if you really enjoy Ambilight, there's a (kinda expensive) solution to get it on any TV now: https://www.techradar.com/news/philips-hue-now-lets-you-turn...
I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns server configured via my DHCP. Letting pi-hole block the requests helps prevent errors from dns request timeouts.
I'm just waiting for smart devices to start doing that instead, forcing me to set up full SSL filtering until they start doing encrypted SNI :/
The only complaint is from my wife who sometimes Googles stuff and clicks on the top result, which is often an ad and will end up blocked. She now has to scroll down a bit to the real results.
Upon discovering the ads I was gonna return mine for a comparable LG, until I learned LG also have ads—at least this way I can pretend I'm not being taken for a ride.
At the time I didn't have any external devices capable of 4K Netflix or YouTube; now I do I should factory reset the TV and set it up without network access,
The forced login is likely illegal, because there is no mention of a requirement for a Google account in their marketing materials or on their sales pages.
The device stays perfectly functional if the the network connection is cut off within seconds after signing in, and the account can be removed after the setup is complete. The only drawback is that you can't update apps from Google Play, unless you add a Google account again.
It literally just bricked my test iPhone SE.
After the upgrade completed there is an only an option to put in a email/password for icloud and there is no "skip" or "do later" button I could find.
I'm pretty derpy but I can tell you it is true.
That or you put in an iCloud account at some point but it did not get removed successfully.
iOS 14 merges the 'not now' from iOS 13 into a 'forgot my account or don't set up now'.
has this been removed? It might be getting into GDPR violation territory.
Dark patterns... I can see why the older generation is scared of the hardware.
There was a company that made just a good tv, no smarts, but I can't find it right offhand. It think it was a european company
I've been running a BenQ w1070 since 2013 and couldn't be happier
I did a firmware upgrade and just disconnected from the internet right after. I also don't use the built in apps, because let's be honest, compared to an AppleTV, all SmartTV apps are basically garbage. I understand that the AppleTV is somewhat expensive, but it's my baseline for the quality I'd expect from a SmartTV.
Netflix on the AppleTV, starts instantly, and you're browsing the content endlessly after 20 sec. Start Netflix on the TV it self, that will take a few minutes.
Edit: also, it was a gift.
What if Samsung decides that it will try to connect to open networks for updates or what not? What then? Ask your neighbour to install PiHole on his network? No. This is an example of a game of cat and mouse that shouldn't exist - you pay money for a TV and that's not enough? You giving them your money is not enough and so they decide to shove ads down your throat because profits.
Simple solution would be just not to buy Samsung.
Real solution is regulation. But that can only happen if the outcry is large enough. Having two revenue streams is always going to be better than one.
It's definitely not for the consumer's benefit in most cases. No one is going to die because your Smart Keurig or 5G-TV goes unpatched for a month. Hopefully we can avoid the slippery slope and realize that these devices' internet capabilities are not for us - they are primarily for data collection/advertising purposes.
I cannot imagine a worse idea.
IoT devices are the richest source of hosts available for botnet operators to compromise because they are numerous and famously insecure. Today it's lightbulbs and security cameras. Tomorrow you wish it to be pacemakers and Toyotas?
We already know it is functionally impossible to write bug-free code which is also useful. We also know that attackers relentlessly probe systems until (that is a _when_, not an _if_) a weakness is found to exploit to gain control of that device. It is possible to write provably-correct code, but so far only for somewhat trivial applications.
Until this fundamental problem of software security can be solved, an air gap is the _only_ reliable thing that can protect life-critical software from external remote attack.
But critical components should be designed as simple as possible, and be thoroughly tested before device release. Releasing garbage and then patching it OTA doesn't really work for safety critical things. Not so long ago cars didn't have capability to upgrade (firmware on mask ROMs) and I don't think something horribly bad happened.
see https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
My next idea - Faraday cages for smart TVs
(I disconnected the antenna on my OnStar, yet found it still connecting to cell towers successfully from time to time. The resister solved that.)
One also has to be cognizant of HDMI Ethernet in case of "unintended" connectivity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...
Also Netflix experience with Chromecast is mostly superior to smart TVs, because it will not play anything while you just try to find something worth watching.
Connecting Chromecast to the soundbar also gives ability to listen to music from Youtube, without running display. It wastes bandwith however.
EDIT: I wrote "beamer" instead of "projector" at first
> Beamer
> Video projector, a pseudo-Anglicism in a number of languages including German, Dutch, Latvian and Swiss French
Haha, just wait until 4g/5g will become so cheap that TVs will have them built in for doing software updates and sending telemetry when offline :)
One of the perks of living in Canada is I am sure this would never happen here in my lifetime.
see https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
sure, the monitor was atleast 25% more expensive than a similar screen with a smart-tv function in it, but I think it's worth it.
Wait until they start including a cellular modem that can't be turned off.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/displays/4k-uhd...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626743
If I'm not mistaken the LG ones were significantly more expensive than their consumer counterparts, but those Samsung ones don't seem all that much more expensive.
Best part is, the TVs are essentially subsidized by ACR and selling your data so you’re getting a deal by not paying the “data tax.”
A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.
B: People don't like ads on their TV.
A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: No.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.
C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
Noted.
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.
If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.
But that isn't the case here.
Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.
And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.
To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!
You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.
Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.
And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.
I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.
I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.
There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.
Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).
Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.
- Sent from my Xperia Compact
well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad
and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.
I don't really follow this line of thinking.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.
Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).
The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.
I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).
Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.
"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"
TuneIn does this.
I always, always thought this is what X buttons do, so I was simply closing the tab :))
(partially kidding, but only partially.)
Apps which lay their buttons out contrary to the conventions of their platform are evil. Apps which randomize the positions of their buttons are unspeakably worse.
I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.
On the other hand, we have to keep the toilet seat down or they'll try to drink toilet water.
I begun suspecting that one day when my wife was preparing dinner. Soon after she took the meat from the fridge to work on it, our baby started crying and making noise for absolutely no reason. My wife immediately dropped everything and went to investigate, and the cat used this opportunity to attempt to steal our dinner meat.
Ever since, I've been noticing many more cases where the baby and the cat are either simultaneously attempting to do things they're not allowed to, or the baby starts distracting us while the cat goes out to carry out some mischief. It's all coordinated too well to be happenstance.
But I have come to believe they are far smarter than me, particularly with scheming methods of sneaking around to quietly appear when they can get food. One used to push donut boxes off the side so that they would burst open, and would then run off with a donut. I have no idea why he wanted to eat donuts. He also tried to eat bread through the wrapper. Or they fein illness. Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.
They're really clever, just not at jigsaws or sudoku.
The problem is cats are really good at hiding pain - being physically able to jump doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable or painful for him.
We have a pair of very senior cats (18/19ish years old) and make sure the house has little staircases dotted around to make getting on to their regular lounging spots easier, as we noticed they prefer to use a step if something happened to be available - while they are still fairly mobile, I suspect they are developing some level of arthritis. Given they've been good companions for nearly two decades it's the least we can do to make sure they're comfortable.
- same color background
- in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake
- I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just opens the ad
- Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad
- I don't remember what company did this, but they would pop the ad and after three seconds, it would reload, all but a few pixels higher so when you're in the process of closing the window, it would reload and then you'd open the ad by mistake because the "X" is in the wrong place now.
I've seen a lot more devious stuff but the sad thing is, I have decent vision. How do these dark patterns affect people who have impaired vision or other issues with their vision? How infuriating it is it for them to deal with this BS? I can't imagine.
``` *:not(.videoContainer){ background-color: black!important; color: black!important; } img { display:none!important; } ```
Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...
The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).
More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.
Fact check. You cannot make an X with anything less than 3 pixels. ;)
An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.
Of course now I'm part of the problem, because some asshole has a graph that shows that (a suspiciously small fraction of) users are able to opt-out so there's no legal liability for having the ads that way.
That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?
- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.
- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.
The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.
Also, as a side note, Vudu is like the one app from that era that still works.
Check what network activity it is engaging in. You'll be disappointed, I am sure. Seems dialling home is the new thing to do on every single device these days. Data vacuuming the entire human population just because they can.
You may want to get an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, or other media server) and plug that into your HDMI if you use the network from apps on the TV.
What can the apps on your TV do that a $40 Amazon Fire stick ($50 if you want 4K) can't?
I'd rather hook up an old laptop to my TV and use that to watch media than use the apps on my TV and deal with all the bullshit that TV manufacturers are doing when you connect the TV to the network.
I didn't push it again because in about 2015 I found that if you push it, it locks up for exactly 30s, which is how long it takes to hit the network timeout and say "Updates are available for your Samsung Smart TV." and then allow you to use the ancient web browser or Netflix or other smart apps. I did try a couple years ago, on a whim, but apparently the update servers have moved and even when plugged into Ethernet it can't actually update.
Everything currently runs through the Roku, the Blu-ray player, or a component-to-HDMI dongle for the Wii, but if I didn't have the Roku I'd have a motivation to update so that Netflix would work without a 30-second delay (and I'd be unsurprised if Netflix wasn't backwards compatible with their 2012 client from a Samsung TV). However, the picture is fine, so it keeps on chugging.
The difference from Samsung is that the ads on the LGs are in the same place they've always been (on the smart tv menu overlay), they've never been obtrusive, and they're always in some way connected to video content (usually VOD movies that you can purchase through one of the streaming apps, or adds for streaming apps you can install on the TV).
I’m more excited about the HDMI 2.1 and variable refresh for the new Nvidia cards.
I took that stupid TV off the network as soon as I could.
I think the manufacturers are all as bad as each other. My current Panasonic TV will refuse to load any of the "smart" apps (even Netflix) if it cannot reach Panasonic's servers, which means the entire TV becomes useless as an Internet device (no Netflix or ANY streaming services) if Panasonic has a server issue (which they sometimes do).
Might revert to VHS at this rate.
Instead I will recommend Sony or LG now
I have a Philips smart TV, so far it has no ads and just mildly annoying bugs, nothing really disruptive. But mine is an old model, it looks like the new ones aren't like that anymore.
A few years ago I brought some TVs to use as monitors because they were much better fit than the actual thing. Now it looks like the trends reversed, and I'll have to start buying monitors to use as TVs. Is there a good TV receptor that I can plug in a Raspberry Pi?
We all know this, but we ignore it. Branding for brandings sake == lying to customers.
Heck the yoga app I use I saw through a mobile ad. Same deal for the fitness app I use (BodBot, awesome app, check it out!)
I've gotten onboard Kickstarters from ads, and I've bought keto cereal from an ad I saw.
99.999% of most ads I ignore, but sometimes ads are really well targeted and actually show me something I want.
(None of these ads were on a tv in any way...)
Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them
Pro tip: if the competitor uses your trademark in their ad copy, you can do a takedown notice and usually the ads will be removed.
Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.
There are a few good reasons to do this:
1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.
2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.
Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.
If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.
I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...
"Hey, have you seen the new COVID-19 contact tracing app? It's named TikTok-19".
https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/the-marketers-g...
The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.
Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.
Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.
The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.
This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.
It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
American tried. American failed. Nobody was willing to pay more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/04/business/american-air-to-...
Back two jobs ago, we had international customers with somewhat high demand to ship our people all across the world on, sometimes on a moment's notice. I had to fly out 4 or 5 times in the span of two years, but some of my colleagues could do more than that in under a year. Somehow, the flights were almost always the cheapest airline available, and the cheapest seats available. The co-workers who flew frequently, including my boss, were all using the accumulating miles to bump themselves a class up.
United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...
tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.
But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.
- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)
- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”
This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, then hack it and remove the "special offers".
I don't know how prevalent this is, but wonder if it's a consideration in deciding on the "money to disable ads" strategy.
When I was buying my Paperwhite, I just ordered the ad-free version from amazon (.com or .co.uk, don't remember which). And then a couple co-workers (agreed, computer people, but very much not the type that's into tinkering or cracking software) looked at me with surprise, because it turns out everyone does the "standard" route - order "special offers" from amazon.de, and save money while getting an ad-free Kindle, because AFAIR initially the special offers didn't even display in Poland, and when they did, apparently everyone knew how to jump some hoops to get rid of them.
Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.
If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.
The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).
Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
—Upton Sinclair
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.
This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.
Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.
We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.
"We need to think of our devices as small hyper local billboards with untapped potential"
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: Yes of course I do. If you don't like ads on your TV why are you working here.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A+group: yes of course we all like ads (lying in a meeting is not a crime, and occurs all over the world)
C: ok no objections, we love it! Ship it!
A, C gets a paycheck at the end of the day.
B gets fired if they don't change their mind.
Yep, sounds about right.
Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.
“Why do we need to track users?” “To give them recommendations!” “But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?” “Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind” “Where is the decline button?” “...” “There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!” “Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”
If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.
Oh they have. Many times over. Two instances affected me[1][2] and that was enough to swear me off all Sony products for the last 10 years. Only now am I contemplating buying from Sony again (a PS5). I don't think any multinational company is above trading their customers needs for a few extra quid.
[1] Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
[2] Removal of "Other OS" feature from Playstation 3's after users had already bought them: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3088169/sony-agrees-to-pay-m...
https://streamingclarity.com/android-tv-staff-pick-highlight...
I guess we're supposed to think "movie buffs who really know their stuff." When the reality is "[Sales] staff picks."
No idea if it's full of some sort of baked in ads because, after the initial setup, I've used it exclusively as... a TV. It turns on, shows me things I give it over HDMI, and turns off. I haven't actually seen the menu/apps/whatever after the first day.
It's not optimal, I'd rather it just be a dumb TV obviously, but in a sea of bad options it's been... fine.
They should feel social pressure to backpedal this stupid decision by hurting their marketing for fear to be known as the brand that has ADS in their television sets.
That rarely works. For each consumer that has the time and understanding to not buy the brand there is a thousand that are not aware. The way to go is lobbying for stronger regulations and to limit where Ads and recollection of data can be done.
Day after day we have more and more connected devices. Samsung is the tip of the iceberg, even if there was consumer backslash for one company the problem will still be there.
Ads are not shown, when the TV is asked to "reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it". And the TV is sold on its ability to show all sorts of things that are not just the signal passed to it. Like Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the menus related to those services.
The Ads are shown when the TV is asked to show its menu of applications and features.
Still not great, but not at all what you are implying.
Usually I disagree about niche hardware in this way (for example, usual mentions about a similar approach for phones and laptops), but the dumb screen might just be dumb and cheap enough to make work at this limited scale?
It can be done, I think, but it has to be VERY well funded - you need to send salespeople / lobbyists to the various on- and offline shops selling TVs, you need "SEO experts" to try and beat the competition's "SEO experts" on the internet and e.g. Amazon's search results, and you need a legal team to help with the inevitable heap of lawsuits you'll get (patents, design infringement, etc). And then you'll have to deal with the competition pushing the prices of their devices below yours; Samsung can afford to sell TVs below market value for decades if need be, JUST to push out that shitty newcomer that does ad-free TVs, and they'll make money off of the ads + subscription services they offer in the meantime.
If they can pull it off for more sophisticated integrated solutions like phones, tablets and laptops, I'd have thought that a TV brand would be even easier.
Surely buying a commodity panel off of an existing OEM would negate a lot of the legal issues, and going DTC to the kinds of people who are specifically looking for a dumb TV is quite a decent niche to market to?
A sad world we live in when you have to fight the devices you paid for.
The sheer amount of content available these days is probably what you are noticing regarding dramas / films; I can remember very few decent Hollywood films recently as utter garbage seems to make billions of dollars, so the studios believe it's what people want.
It isn't a new issue though - "Penny Dreadfuls" were the old poor-quality entertainment of yesteryear where I suspect people were saying the same things that we are saying now. The only difference now is the availability of immense volumes of instantly accessible tripe.
As for political messaging, I am entirely apolitical but do see a lot of ideologies being promoted/pushed in programmes, with an opposing stance on any "modern" issue descending rapidly into a shouting match instead of a reasonable, logical debate; it then turns into a witch hunt regarding the opposing party's behaviour instead of a balanced discussion of the first issue raised. Exercise your free will and turn the rubbish off like I do!
Google is purely Ad company and is worth a trillion. Here is your context and reasoning, combined.
Do we have any evidence Samsung TV sales have taken a hit from these measures?
Often, despite the ~10% user/activity loss, profit is increased by increasing ad load. And this is in tech contexts like web browser/smartphone/music-streaming where switches and upgrades are pretty easy and often done anyway. The loss from equivalent ad burdens on TVs is probably much less. (People replace their smartphones more often than their TVs!) The ad revenue also lets them discount the upfront price of TVs (I think I saw an article on HN that the discount due to advertising is at least $50/set?). And then there's the time-value of money: $1 up front in exchange for $1.10 of lost sales 10 years from now when they (maybe) buy an alternative brand is a pretty sweet deal for the seller.
Some consumers may hate ads like poison. But most of them are just fine with it, and prefer the micropayments to the macropayments, as it were.
It seems like the smart thing would be to have ads by default but allow the customer to turn them off. Most consumers would leave them on and be fine with it (like you said) and the haters would be happy too.
True, not like this. But they've done worse things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit
After all, most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
The "home screen" of the TV (where it goes when you turn it on) was always the chromecast, which as I'm sure most people have seen, is rather nice; just endless pictures of art and landscapes, like a screensaver.
One day it updated without my consent, and that screen was replaced with Vizio's, I dont know, some piece of shit interface no human being on the planet wants. Ads for Crackle and other Vizio tvs mostly. Its so bad.
So, I'm never buying another Vizio TV.
They have the same contempt for software that they do on their phones.
They NEVER update their firmware. It's amazingly slow and latent.
When they DO occasionally update they usually break things that were working or remote features you used.
About 2 years ago they implemented some weird/stupid popover commercial thing which you could eventually disable but they hid the feature.
I'd be watching Game of Thrones or something and in the middle of the show they'd bring up a popup for a new TV show or something along those lines.
NEVER buy a TV. Even better. They are all horrible. I thought that TVs would be a thing of the past like landline phones, but looks like I was wrong. It's incredible that the gullible are swarming to "smart" TVs.
That screen has no business connecting to the internet.
Even better is a home projector.
The color resolution is also great for movies.
Sony just pushed an update to the homescreen of android TVs that pushes ads for shows and services on the very top of the screen.
I went with the opposite approach- I paid the small bucks to buy an Avera display, and connect it to my own media box. Also, a decent soundbar, because the built-in speakers are terrible. Now I have better sound than any built-in speakers at any price, a decent display, and the best "smart" features (with no ads), all for a price much lower than a "Smart" TV.
I knew something was fucky when smart TVs started to be sold for less than the dumb ones - all things being even, smart TVs had to cost more to produce, so something had to be subsidizing the prices.
It would only be fair to let people know what to expect!
you'll be thrilled how much data these "smart" tvs collect when you plug it to your local DNS server.
It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR and such. The manufacturers, of course, know all about it, but it's not in their interest to share the information - specifically, to do so in a way that empowers the consumer to make an educated decision at purchase time. (Or am I wrong and they do in fact explain everything "on the box"? I haven't had to buy a TV in a long time.)
I mean, normal TV it's 90% ads 10% content, do we need to watch even more ads?
Anyone has any idea on how adding a filter like AdBlocker to your router? Never thought about this but it's getting useful af.
For my Roku I have setup a redirection for all DNS port queries to my pihole as some app developers are getting wise to this and using their own DNS.
It won't be long until they encrypt this traffic and lock us out completely though.
Frustratingly, recently the latest Plex app stopped working with the block rules I had in place, so I've had to allow through a lot more of the TV's traffic to samsung domains than I'd like.
My primary annoyance is Samsung's monitoring of what I do on my TV, and secondarily their IPTV service, which it seems to default to on startup (I only use apps and PC/game console sources, the TV isn't plugged into or tuned for any channels).
Realistically I need to switch to a Shield TV and hope that nVidia's privacy policies are better... and never buy a samsung tv ever again.
For all the bad press it got, I'm happy to have GDPR because it very firmly puts the consumers in control of their data.
Enforcement isn't fully there yet, but with Oracle getting sued and pulling the plug on the European side of their Blukai data sales business things are moving in the right direction.
My old Sony Bravia with android tv didn't even honour my DHCP DNS settings so I made the firewall reroute all the requests to my internal dns for "pi-holeing".
GDPR is a massive win for consumers, enforcement will come it just takes time :)
The vast majority of consumers don't care about this. They're trying to get the biggest screen for the least money. And TV manufacturers are giving it to them.
However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue. So, we get TVs with ads.
This isn't a dystopian thing forced upon us by evil TV manufacturers. This is a dystopian thing we've asked for.
You may be right, but how exactly is someone meant to make an informed decision when they don't know what their TV is doing? It's unreasonable to expect the average person on the street to be an expert on the subject and to have fully researched everything before walking into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say anything about the subject, how do they learn?
> However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue.
Which other TVs are you referring to? And is this really the case or are you speculating? Surely a company the size of Samsung can be competitive without having to resort to this sort of activity?
The solution depends on who you ask.
Some would say that it's up to the consumer to be educated. Like you, I don't think this is realistic. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to become an expert in the nuances of every single thing they might buy.
Others would say that if it's really important to customers, we'll vote with our dollars and demand alternatives to the current situation.
Some would say that the government should ban the practice or at least require some sort of very clear disclosure.
What would you like to see?
The vast majority of people just don't care and want the most TV for the least money.
It's a "tyranny of the majority" kind of situation. For TV manufacturers, it's not worth catering to the tiny minority of customers who think like us.
It is entirely possible there are other factors as to why we are not buying from them right now, such as supplier-related issues unbeknownst to us.
In short, the economy is more complex than claiming "demand" and saying we are done.
Yes, admittedly this is anecdotal, but I am talking about an extended family/social circle of hundreds of people over the course of quite a few years. The odds of it being a massively unrepresentative sample are rather low.
Let's turn it around. How do you know that people are concerned about data collection?
All available evidence points to my assertion being correct. All sorts of "smart" devices, chock full of phone-home tracking, are flying off the shelves. There are alternatives, but they are quite niche.
The "smart" functionality is how they achieve low prices. They subsidize the cost of the TV by selling your usage data. They may have deals with app providers as well - similar to how the price of a consumer laptop is subsidized by preloaded crapware.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968
At least I know it's possible on all Sony AndroidTV models and most Samsung models (not sure about their latest Tizen).
Anyone have recommendations for units they've bought this way? I've avoided upgrading my super old LCD because at least my current one is somewhat stupid and so long as I don't connect it to the network it mostly does what I bought it for: display the pixels.
I use few year old Sony like that, couldn't care less about any of these complaints. It requires trips to PC to manage content, which I think is the biggest hurdle of this approach for lazy couch potatoes.
> Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason@SYSLOG: INTERNAL ERROR[2]
Oh well, if it's for better security reason, then… /s
Plus, this is how I learned that Phillips is just a brand of a Chinese company now.
And where the regions do get relevant again is for the legality of it. If it's an EU company doing such data extraction, they would be swiftly punished for it. Same I presume for the US. So I would assume that they are using a Chinese intermediary for the data to avoid / delay the legal consequences from it.
I love your optimism. Will a random company be punished? Probably, will a powerful company or more importantly a government agency be meaningfully punished and forced to desist? Never in a million years.
For instance, when an older PlayStation (3?) in an update made it so that one could no longer run Linux (which was advertised as possible), I know of people that got to return it and get their money back after the Norwegian Consumer Council ruled against Sony.
https://www.samygo.tv/
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Samsung