FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). But they're often nice panels aimed at serious running hours, without this sort of junk (which would give enterprise IT conniptions) and can have very useful feature support like 802.1x authentication which so many devices still lack. Players like NEC will even advertise their use of an RPi compute and wink at lack of spyware [0] for some of their products, but lots of major "smart TV" providers also have a commercial lineup.
I think they're well worth considering, particularly for the HN crowd, granted I suppose for people who truly want built-in netflix or the like without connecting something like a Roku or Apple TV maybe it's less optimal. But even they might change their tunes back to the concept of separate boxes and normal panels if they dislike all the ads and data tracking.
You can still get cheap ones. And by cheap I mean TLC/Hisense level quality displays. Walmart sells Sceptre's for low prices and have no smart features, best purchase I've made in years.
We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV.
Sure I don't get 120Hz fancyness but at least it's 4k and the picture is good enough for my consoles.
+1 to Sceptre TVs! Recently (past week) bought a 4k Sceptre TV and it was less than $200. 60hz, looks great, the smartest feature it has is a clock you have to set yourself.
Just make sure not to buy the android or roku ones!
I bought a Sceptre last year and one of the hilarious things about it was it had the "lite" Roku interface, just your input selections with no smart features. Those TV's are fantastic for the price assuming they don't fail (and even then it could be argued that it's still a good deal).
I bought a TCL with smart features and there's no ads and I just dont connect it to wifi.
The Firestick 4k Max I got for $75 advertises prime shows occasionally (unobtrusively) but the UI is 2x as fast as my Chromecast so I very happily use it w/ IPTV, Airplay, and streaming apps.
I was curious and looked up reviews for Sceptre, but according to some discussions on Reddit, they have build quality issues. One of the threads [0] had a discussion on picture quality and build quality issues.
Another subreddit [1] even has an automoderator comment that says getting a smart TV and not hooking it up to the internet is the best option. The automoderator also writes that if one is certain about going non-Smart, then one should "look at a projector or a Commercial Display. A projector means you will also 100% need audio with it. A Commercial Display or Hospitality TV you could pay up to twice or even more for the same TV (or worse) without smart features."
However, I'm not sure how reliable that automoderated comment on r/4kTV is.
I dont like 120Hz refresh, it looks weird. I see it a whole lot on bad 4k transfers of older movies, they're either doing a 3:2 pulldown or something else to up convert the scan rate, but no matter what it is, it makes the motion look weird and excessively fluid.
I ended up buying a Philips 55" gaming monitor instead of a TV. Seems to be the only way to get a high quality panel and proper HDR without spyware, most of the commercial displays I looked at didn't support HDR properly or had terrible panels.
Yeah, but I don't want a dumb TV. Or the side-effort of some moribund commercial line that will also cost a ton more.
You know what else kind of had this problem? Well, not the spyware as much, but just the crap software embedded: routers. OpenWRT appeared.
It appears most smart tvs are already running linux, but probably in the way that android phones are already running linux.
With android and smart tvs, the corps got a major foothold into managed computing platforms that they can control to do whatever spying was necessary. Firefox on the phone, ubuntu phone, etc, they couldn't break into Android, and nothing has broken into smart tvs.
But man if there was an OpenWRT I could replace my roku TVs with, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.
It's not just that, my relatives have an old LG smart TV that long ago stopped adding apps. If there was an open linux alternative, it probably would be getting updates and AppleTV and Disney Plus would be options on it.
Cursory searches have basically returned "man it would be hard, you'd need to know the board pretty well", yet ... aren't there armies of linux hackers that love hacking stuff like this? Seems like Smart TVs are a big, ubiquitous consumer item with privacy concerns that the linux hardware hacking community has treated with apathy. Which seems strange.
Maybe all the hackers think "eh, plug a raspberry pi into a free HDMI port" or "eh, build a media pc".
This is corporate big brother in your grandma's living room spying. This is freedom on the line, it's strange that the linux-as-hacking-freedom and the linux anticorporate crowd haven't jumped on this.
I worked at a place where they conference room TV's were showing ads for games, netflix. Everybody else looked at it as normal but my TV at home doesn't show ads, so it seemed ridiculously unprofessional to me. Just like when Windows shows ads in the start menu, etc. I don't see how people get used to it.
If you want a TV-priced display for use as a dumb monitor, just buy a TV and don't give it a wifi password. My main desktop monitor is a 43" Roku/TCL thing that is still running the factory firmware. Works great.
One issue with TV displays I didn't see mentioned here is glossiness. TVs are mostly glossy and monitors are usually matte. I strongly prefer the latter.
However those TVs are not easy to get and, like you said, they come with an increased price.
I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
I don't know if you have been following the news about Apple expanding its advertising business. If you don't want a corporation collecting data about your viewing, you could modify your approach slightly and try kodi.tv. I have Librelec running on a RPI with attached SSD as house media server. The add-ons catalog is large and growing, but it won't have all the channels you might want.
>I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
I'd be worried that's a losing battle long term though (maybe even short/medium term?), same with other hacks like running your own DNS and blackholing ad stuff that way. At the ultimate level, cellular modules and fixed data plans are getting real cheap, and for that matter for those living in denser urban/suburban areas I've heard people saying some stuff seems to be extremely aggressive about grabbing onto any WiFi they can find. But I could definitely see a point where everything comes with its own 4G module just for advertising usage (and maybe firmware updates so they can hang a fig leaf of "easier, no configuration!" over it). If we start having to talk Faraday cages for our TVs that's really hard to get around. Even purely in software they could use fixed DNS IPs to bypass simple user DNS, DoH to bypass users then trying to force all DNS traffic through their own, VPNs, and all the other ways everyone normally try to punch through aggressive firewalling with.
You're right that at present it's often still feasible to get a hostile TV then neuter it. But I think it's better to just not have a fundamentally malicious device inside your setup at all if it can be helped. To me that's worth some money up front, and I appreciate that it exists.
At the core and unfortunately it appears data harvesting and advertising really is quite profitable, and in a further grim twist those trying to avoid it might be even more valuable than the average. Which means the margins may exist on something like TVs to make it worth it to amoral manufacturers to get fairly nasty. That's a hard race as everything gets more and more integrated, vs just rewarding those who don't do it. Or else get laws passed with enough fines to change the equation!
It's only a matter of time until these span their own Amazon Sidewalk-like networks and then possibly use the neighbors smartphone as a gateway.
Like "my Samsung TV" <--> "neighbors Samsung TV" <--> 'neighbors Samsung Smartphone" (or skip the Smartphone if their TV is already connected without a properly set up firewall)
Do they, or do the consumer TVs come with a decreased price to make them more tempting as the manufacture knows they will make up that discount in selling the collected analytics?
There was an article back some time now that showed how one brand was making more from the data sells than from the TVs themselves.
I'm considering getting a 70" version whenever I get a house. While I've been renting I always just get the biggest and cheapest TV from the local electronics store.
Besides not having the usual crap, I would imagine these use higher quality component since the TV's might be on 24/7. Even that 50" at just over 1k doesn't seem that bad, that's usually what you would pay for a high end 50" anyways.
Which brands of smart TV show ads? I live in the UK and I've had three different brands of smart TV (Philips, Samsung and Toshiba) and my experience with all of them has been pretty good. Netflix, YouTube, etc. have worked pretty well and I haven't seen any ads that weren't linked to the apps themselves. Perhaps they're tracking me in ways I don't know about, though?
Samsung frame.
Hardware: It has physical netflix, prime, somethingelse buttons which immediately switch to that app without asking if you want to close the current app. Frustrating when you accidentally sit on your remote. So i modified my remote, put tape underneath the buttons to disable them.
Software:
In menu ads, sometimes, for some crap thing like tennistv. I have no idea how to disable it.
The fucking frame store is inbetween apps and starting point of the menu. Alyways need to do 4 (or 5, depending on ad) times to the right before being able to run the app you want.
It started playing samsung tv. After a week. I hate tv. Took me a day to get annoyed enough and then spend an hour to disable the shouting XL Americans.
So, typical Samsung. Software ux just sucks. Luckily a tv is mostly turned off* and that is why I bought it; hardware looks great when it’s off.
*off: it always switches to the frame mode. It is a laughable gimmick. Ever seen a painting giving light? You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
We need to save energy here in Europe. @Samsung: please fix it.
I thought i would not use thr smart functions, but I use it a lot. Tune-in radio and spotify work great. Also a lot of youtube and national tv app are pretty good. Airplay works fine too.
Recommend it? No. Happy with it… just enough to not return it.
My Samsung TV shows ads in the bottom app bar. Or did until it was disconnected from the internet. Crappiest TV I've ever had, slow and just all around a bad experience. I would love a dumb TV with decent panel in UK! Any suggestions are welcome.
FWIW we just upgraded to a 98" NEC "commercial display" C981Q and couldn't be happier with it. I looked into the Raspi compute module but we just have a PC and some Crestron gear running it all, Shure ceiling tile mic and a vladdio cam.
I looked at an LG one, 65EP5G. It's around 10x the cost of other 65" LG OLED displays. I get that it might be higher quality, but not 10x higher, and I know there's some revenue from ads, but not $10k.
> FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc.
Do they have tuners? I've heard many of those are missing them.
If this is a major concern for you, I think you'll be happy to hear that tuners are ridiculously cheap, with built in recording capabilities for under $30. I suspect if you're in the market for one of these pricier TVs and willing to pay the premium then the extra cost for an external tuner unit will be not be a major factor. For cleanliness you can attach it to the rear of the TV and use short cables.
It would be interesting to know how many people use the tuner in their TV rather than cable, streaming, or the one in their DVR. Our TiVo use was supplanted by DIRECTV streaming in the past few years, but I don’t think I’ve used the built in tuner in about 15 years.
Is there any regulatory reason to include tuners in displays?
For the technically minded, not neccessary. Just buy a large computer monitor and connect it with a tiny computer. It's a hassle but the system is really yours, especially if you choose carefully what to install.
That's what I thought we well, but TFA seems to suggest that some TVs may overlay ads on top of any video source:
"Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen and matched them to an existing database of content to find out what a user was watching and when"
"pop-ups would reportedly appear halfway through the show and be injected into the users' own content, such as home videos"
Android TV now also comes with forced ads (since rebranding to Google TV).
I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.
The problem is that you cannot turn off much of the smart tv junk, including things like ads. Paired with features such as the tv refusing to work if you don't periodically give it a valid internet connection (for it to send its cached metrics and download new ads, of course), which is slowly but surely becoming more common, and you're only marginally better off than just using the smart tv features.
If you care about privacy absolutely do not get an Android TV dongle. Get an Apple TV (though yes, they cost more. Maybe find a used one on eBay if you're particularly price sensitive)
> Some may argue that there's no need to be dramatic and that there's nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then.
Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it's something else I'm canceling and going back to P2P. Fuck 'em.
This probably sounds over the top, but at some point it feels like they're saying they own you. You're paying them for one service, and they'll unilaterally decide it's not enough and they are going to make more money on you. But they don't do it via a price increase that gives you a fair opportunity to decide on the value exchange. They just start shoving this stuff on you.
And worst of all, it's your time they're taking to do it. The one thing there's never enough of, and that you'll never get back.
A lot of consumer-facing tech follows the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. "I want to know everything about you and who you talk to." "I decide what's best for you." "You can't leave."
I can't help but conclude that the engineers complicit with this are deeply broken people.
It's not just our time! It's also our limited attention. They think they have a right to it, they even think they can sell it off to the highest bidder. As if it belonged to them.
Desire is the cause of suffering. Advertising, in its way, generates desire where there was once none and therefore causes suffering. And, it does so on industrial mass-scale!
Worst of all, there is no mechanism, at all, to restore the bliss advertising has destroyed. Because, money cannot buy confidence, friendship, fulfillment, or (most famously) happiness. So, once exposed, you have no way to regain what has been obliterated from your soul.
Advertising is not harmless, adblocking is not immoral, and your well-being is more important than anyone’s profits.
Yup. It's kind of incredible how these platforms are fucking up their services. Like, all they had to do was to provide the content in a way more convenient than pirating, but they've managed to go down a path where the experience get more and more user hostile by the day.
Ditto. I got rid of windows shortly after they introduced ads in the OS. It really doesn't matter to me that there are technical ways of blocking them, I don't want to have to think about it or play cat and mouse with them.
When it comes to websites I really wouldn't care if they blocked my access because I use an ad blocker. I don't feel any entitlement to their content and they have no entitlement to what displays on my machine.
Also, knowing which ads you've seen is more valuable than the shows you've watched. Think how much advertisers are paying TV manufacturers to know the conversion rate of their latest TV ads.
It should be mentioned that "advertising" is not "showing an ad". it is collecting and selling detailed information about people's activities and behaviors.
Amazon Prime Video showing preroll ads is massively dumb on their part. I'm already paying you and already actively using your service. I specifically have a Prime subscription because it gives me access to a huge catalog of obscure sci-fi & horror films. Really awful stuff. I'm not interested in the latest content you paid some outrageous amount to acquire the licensing rights to.
If you're paying for Twitch Prime, but still getting ads, then what are you paying for exactly? Less ads?
Sadly I think it's what happens when companies are pushed to generate more and more profit each year. So you you start just a few ads to the paying users, because: "They won't mind one short ad" and then suddenly it's all ads all the time.
It does make you wonder exactly how ads are so profitable and which products are paying the whole thing. It almost can't be electronics, because ads apparently help finance TVs and phones as well.
I dumped Prime a couple months ago. So far the only consequence has been having to use an alternate platform to watch a specific movie and I have much less random "stuff" arriving in my mailbox/front porch now that I have to give some thought about shipping costs for cheap items.
So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available.
and this:
> What’s more, if the Disney+ profile being used is associated with a child, no ads will play.
A clarification for the advertising to kids things. Looks like it's no ads to preschool kids
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
At home, I've never connected my TV to my network. The few firmware updates I've needed to do were applied using a thumb drive, and I use an AppleTV as my interface.
When I travel, I bring along an AppleTV and plug the HDMI port into their set. This lets me keep the services I subscribe-to and use them with their display. This has worked great until my most-recent rental, which had a RokuTV -- presumably setup on Wifi.
When content was streaming from my AppleTV, Roku would overlay a panel along the bottom-part of the screen proposing that I can watch what I'm currently watching from a variety of other providers. This must mean that the TV set is analyzing the video or audio signal to fingerprint what the content contained, then matching it against a library of content to feed into its profile of my use.
This is the first time I've seen something like this. I'd always assumed that if you used the TV's UI and if it was connected to the internet, then you'd probably be subject to their ads and data analysis, but it never crossed my mind that they'd perform the same data-analysis over any signal passing through its silicon.
Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same?
> Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same?
As far as I can tell, it's not only commonplace but ubiquitous for any new TV you buy these days.
I recently moved and had to buy a number of TV sets over the years to outfit various guest rooms. All LG and Samsung TVs I've setup over the past 3 years have a "feature" like this you can manually disable if you dig down through menus enough.
Then every firmware update the flag gets reset to enabled of course :)
My LG TV plays movies from USB stick and never tried a trick like this. Not gonna lie, those were mostly relatively old movies, like LOTR or Heat, but also latest Predator installment.
Not everyone lives in higher density housing, so open wifi networks are not always a given. Also a built-in cellular modem would be antithetical to having a lower cost TV set based on ad subsidies.
I would worry more about mesh networks like Amazon sidewalk
> I'd always assumed that if you used the TV's UI and if it was connected to the internet, then you'd probably be subject to their ads and data analysis, but it never crossed my mind that they'd perform the same data-analysis over any signal passing through its silicon.
This is discussed in TFA. It's "ACR" (Automatic Content Recognition), and it applies to anything you watch on that TV, via any mechanism you try. Yes, if you hook up your AppleTV and look at your own videos, the TV is watching what you watch.
Today, it's comparing a fingerprint to a database. Tomorrow a new model or a firmware update will have it shipping your pixels to the mothership and doing things like determining who else watched the same video.
And if this isn't enough, you also have to ask yourself: What is your SmartTV doing with the camera facing your hotel room and the built-in microphone?
If a manufacturer uses ACR on content you brought in through the HDMI port, do you trust them with a camera and microphone pointing into your hotel room or home?
If you do trust them not to abuse that, do you trust them to keep all their TVs up-to-date with security patches to prevent hackers from exploiting them and taking over the cameras and microphones?
---
I can do this all day. Remember, it's not paranoia if there really is a trillion-dollar surveillance capitalism industry out there buying and selling data, and laundering data so that companies can buy it while having plausible deniability that they were knowingly involved in any illegal or brand-damaging shenanigans.
> What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
On some screens, signal processing has been significantly improved in later firmware versions. New features are also not uncommon, such as VRR and HFR being added after release[1]. This is particularity nice for modern consoles.
>What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
My display had an issue where the video modes necessary for the XBOX Series X were not working properly. The display would drop-out in some 4K modes. It's stable now, so I haven't checked/updated anything in about a year.
My Sony TV came with the newest ATSC 3.0 TV tuner hardware. The software wasn't fully QC'd at launch. They put out a firmware update about 2 months after I bought mine to fully enable the tuner software and hardware.
Otherwise, it's been app updates and some improved HDR processing.
I love my ATV 4K. But it’s useless for traveling since hotels require you to login and the AppleTV doesn’t have a browser. The Roku sticks get around this by temporarily exposing a pass through wifi connection that you can connect to from your phone/computer and log in to your hotel’s wifi.
The only work around with the AppleTV is to buy a second travel router.
With tvOS 15.4, "Captive Wi-Fi network support on tvOS allows you to use your iPhone or iPad to connect your Apple TV to networks that need additional sign-in steps, like at hotels or dorms."
For travel, I have a Raspberry Pi with a second wifi stick to transmute hotel wifi into my own local network. This avoids having to modify every phone/tablet/Chromebook/Switch the family has in tow or fight with buggy hotspots. I keep meaning to add a VPN back to home (mostly for performance) but I haven't got around to it yet.
An upgrade I keep looking for is an external directional antenna so I can get a stronger signal when RVing.
I have a spare AppleTV for travelling and have never had a problem connecting it, even before tvOS 15.4. The router suggestions are also overcomplicating it. Just connect your phone to the WiFi, then choose the same network on the AppleTV and stand near it - a sheet pops up on your phone asking if you want to share the password with the AppleTV.
>When content was streaming from my AppleTV, Roku would overlay a panel along the bottom-part of the screen proposing that I can watch what I'm currently watching from a variety of other providers. This must mean that the TV set is analyzing the video or audio signal to fingerprint what the content contained, then matching it against a library of content to feed into its profile of my use.
My Roku TV specifically said it didn't analyze HDMI inputs, only Roku channel watching
I'm really glad that our "smart TV" just pre-dates all of this stuff. It can't connect to a network - it doesn't have that functionality. Firmware updates? No idea if there are any.
same, except I go even further and instead other online thingy I just use USB driver loaded with movies/TV shows for me and kids, I don't understand nowadays people addiction to streaming, offline experience is much better/smoother, i decide what I wanna watch on computer and just load it to drive
but I guess some people can have moral reasons to pay for some service and/or it's not legal in their country to download and watch video content for free (though many EU countries allow this)
The new Google TV launcher complete with ads on an expensive TV or a Shield is getting a hammering in the ratings, shows how little they care about customer feedback.
Bonus points for making the preview images in the store not show the ads you'll see. If any other app tried to mislead users like that they'd be banned from the store.
Although it's not like we have a choice, they've also disabled the option to change the launcher on the newest Android TV version as well to coincide with adding the ads on the home screen.
I get we need to have ads to pay for services but come on, the TVs they're doing this to are not your cheap Aldi ones, they're high end Sony Bravias. Most of the ads are even for other paid services like Disney+ and Netflix.
I have the same problems and it enraged me. It enraged me to the point where I back flashed the nvidia and blocked all domains to .google.com at the pihole for that mac address. Above that all NAT for DNS and blocking DoH and DoT. I do not need "new firmware" versions as the software I run on nvidia shield is just fine.
I unlock the shield, manually install the apps I want updated and ignore the rest. It has no external internet so meh if its got zero day exploits open.
The first time I saw a TV advertised with Google as the OS I laughed out loud thinking "who in their right mind would buy that?!", but then again, quite a lot of people buy a phone with it so I guess there's enough people out there who simply don't understand why it's problematic.
Downfall implies a failure or ending, it seems like they're still selling like hotcakes. This is why we need regulation to save us from surveillance, most consumers want cheap and don't understand/care that they're selling their privacy instead.
That's the beauty of great click bait. A word or idiom can mean different things now to people from different social nets. "Downfall" here could mean in terms of sales, or it could mean in industry reputation, or even more things even the author isn't aware of. Either way the headline has apparently tested well probably due to its controversial meaning.
I quite like my android tv on my lg display. It’s responsive with a nice solid feeling remote. I think there are ads on the screen but I’ve never given them more than a passing glance except once or twice I was recommended a good tv show. Most people outside of the HN crowd really don’t think about this stuff at all.
Any TV sold in the EU must adhere to the GDPR, so there has to be some sort of opt-out for tracking (and yes, GDPR opt-out also applies for "anonymized" profiling)
My LG TV has opt-in for tracking. That said, a lot of stuff just refuses to work unless I accept it. I refuse to use those features. It's a lose-lose situation.
So what legislation? How many consumers even knowing that they are being tracked and advertised to are willing to pay the price so their hardware, software, and services come ad free?
If the US follows what the GDPR did, we will just have pop ups before every TV show asking us will we allow tracking.
Your downvoters don't know that that's exactly what happens. I see cookie consent popups on the TV, every time. I have no idea where they are coming from.
The existing options for monitors, suitable for use as a TV, are extremely limited. For TVs 55" and 65" are common, for monitors there were just a few, which were dumb TVs basically. And then there are bigger sizes, different types of panels (there are no 4K QD-OLED monitors for example) that are not available for monitors.
I think, if telemetry and ads are concern, buying TV without connecting it to the internet (using Apple TV or a homelab media server) is a better choice for many TV buyers.
Frankly at this point I'd just avoid buying anything from Samsung. If there's one company that's displayed consistent disregard for data privacy, it's them.
I haven't had one since 2006. I haven't missed it, nor do I watch any streaming services apart from the occasional documentary that generally leaves me disappointed.
We are doing that. We have a projector. In its case under the table in the living room.
Setting it up increases the transaction cost of watching a show/movie. The result is that we only put it up for the few cases when we deem it worth it.
I’ve done the homelab media server. I did my first one back in 2006 with a Mac Mini running Front Row. But this is 2022. If you want a set top box without tracking, just buy an AppleTV. It cost more because Apple makes money off of hardware and not advertising.
Yes I know the reports about Apple getting even deeper into advertising. Yes it saddens me.
Digital Signage Displays are basically fancy monitors available as large as you want. But they'll cost you a pretty penny, being designed for 24/7 operation and without the ad-subsidy of smart TVs. Maybe hunt for a used one. Or conference room monitors, as suggested elsewhere in the thread.
And it will probably stay feasible as long as the number of people who do it is relatively miniscule. But economics being economics, we’re freeloading off the customers who hook their smart TVs up to the internet and provide manufacturers with enough revenue that they don’t care about us.
But should the practice become widespread and manufacturers notice a material impact on their revenues, or should growth stall and manufacturers start looking to squeeze more revenue out of customers, they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled, and work out deals with wireless carriers to have a private data channel as Amazon does with its kindles.
my 4K “smart” TV is the first I ever bought, and I believe the last. By the time I will want to replace it, I believe manufacturers will have closed this “loophole” and it will be impossible to keep a new TV from phoning home.
TVs will soon, if not already, come with cell phones; the ad revenue is larger than what they are charged for the cell phone IP traffic. TVs also reportedly use any open WiFi they can see, and use DoH to make DNS-based ad blocking impossible.
Some vendors are also just less scummy in turning it off and the extent of ad services. Sony TVs are Google TV-based and explicitly ask for Samba (not SMB) TV analytics (and can be declined), and you can just outright disable the APK in settings. No ads in menus like Samsung (you do get the Google TV "recommendations" but that's a whole other problem).
I'm the opposite of that. I will go to pretty great lengths to avoid ads. They are incredibly annoying and often actively stupid. I am so much happier now that I almost never see a TV ad.
FWIW, mobile ads are worse. Avoiding them is easier, though. I almost always tell it when to show the ad and I can just look away with it muted for a while and do something else. I'm usually already watching TV while I play ad-based games anyhow. But if I had to actually watch the ads, I'd just stop playing those games.
A home served setup can be as simple as a Shield Pro with a hard drive attached. It's a lot simpler than 2009 for me, when I was running FreeBSD desktop with nvidia drivers painfully installed and a wireless keyboard.
haha - I rec just getting the cheapest option at ultra.cc ($5-6/month) and load whatever apps you want on it (e.g., rutorrent/sabnzbd) connecting that to your media player/app/stick of choice (e.g., firestick with kodi) - haven't tried it with super high bitrate content but seems pretty quick
I interviewed with them years ago. The technological challenges seemed cool but ethically I wouldn't want to work on tracking what people are watching.
Sometimes I have this interesting thought, that someday, when even the oldest people alive will not know or will not remebered how things worked back then. Then someone, or a group of people, will suddenly rediscover, or reinvent (as we always do throughout history) things that today still exist. Maybe someone will come up with "shops where you are served by real people", or paying for content you watch. Or a "shopping mall, but without cameras" ("but who will be watching me?"). Or a vehicle you can drive yourself.
I know it's a silly philosophical thought. But what it points to, for me, is that data harvesting works because it trades privacy for convenience, and even if it's too little, there are ways to opt-out (the trivial case being opting out of convenience). But it's a much too thin line to thread.
People are aware of the massive commercial surveillance. They just don't care. Human society is built upon trust or its lack thereof. When trust can't be established, surveillance arises. It only becomes a moral problem when it is done asymmetrically, and in an unprecedented scale.
When is too much too much? When your TV starts showing ads, even when unplugged from electricity? When you have to watch an ad to start your EV car (unless you purchase the Quick Start+ package for 9.99/mo)? You can take a break from ads today. That, in a way, ensures that you can consume ads for longer. But industry seems to be moving in the direction of eventually leaving you with no way to opt out. Then, the convenience might not be worth it anymore. That means either a market demand for ad-free products, and a subsequent return to pay-for-content business model, or some sort of social turmoil.
Or maybe that's their plan to get us to consume less: just stick everything with insane amounts of obnoxious ads, so we won't buy anything anyway.
Readit News
I think they're well worth considering, particularly for the HN crowd, granted I suppose for people who truly want built-in netflix or the like without connecting something like a Roku or Apple TV maybe it's less optimal. But even they might change their tunes back to the concept of separate boxes and normal panels if they dislike all the ads and data tracking.
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0: https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays/me501
We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV.
Sure I don't get 120Hz fancyness but at least it's 4k and the picture is good enough for my consoles.
Just make sure not to buy the android or roku ones!
The Firestick 4k Max I got for $75 advertises prime shows occasionally (unobtrusively) but the UI is 2x as fast as my Chromecast so I very happily use it w/ IPTV, Airplay, and streaming apps.
Another subreddit [1] even has an automoderator comment that says getting a smart TV and not hooking it up to the internet is the best option. The automoderator also writes that if one is certain about going non-Smart, then one should "look at a projector or a Commercial Display. A projector means you will also 100% need audio with it. A Commercial Display or Hospitality TV you could pay up to twice or even more for the same TV (or worse) without smart features."
However, I'm not sure how reliable that automoderated comment on r/4kTV is.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/hometheater/comments/a25d5m/are_sce...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/4kTV/comments/qt9wvf/nonsmart_tvs/
The curse of smart TVs, I swear.
My TV pops an error and says it's still powering on if I try to change inputs right after turning it on.
Yet, if it is turned on by a device, like I begin casting to my chromecast, or turn on my xbox, it'll go to that input immediately no problem.
My Samsung TV just seems buggy. Certain apps like YouTube will choke on certain videos, down to the point of just randomly rebooting the TV.
And newer apps (like Peacock) never get released for the version of the software that runs on my TV.
I guess at some point we'll just either buy a new TV, or maybe now that Apple 'fixed' the remote I'll dig the Apple TV back out.
https://i.imgur.com/D3p8bCA.png
That's amazing!
If my partner wasn’t so hell bent in decor when choosing a TV, I would have loved one of these!
You know what else kind of had this problem? Well, not the spyware as much, but just the crap software embedded: routers. OpenWRT appeared.
It appears most smart tvs are already running linux, but probably in the way that android phones are already running linux.
With android and smart tvs, the corps got a major foothold into managed computing platforms that they can control to do whatever spying was necessary. Firefox on the phone, ubuntu phone, etc, they couldn't break into Android, and nothing has broken into smart tvs.
But man if there was an OpenWRT I could replace my roku TVs with, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.
It's not just that, my relatives have an old LG smart TV that long ago stopped adding apps. If there was an open linux alternative, it probably would be getting updates and AppleTV and Disney Plus would be options on it.
Cursory searches have basically returned "man it would be hard, you'd need to know the board pretty well", yet ... aren't there armies of linux hackers that love hacking stuff like this? Seems like Smart TVs are a big, ubiquitous consumer item with privacy concerns that the linux hardware hacking community has treated with apathy. Which seems strange.
Maybe all the hackers think "eh, plug a raspberry pi into a free HDMI port" or "eh, build a media pc".
This is corporate big brother in your grandma's living room spying. This is freedom on the line, it's strange that the linux-as-hacking-freedom and the linux anticorporate crowd haven't jumped on this.
First result from brave search: https://www.samsung.com/levant/business/smart-hospitality-di...
I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
I'd be worried that's a losing battle long term though (maybe even short/medium term?), same with other hacks like running your own DNS and blackholing ad stuff that way. At the ultimate level, cellular modules and fixed data plans are getting real cheap, and for that matter for those living in denser urban/suburban areas I've heard people saying some stuff seems to be extremely aggressive about grabbing onto any WiFi they can find. But I could definitely see a point where everything comes with its own 4G module just for advertising usage (and maybe firmware updates so they can hang a fig leaf of "easier, no configuration!" over it). If we start having to talk Faraday cages for our TVs that's really hard to get around. Even purely in software they could use fixed DNS IPs to bypass simple user DNS, DoH to bypass users then trying to force all DNS traffic through their own, VPNs, and all the other ways everyone normally try to punch through aggressive firewalling with.
You're right that at present it's often still feasible to get a hostile TV then neuter it. But I think it's better to just not have a fundamentally malicious device inside your setup at all if it can be helped. To me that's worth some money up front, and I appreciate that it exists.
At the core and unfortunately it appears data harvesting and advertising really is quite profitable, and in a further grim twist those trying to avoid it might be even more valuable than the average. Which means the margins may exist on something like TVs to make it worth it to amoral manufacturers to get fairly nasty. That's a hard race as everything gets more and more integrated, vs just rewarding those who don't do it. Or else get laws passed with enough fines to change the equation!
Like "my Samsung TV" <--> "neighbors Samsung TV" <--> 'neighbors Samsung Smartphone" (or skip the Smartphone if their TV is already connected without a properly set up firewall)
Do they, or do the consumer TVs come with a decreased price to make them more tempting as the manufacture knows they will make up that discount in selling the collected analytics?
There was an article back some time now that showed how one brand was making more from the data sells than from the TVs themselves.
Edit: It didn't take as long to find an example:
https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/328967-vizio-makes-2...
Besides not having the usual crap, I would imagine these use higher quality component since the TV's might be on 24/7. Even that 50" at just over 1k doesn't seem that bad, that's usually what you would pay for a high end 50" anyways.
Software: In menu ads, sometimes, for some crap thing like tennistv. I have no idea how to disable it.
The fucking frame store is inbetween apps and starting point of the menu. Alyways need to do 4 (or 5, depending on ad) times to the right before being able to run the app you want.
It started playing samsung tv. After a week. I hate tv. Took me a day to get annoyed enough and then spend an hour to disable the shouting XL Americans.
So, typical Samsung. Software ux just sucks. Luckily a tv is mostly turned off* and that is why I bought it; hardware looks great when it’s off.
*off: it always switches to the frame mode. It is a laughable gimmick. Ever seen a painting giving light? You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.
We need to save energy here in Europe. @Samsung: please fix it.
I thought i would not use thr smart functions, but I use it a lot. Tune-in radio and spotify work great. Also a lot of youtube and national tv app are pretty good. Airplay works fine too.
Recommend it? No. Happy with it… just enough to not return it.
"Press Green to see the show from the beginning on iPlayer"
You can't turn it off and will only go away if you remove iPlayer. While it's not an advert, it's still annoying spyware.
It was $8500 + 1500 freight IIRC
Do they have tuners? I've heard many of those are missing them.
Dead Comment
Is there any regulatory reason to include tuners in displays?
"Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen and matched them to an existing database of content to find out what a user was watching and when"
"pop-ups would reportedly appear halfway through the show and be injected into the users' own content, such as home videos"
I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.
seems odd
Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it's something else I'm canceling and going back to P2P. Fuck 'em.
It indiscriminately pollutes the environment, and inflicts harm on non participants by incentivising unbridled data collection.
Society needs to pay directly for content.
I’ll hold my drink while you convince America why it should pay 10x for a TV because ads are bad.
This probably sounds over the top, but at some point it feels like they're saying they own you. You're paying them for one service, and they'll unilaterally decide it's not enough and they are going to make more money on you. But they don't do it via a price increase that gives you a fair opportunity to decide on the value exchange. They just start shoving this stuff on you.
And worst of all, it's your time they're taking to do it. The one thing there's never enough of, and that you'll never get back.
I can't help but conclude that the engineers complicit with this are deeply broken people.
Worst of all, there is no mechanism, at all, to restore the bliss advertising has destroyed. Because, money cannot buy confidence, friendship, fulfillment, or (most famously) happiness. So, once exposed, you have no way to regain what has been obliterated from your soul.
Advertising is not harmless, adblocking is not immoral, and your well-being is more important than anyone’s profits.
When it comes to websites I really wouldn't care if they blocked my access because I use an ad blocker. I don't feel any entitlement to their content and they have no entitlement to what displays on my machine.
Not just that, it also means having thousands of companies know every show or movie you ever watched:
> [tv manufacturer] shared IP addresses of its consumers with the data aggregators who then would find a person or a household to which it belonged.
I mute the volume for ads to take away some of that edge. It's one of the few things I can control about it.
Sadly I think it's what happens when companies are pushed to generate more and more profit each year. So you you start just a few ads to the paying users, because: "They won't mind one short ad" and then suddenly it's all ads all the time.
It does make you wonder exactly how ads are so profitable and which products are paying the whole thing. It almost can't be electronics, because ads apparently help finance TVs and phones as well.
The best explanation I can come up with is that it wastes my time, and I value time above all else.
I have never bought or purchased anything advertised online. And nowadays I consciously try to avoid products that I see on online ads.
Yes.
I've already bought the service... why show me ads for it?
... just googled it:
So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available.
and this:
> What’s more, if the Disney+ profile being used is associated with a child, no ads will play.
source: https://tvline.com/2022/05/17/disney-plus-with-ads-subscript...
edit:
A clarification for the advertising to kids things. Looks like it's no ads to preschool kids
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
source: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/disney-plus-advertisin...
When I travel, I bring along an AppleTV and plug the HDMI port into their set. This lets me keep the services I subscribe-to and use them with their display. This has worked great until my most-recent rental, which had a RokuTV -- presumably setup on Wifi.
When content was streaming from my AppleTV, Roku would overlay a panel along the bottom-part of the screen proposing that I can watch what I'm currently watching from a variety of other providers. This must mean that the TV set is analyzing the video or audio signal to fingerprint what the content contained, then matching it against a library of content to feed into its profile of my use.
This is the first time I've seen something like this. I'd always assumed that if you used the TV's UI and if it was connected to the internet, then you'd probably be subject to their ads and data analysis, but it never crossed my mind that they'd perform the same data-analysis over any signal passing through its silicon.
Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same?
As far as I can tell, it's not only commonplace but ubiquitous for any new TV you buy these days.
I recently moved and had to buy a number of TV sets over the years to outfit various guest rooms. All LG and Samsung TVs I've setup over the past 3 years have a "feature" like this you can manually disable if you dig down through menus enough.
Then every firmware update the flag gets reset to enabled of course :)
This should be criminal
The next (already there?) steps are the TV automatically scanning for open wifi network to leverage and/or having a built in 4g connection.
https://www.techradar.com/news/samsungs-5g-8k-tv-promises-to...
https://www.techradar.com/news/huawei-is-developing-a-5g-8k-...
I would worry more about mesh networks like Amazon sidewalk
This is discussed in TFA. It's "ACR" (Automatic Content Recognition), and it applies to anything you watch on that TV, via any mechanism you try. Yes, if you hook up your AppleTV and look at your own videos, the TV is watching what you watch.
Today, it's comparing a fingerprint to a database. Tomorrow a new model or a firmware update will have it shipping your pixels to the mothership and doing things like determining who else watched the same video.
And if this isn't enough, you also have to ask yourself: What is your SmartTV doing with the camera facing your hotel room and the built-in microphone?
If a manufacturer uses ACR on content you brought in through the HDMI port, do you trust them with a camera and microphone pointing into your hotel room or home?
If you do trust them not to abuse that, do you trust them to keep all their TVs up-to-date with security patches to prevent hackers from exploiting them and taking over the cameras and microphones?
---
I can do this all day. Remember, it's not paranoia if there really is a trillion-dollar surveillance capitalism industry out there buying and selling data, and laundering data so that companies can buy it while having plausible deniability that they were knowingly involved in any illegal or brand-damaging shenanigans.
What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
On some screens, signal processing has been significantly improved in later firmware versions. New features are also not uncommon, such as VRR and HFR being added after release[1]. This is particularity nice for modern consoles.
[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
My display had an issue where the video modes necessary for the XBOX Series X were not working properly. The display would drop-out in some 4K modes. It's stable now, so I haven't checked/updated anything in about a year.
Otherwise, it's been app updates and some improved HDR processing.
The only work around with the AppleTV is to buy a second travel router.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvos-release-notes...
An upgrade I keep looking for is an external directional antenna so I can get a stronger signal when RVing.
Deleted Comment
My Roku TV specifically said it didn't analyze HDMI inputs, only Roku channel watching
Dead Comment
Yuck, yuck, yuck.
but I guess some people can have moral reasons to pay for some service and/or it's not legal in their country to download and watch video content for free (though many EU countries allow this)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Bonus points for making the preview images in the store not show the ads you'll see. If any other app tried to mislead users like that they'd be banned from the store.
Although it's not like we have a choice, they've also disabled the option to change the launcher on the newest Android TV version as well to coincide with adding the ads on the home screen.
I get we need to have ads to pay for services but come on, the TVs they're doing this to are not your cheap Aldi ones, they're high end Sony Bravias. Most of the ads are even for other paid services like Disney+ and Netflix.
I unlock the shield, manually install the apps I want updated and ignore the rest. It has no external internet so meh if its got zero day exploits open.
e.g. https://www.sharpconsumer.uk/electronics/tv/non-smart-tv-hd-...
(Edit: size and resolution admittedly not great)
Looks like the ads worked.
This does not stop companies from making it very difficult to stay opted out, or to disregard GDPR entirely. After all, enforcement is very rare.
If the US follows what the GDPR did, we will just have pop ups before every TV show asking us will we allow tracking.
Ideally we'd include in the law the provision to say no once for some extended period of time. CAN-SPAM is a precedent for this, I believe.
Buy a large/modern computer monitor and connect it to your homelab’s media server.
Literally there is no need for a smart TV so long as you are capable of setting up a small homelab.
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-announce...
Deleted Comment
When i say 'TV' i also mean to include Netflix and Hulu and other services serving the same purpose.
What next the old Slashdot meme - “I haven’t owned a TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV?”
Setting it up increases the transaction cost of watching a show/movie. The result is that we only put it up for the few cases when we deem it worth it.
And when we do, the experience is awesome.
I’ve done the homelab media server. I did my first one back in 2006 with a Mac Mini running Front Row. But this is 2022. If you want a set top box without tracking, just buy an AppleTV. It cost more because Apple makes money off of hardware and not advertising.
Yes I know the reports about Apple getting even deeper into advertising. Yes it saddens me.
Not cheap though.
And it will probably stay feasible as long as the number of people who do it is relatively miniscule. But economics being economics, we’re freeloading off the customers who hook their smart TVs up to the internet and provide manufacturers with enough revenue that they don’t care about us.
But should the practice become widespread and manufacturers notice a material impact on their revenues, or should growth stall and manufacturers start looking to squeeze more revenue out of customers, they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled, and work out deals with wireless carriers to have a private data channel as Amazon does with its kindles.
my 4K “smart” TV is the first I ever bought, and I believe the last. By the time I will want to replace it, I believe manufacturers will have closed this “loophole” and it will be impossible to keep a new TV from phoning home.
It literally will not work for any input source -- including OTA TV -- until it has been hooked to a network where it can register itself.
It appears to work afterwards without a network connection... but I cannot recommend HiSense at all.
The nice part is that I can control the tuner with the same remote as the TV.
The not so nice part: my TV is now connected to the internet.
FWIW, mobile ads are worse. Avoiding them is easier, though. I almost always tell it when to show the ad and I can just look away with it muted for a while and do something else. I'm usually already watching TV while I play ad-based games anyhow. But if I had to actually watch the ads, I'd just stop playing those games.
These days there is nothing more than plug and play..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/business/media/tv-viewer-...
And the Pi-Hole list you want is here: https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist
no thanks
Sometimes I have this interesting thought, that someday, when even the oldest people alive will not know or will not remebered how things worked back then. Then someone, or a group of people, will suddenly rediscover, or reinvent (as we always do throughout history) things that today still exist. Maybe someone will come up with "shops where you are served by real people", or paying for content you watch. Or a "shopping mall, but without cameras" ("but who will be watching me?"). Or a vehicle you can drive yourself.
I know it's a silly philosophical thought. But what it points to, for me, is that data harvesting works because it trades privacy for convenience, and even if it's too little, there are ways to opt-out (the trivial case being opting out of convenience). But it's a much too thin line to thread.
People are aware of the massive commercial surveillance. They just don't care. Human society is built upon trust or its lack thereof. When trust can't be established, surveillance arises. It only becomes a moral problem when it is done asymmetrically, and in an unprecedented scale.
When is too much too much? When your TV starts showing ads, even when unplugged from electricity? When you have to watch an ad to start your EV car (unless you purchase the Quick Start+ package for 9.99/mo)? You can take a break from ads today. That, in a way, ensures that you can consume ads for longer. But industry seems to be moving in the direction of eventually leaving you with no way to opt out. Then, the convenience might not be worth it anymore. That means either a market demand for ad-free products, and a subsequent return to pay-for-content business model, or some sort of social turmoil.
Or maybe that's their plan to get us to consume less: just stick everything with insane amounts of obnoxious ads, so we won't buy anything anyway.