Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.

First thing I thought of, Idiocracy, love that movie.

There is a certain unfortunate irony in the realization that one of the easiest ways to avoid this kind of thing is to buy a commercial digital signage panel intended for advertising instead of a consumer TV.

My TV doesn't get connected to the internet.

If I connect it then eventually it will update to a version of the OS that is slow, buggy and all the apps will be out of support regardless.

If I airgap the TV and use a computer it is good until too many pixels burn out or someone yeets something into it.

I only connect to internet if my tv needs an update. Generally hardware inside TVs are super slow too.

Do I have Nvidia shield connected that been debloated with a simple launcher, which is connected to my router that's running a VPN + DNS filter.

I don't have a TV. I have a beamer as a screen for my PC, playing media with Kodi from my NAS, which runs Radarr (for movies) and Sonarr (for series) to download using usenet. I don't have to give consent for the stupid agreements from streaming services, I'm not limited by them either, I don't have to pay 10 different services to see everything I want. I pay for usenet, VPN and indexers. My VPN (Proton) blocks ads, trackers and malware. I watch YouTube using the Grayjay app (including sponsor block). I live ad free. I have more rights, freedom and access by piracy then I would have by paying those fucked up companies.

I don't want to pirate, I want an honest transaction where I pay just money so I would own the content I bought. Instead I have to pay money, agree to have no rights, give all my personal information which they are free to sell, all for limited access to watch content I do not own. Fuck that. Piracy it is.

Whenever I see an honest company providing a decent service, I gladly give them my money. Even if it's kind of expensive. They deserve to exist. I gladly pay for quality. Like Proton for example. Larian studios, I wish I could give them more money. They deserve every penny I payed for baldur's gate 3, I even bought the useless deluxe pack just because they deserve it. It Takes Two is a game I pirated. It is so good, I wanted to purchase it to support the devs. It was on sale, so I waited for the sale to end before purchasing it. Sadly it's not on GoG so I still do not own it, because with Steam you just pay for access to a game you do not own.

I only pirate to avoid asshole companies and ads. I do not wish to pirate, I feel forced to do so.

That's why I love projectors, they almost never have "smart" features built in. A Raspberry Pi can serve as a great HTPC running FOSS software like Kodi, connecting to a local, self-hosted Jellyfin server full of pirated content.

Didnt noticed ads on youtube with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)

do we have ads in computer monitors yet? monitors often have mediocre speakers so people that weren't going to bring their own sound system have that option

Even when you are paying for the product you are still the product.

imho adb works wonders debloating many smartTVs. mine shows zero ads outside of commercial tv breaks. not even suggestions for amazon shows or anything in the dashboard. smarttube,kodi etc are just great!

Disconnected my TV from the Internet. I stream media from a PC on my lan to Kodi running on a fire stick. Setup openwrt to drop all packets to wan from the fire stick. These companies can get fucked and if they ever figure out a way to stop me from owning my devices, I'll just take up some new hobbies and be done with it all.

The cheapest 40" Bestbuy TV is a solid "dumb" TV. No software at all.

That's one reason I ditched cable years ago. Why the hell should I pay Comcast for the "privilege" of watching commercials?

Fun fact, Mythbusters episodes have a longer international edit length because America has substantially longer commercial breaks.

I am so genuinely surprised that there isnt a bigger movement to hack TVs to replace the OS's on them with non-invasive open software alternatives.

Especially with shit like this.

Pi-hole, nvidia shield, custom launcher = less ads for the whole family

Jokes on them, my TV can't connect to the internet anymore because of the the bloat added by Roku in automatic updates.

"each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue."

Fuck me, this is the amount of money that's enough motivation for them to ruin my experience and make me angry?

I guess regular users have much higher tolerance to ads than me, but our home has a strict zero ad policy.

Yet another justification for piracy

Have an Insignia tv and having to click out of a full screen ad after boot up will never not annoy me

i for one cannot wait for this future

Start buying commercial displays. Cost more but will be about as close to a dumb tv. You will have to provide your own smart device for apps ...

I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.

When our last TV which was 'smart' died, we just bought a big lcd monitor at the pawn shop. We already were only using Kodi on an Android box, so a monitor with external speaker is fine. (Seemed spyware free last time I checked, but beware no-name android media boxes on=from eBay etc., use a tiny or old spare PC instead if you wish).

One must 'sail the high seas' tovget content, of course...

My TVs are pre-smart TV and only 1080p and I have yet to feel that I was missing anything important.

Since at one point in the near future I'll be shopping for a TV, is there such a thing as a good quality panel TV that is dumb? I intend to hook it up to a PC or a set top box. Alternatively, is there a smart TV that can be easily bootloader unlocked and rooted without consequences (similarly to how a Pixel phone can)? I realise this is even more niche than unlocking/rooting a phone, but still, someone might have ideas.

As opposed to the old days when it was an analog billboard

I revived the old LCD my grandparents were throwing out because it had good specs and no built in ads. Tossed in a new capacitor and it was good to go, otherwise I would just not own a TV.

My phone is a billboard. My TV is a billboard. My PC is sometimes a billboard.

Like, what hasn't advertisement infected?

I think it's about time we just harass marketers back, but not with advertisements, but with other means. Enough so they get the message.

I can barely see the ads whilst sailing the high seas. IP is the fakest of P.

Don't give your TV the wifi password, kids. No, you don't need to 'finish setting up' your TV; it works just fine as a dumb display.

My 10 year old TV which I watch 10 year old TV-series via HDMI from? I don't think so.

Tomorrow there's going to be article about how my car spies on me as if that's not 15 years old too. Or something about my office job that I don't have.

I'm becoming irrelevant. Not the target audience for anything.

Mine is a monitor and nothing more.

Nah, my TV is not Internet connected. My router is as blocking. My dns is as blocking. My web browser and phone browser are web blocking. I use the YouTube website on my phone. If someone bypasses all that and pushes adds I just back out of that site.

My tv hasn't seen an ad since i plugged it in.

Dumb monitor > smart TV.

My TV is a smart TV whose smart features I never, ever use because the first thing it does is switch to the input my Apple TV is on.

Ironic really that the reason I chose an LG is because webOS seems less cunty than Android TV and whatever shit Samsung are offering. But I still never use it.

Average users will not have the knowledge or patience for work arounds.

Imo, the larger problem seems to be the majority of users appear to be fine with ads and data collection just to watch a movie or series.

My cheap projector doesn't have 4k, but it also doesn't have ads

I reset my Android TV to stock before the ads, block all updates, and just run Plex and Netflix when I choose.

Probably going to take it further in the future and just use a little android media stick and nuke the SmartTV is entirely because of how badly it lags.

Absolutely insane how badly AndroidTVs perform after a year or so of ownership. If I could revert the core software updates I would.

Also, wifi causes the entire TV to become a laggy unusable mess. Has to be plugged in over ethernet. Absolutely unbelievable.

Pro Tip: Connect your TV to your Wi-Fi so the TV doesn’t bother you constantly, and shut off access outside your network at the router level.

Server to host media. Super easy to set up and can run on a Windows client. Don't even need an independent server to run it on. https://jellyfin.org/

https://kodi.tv/ (or https://libreelec.tv/ for an OS that boots to just Kodi)

Application to watch through Kodi https://github.com/jellyfin/jellycon

Client to run Kodi on: MeLE PCG02 Mini PC Stick https://a.co/d/1EGnekO

If you didn't want to install LibreELEC to the PC and just want to keep Windows, you could run Kodi in Kiosk mode and it would boot directly to it just like LibreELEC.

I have not watched normal TV in years, let alone an ad on my TV. I spoke to my neighbors one day and figured out they were paying ~$60 a month for all their streaming services, and they're STILL getting ads...

Stuff like this is unacceptable, and I refuse to partake in the lunacy and delusion that is modern television.

Not mine. My TV's my absolute digital bitch. It lets me do anything I want AND nothing, unlike Warren Buffet's kids

I replaced the TV Box from my ISP as well as the Media Player I already had for local media with a cheap mini-PC running Lubuntu and Kodi and have seen only a handful of adverts on my TV in the last couple of months (which I might see only when I'm watching Live-TV).

(PS: Mind you, there is no way to avoid Product Placement in Movies and TV Series, so I have still probably seen quite a lot of "covert" advertising).

The whole thing is now under my control and hence I don't have to endure that crap.

Granted, I've been a Techie for decades and have for a long time been very aware of how software with Internet access is an agent of the software maker serving their objectives, not of yours serving your interests and how anything you paid for held by somebody else isn't yours until you take them into Court for it and win (so your "bought" movies held in somebody else's system aren't yours) so I never jumped into the Streaming bandwagon and instead kept my eyepatch handy and wooden leg polished, and when I got a TV some years ago - before the enshittification really took off - I very purposefully avoided "smart" ones like the plague.

Frankly even if you're not technically adept just get a Mini-PC and install LibreElec on it (which is purposefully made for non-Technical users to just to use Kodi) and get used to using Kodi. If you're into paying for it you can even subscribe to perfectly legit IPTV subscriptions with hundreds of Live-TV channels and it definitelly integrates with the paid streaming services if you can't do without and don't want to sail the high seas.

(I'm running Lubunto, a more generalistic lightweight Linux distro where I explicitly installed Kodi, rather than LibreElec, because I use it for more things than just watching stuff on my TV).

PPS: Also, get a generic wireless remote of the kind used for Android TV (which works just as well in Kodi under Linux, as all those things do is send key-presses using the same USB protocol as keyboards), not the voice control crap with just a few "app" buttons but the ones which look like normal remotes. They often come with air-mouse functionality and a full mini-keyboard on the back, but one almost never has to use that even with Lubunto which is not really designed to be unobstrucive and will pop-up "update" prompts once in a while (I'm tempted to fix that, just like I fixed the need to explicitly log-in and start Kodi, but so far I can't be arsed because it seldom happens)

And it's driving up the price of commercial flatscreens.

Problem is getting an 55+" Screen with an OLED panel and support for HDR in a non-smart package

Pihole on your network... And block Internet access to the TV..

Tho.. a while back the wife and I bought a dirt cheap 32 inch TV from bestbuy.. it will literally turn itself on to deliver an advertisement if you power it off while in an app. (Skipping the home page)

Pihole crashes it.

We bought it for watching football outside so it's unplugged for the majority of the year.. but that's still absolutely unacceptable. Imho

My HiSense Vidaa OS TV shows ads for newer TV’s from their online store.

Is an Apple TV box a good platform choice to avoid this?

is this a new trend? last time i bought a tv was 2019 and it doesnt even have a menu

My best purchase in the last couple of years was a 4k Sceptre TV from Walmart. Super cheap, good enough video quality and is dumb, just turns on to 4hdmi ports. That way I can just plug in whatever I want, or get a $30 roku and replace it whenever they update it to the point where it lags on basic menu navigation like my previous tvs.

Fuck all that bloatware, ad infested crap.

Any 10 year old computer & LibreELEC.

GO AWAY!! BAITIN'!

Smart tub and stremio. I'm good.

My TV burned out a few months ago and we got a cheap vizio. We stream everything from another device so maybe that's the solution, but I haven't seen any of these ads.

not if I don't have a smart tv

People let their TV's onto the internet? I thought we already had this discussion and nobody does this anymore.

An article on Ars Technica, complaining about advertising.

What hypocrite posted this?