Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
TV software is getting loaded with ads, changing what it means to own a TV set.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Jokes on them, my TV can't connect to the internet anymore because of the the bloat added by Roku in automatic updates.
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)
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.
My cheap projector doesn't have 4k, but it also doesn't have ads
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
Yet another justification for piracy
My TVs are pre-smart TV and only 1080p and I have yet to feel that I was missing anything important.
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.
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...
Have an Insignia tv and having to click out of a full screen ad after boot up will never not annoy me
And it's driving up the price of commercial flatscreens.
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.
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.
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 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.
Even when you are paying for the product you are still the product.
Any 10 year old computer & LibreELEC.
not if I don't have a smart tv
Didnt noticed ads on youtube with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
Pihole can block all this nonsense.
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.
Vote with your dollars. Unplug. Fuck them
is this a new trend? last time i bought a tv was 2019 and it doesnt even have a menu
People let their TV's onto the internet? I thought we already had this discussion and nobody does this anymore.
