171–180 of 316 posts
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But then you're losing all of the goodies for movies and games, such as proper color space or contrast. Usually the business TVs are anything but good for movies.
But consumer TVs nowadays come with absolutely hideous defaults, with color, contrast and sharpness adjusted to first and foremost compete for attention against other manufacturers on store shelves. It's gotten bad enough that stores now offer adjustment services — for a price, obviously — just to get the picture to look the way it should in the first place!
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The commercial monitors cost more because the price isn't subsidized by user data collection.
The data on your viewing habits isn’t worth that sum (making it even sadder that TV OEMs are selling you out). The price deltas are driven by what the market will bear. As expensive as the commercial monitors are, they are a small fraction of the other costs of fitting out the conference rooms and facilities that use them.
From the mouth of the CTO of Visio:
> So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.
> This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.
> And then I need to make money off those TVs. They live in households for 6.9 years — the average lifetime of a Vizio TV is 6.9 years. You would probably be amazed at the number of people come up to me saying, “I love Vizio TVs, I have one” and it’s 11 years old. I’m like, “Dude, that’s not even full HD, that’s 720p.”
> But they do last a long time and our strategy — you’ve seen this with all of our software upgrades including AirPlay 2 and HomeKit — is that we want to make things backward compatible to those TVs. So we’re continuing to invest in those older TVs to bring them up to feature level comparison with the new TVs when there’s no hardware limitation that would otherwise prevent that.
> And the reason why we do that is there are ways to monetize that TV and data is one, but not only the only one. It’s sort of like a business of singles and doubles, it’s not home runs, right? You make a little money here, a little money there. You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know. It’s not really that different than The Verge website.
> Q: One sort of Verge-nerd meme that I hear in our comments or on Twitter is “I just want a dumb TV. I just want a panel with no smarts and I’ll figure it out on my own.” But it sounds like that lifetime monetization problem would prevent you from just making a dumb panel that you can sell to somebody.
> A: Well, it wouldn’t prevent us, to be honest with you. What it would do is, we’d collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it. Again, it may be an aspirational goal to not have high margins on our TV business because I can make it up downstream. On the other hand, I’m actually aggregating that monetization across a large number of users, some of which opt out.
> It’s a blended revenue model where, in the end, Vizio succeeds, but you know, it’s not wholly dependent on things like data collection.
I had a very nice Sharp Aquos TV for a long time. One of the first reasonably priced 1080p 65" TVs. It had absolutely no "smart" features, which was perfectly fine with me. I have my TV hooked up to a home theatre system and have my devices (PS4/AppleTV/XB1/Nvidia Shield) hooked up to that. I recently upgraded to a LG 4K OLED TV. It's an absolutely gorgeous TV, but, I absolutely lament the "smart" features of this TV…
I recently bought an LG OLED as well. I never connected it to my network and never will. It was a dark pattern during setup. The options were to connect via LAN or WIFI, and only by scrolling into "nothing" did a skip option appear. This ImO is the only option and even then I bet it's trying to exhilarate data by like trying to connect to a phone or high frequency audio or something.
I get very few notifications. Obviously, when app or firmware updates are available. I also get a small and brief notification when they add a new ip channel to their lineup. I get no ads or anything like that.
I've not run a sniffer to see what it phones home with beyond info for version checks.
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If you’re using a chromecast and also trying to keep your tv from phoning home what are you even doing? I mean I guess one fewer place having your info is good, but...
VLC supports casting to a local network Chromecast. It works fantastic.
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Agreed. My Samsung TV is not connected to Ethernet/WiFi and I have a quadcore Pentium NUC as a 4k HTPC for interacting with it. I have a full control of what I run on NUC (Ubuntu + Kodi) and TV is just a display. My Marantz is connected to Internet though (used for AirPlay) as it needs updates to its firmware, so there might be some audiophile listening...
Marantz doesn’t report home if you disable reports. I also have never upgraded my marantz receivers
Why not use a computer display as a dumb TV?
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I bought a dumb tv in 2013 that I still use just fine without any firmware updates. It's a screen, it needs no updates.
I plugged in my pre-all-devices-spy 10 year old dumb tv to the network for the first time and now it hounds me for firmware updates.... I always reject because I don’t want it to learn how to spy on me. Pretty sure my firetv phones my hdmi content home
I realised after spending working hours in front of Monitor/Laptop, my eyes can use some rest. So NO TV in weekdays.
I have bought 30 inch monitor, connected to home desktop and use it for entertainment - Netflix, sports etc.
NO TV is an option. Some day going to upgrade to bigger monitor.