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Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

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Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#141

Post by eropple »

xenihn wrote: post #76
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman actually helped bring this about. The ad companies all run their massive data farms on open source software. Stallman and open source helped drive a lot of paid software out of the market because they could not compete with free versions. For the most part, the paid consumer software market is dead. Companies will always want to make money, so they “gave away” free software funded by ads and then used free o…

>Stallman and open source helped drive a lot of paid software out of the market because they could not compete with free versions. >they “gave away” free software funded by ads Proprietary software isn't free software. Free doesn't just mean free as in no cost to use.

I feel like this post elides the functionally single-source nature of plenty of free and open-source software. "But you can fork it" means nothing when you, singularly or collectively, don't have the will or, far more frequently, the resources (time, money, knowledge, etc.) to do so in a sustainable and secure manner. It's the "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread--the rich as well as the poor" of tech.

There is an argument, and I sometimes wonder if it doesn't have legs, that a software developer who I just hand money to is more likely to be aligned with my interests than an advertiser's. (And yeah you can say "well bankroll free software!"--then you have to find somebody and be capable of evaluating the results and you've just hit the resource scarcity problem from the other side. A commercially-released application is a lot more concrete.)

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#142

Post by minikites »

Google is fundamentally an advertising company. I don't understand why people are surprised that an operating system made by an advertising company shows ads. It's the same reason Chrome's address bar makes you search instead of bringing up your history. It's the same reason Gmail even exists. Everything Google does has the ultimate purpose of showing advertising to you.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#143

Post by slownews45 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #89
slownews45 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use apple TV all the time and I've yet to see an ad. Meanwhile both the TV itself (gone) and other devices seem to push ads all the time. When we say Apple is as bad - what are we talking about? Inside the individual apps obviously developers do push things.

Apple defaults to playing big trailers on the home screen, but it's easy to turn off and IMO not nearly as bad as what Google has done here https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/19/how-to-remove-home-screen-tra...

Very helpful.

I'm a Apple TV+ subscriber, so I think I already seem to have access to most of the content. But I also have Prime / Netflix up there, and I can preview that stuff too (neither may wife or I mind this).

I did notice once I could turn things off, but we use the Apple TV App (confusing naming) for Up Next pretty frequently (new remote has a quick button for that) and up next nicely seems to pull most of our content in (not sure how) so when we are trying to decide what to watch (we watch about 1 hr every other week) it's handy to remind ourselves of what we were watching from before. Apple obviously does something so that netflix / prime / etc all flow into Up Next. My only annoyance is it feels like there are two "Home" screens, the app icon grid and the apple TV App.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#144

Post by Sebb767 »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #31
gpspake wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not a comparable device short of plugging a pc in to my tv and I'm not going back to that life. I play retro arch installed from the play store, stream my pc from my office in to RDP, and connect a wireless kb to one of two usb ports in the back. I also generally like the Google stuff including the assistant integration. The device is perfect in every way and I shouldn't have to throw this $300 device that's…

Yep, the Shield TV really does seem to have some of the best hardware and sort of "just works" I'd normally just have a Linux box with Kodi, but once you try to get 4K HDR working, things start getting prickly. GPU and driver combos were a bit of a pain and even Windows had issues.

I had the exact same problems. Especially when you're trying to get Netflix out PrimeVideo in 4K, you're pretty much out of open source options.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#145

Post by wlesieutre »

RandallBrown wrote: post #117
wlesieutre wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple no longer prohibits ads in notifications as of March last year https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/04/apple-now-allows-push-notific... Good way to get your notification privileges revoked though. I wish Apple would add granular notification categories within apps so that you could approve particular types of notifications while denying others. A quick google says Android 8 did this in 2017. Apple's policy on this is to…

Apple is adding something like what you want in iOS 15. https://openback.com/blog/wwdc-2021-ios-15-push-notification...

Sort of like what I want, but relies of developers to decide what is passive/active/time-sensitive/critical, and instead of being able to fix it the only recourse is to say "no notifications."

I do see what Apple is going for, in that these predefined categories let you automate notification handling with Focus modes, but I have a feeling a lot of apps will have an inflated opinion of how important "new episodes of ____ are available" is to me.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#146

Post by foepys »

pdimitar wrote: post #111
tyingq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the essence of the problem. Android TV devices have to use Google's launcher as the default, or they have to go fully on their own, without Google services, like a FireTV device.

Well, it seems that Google (and various other corporations) are finally entering their endgame and are showing their true colors. I am eager to find out if the world can fight back meaningfully. Here's hoping. {raises glass}

The only way to solve this is to break up Google (or rather Alphabet) but I don't see this happening. Anti-trust got way too soft.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#147

Post by jader201 »

djrogers wrote: post #17
sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

My shield updated to this the other day. I'm pretty furious about it, it's not a cheap device, and it's certainly not Google's. To be adding these "features" without asking, irrespective of whatever agreement between me, Nvidia or Google exists, is ridiculous. I know it's in whatever terms I, uh, "accepted", but there's just no escaping it in this day and age. Fortunately, I know how to use ADB and just installed ano…

> Apple is seems almost as bad too. There's recommendations that I don't want. The main AppleTV UI doesn’t have any recommendations for streaming apps you don’t own - the only thing that’s even close are when you highlight one of the apps in the top bar.

My “Up Next”, which is Apple’s integration to show shows you’ve been watching when the Apple TV app is selected in the top bar, is polluted constantly with MLB games that I’ve not figured out how to disable. Sometimes I have to skip 3 or 4 games in the bar to find a show I watched yesterday.

And I never watch MLB games nor do I have the app installed (clicking the games brings me to install the MLB app).

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#148

Post by mumblemumble »

wildrhythms wrote: post #13

It's really incredible how the average American home spends some $116/mo for television[1], and is still subjected to 16 minutes of advertisements per hour of entertainment. [1] https://www.doxo.com/insights/united-states-of-bill-pay-doxo...

I suppose it's the price of convenience? For my part, I pay a lot less for just Internet, borrow DVDs from the public library, and occasionally pay a la carte to stream specific shows I particularly want to watch. It's definitely less expensive in the long run, but my real motivation is that I really hate ads, enough so that I'm willing to put up with lower definition (the library doesn't do as much in the way of blu-ray), waitlists for popular shows, and having to actually plan ahead when deciding what to watch. I'm very, very aware, though, that choosing to do it this way makes me an unusual case. And I'm pretty sure it's not because I've discovered some lifehack that nobody else is clever enough to know about. No, it's because I'm grumpy and easy to irritate, and because, as someone with objectively poor taste in entertainment, I genuinely don't give a damn about keeping up with Star Wars or Game of Thrones or whatever. I'm perfectly satisfied with ancient crusty stuff like Murder, She Wrote.

Ads seem to do a good job of riding a very fine line. There's no need to care about what people will gripe about; people who gripe on the Internet are just a vocal minority, and realistically, as paying customers, they aren't even a problem, in and of themselves. All they've really got to do is be ever so slightly less annoying, to the majority of people, than any of the alternatives.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#149

Post by underscore_ku »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

My shield updated to this the other day. I'm pretty furious about it, it's not a cheap device, and it's certainly not Google's. To be adding these "features" without asking, irrespective of whatever agreement between me, Nvidia or Google exists, is ridiculous. I know it's in whatever terms I, uh, "accepted", but there's just no escaping it in this day and age. Fortunately, I know how to use ADB and just installed ano…

YOU DON'T OWN "YOUR" DEVICE. go ahead and buy more close source crap

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#150

Post by TeMPOraL »

yardie wrote: post #124
pdimitar wrote: post #77

I might be the dumbest observer on these trends around here but does it seem to somebody else that this is a normal part of the end-of-life lifecycle of many devices and that it usually goes like this... - "Sir, sales are falling... we actually haven't had new sales in months". - "How much does it cost to support the infrastructure for these devices?" - "X million a month". - "Feck it. Cram ads into them, we're not s…

It feels that way with the Smart TVs. Once you've purchased it the manufacturer no longer has a way to make additional money from it. Yet these things are connected to the internet and wildly insecure. So the only way to justify future updates is to shoehorn in some adtech along with the security patches.

> So the only way to justify future updates is to shoehorn in some adtech along with the security patches.

I'd say it's the exact opposite: the way to justify adtech, i.e. the thing they actually wanted from the start, is by playing up the importance of automated updates to security. Note how devices tend to stop being updated the moment their market share is projected to dwindle.

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