Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 434 posts

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#211

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

vortico wrote: post #45
chii wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it turns out that too many people are disconnecting their tv, the manufacturer would merely add in a sim card. They don't yet ATM because they don't need to - too many people are stupidly connecting their wifi.

Wouldn't the free market simply provide modifications with the cell networking removed for an extra $50 or so? The "discount" you get from buying a smart TV verses a dumb TV (which is a niche product so it would cost hundreds more) would still be positive after subtracting the cost of modification.

> Wouldn't the free market simply provide modifications

The free market doesn't seem so keen on modifications, see phones, laptops etc. All walled gardens where even repair is discouraged.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#212

Post by mschuster91 »

contravariant wrote: post #22
lordnacho wrote: post #11

What's frightening is that I can see on my PiHole the huge spike of requests that happens when one of my TVs comes on. Just the standard graph in the front page is enough to see exactly when the kids have turned it on. Most of the requests are rejected though, maybe someone can say whether that is enough to protect me from corporate surveillance.

Blocking the MAC address from making connections outright seems like a more sensible way to prevent surveillance. Assuming of course you are using it as a truly 'dumb' TV and not as a client for Netflix etc.

> Blocking the MAC address from making connections outright seems like a more sensible way to prevent surveillance.

That won't protect against DNS data exfiltration. Extremely low-bandwidth, but works in a lot of cases - people have even written proxy servers to get slow but working Internet on public hotspots that normally require login.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#213

Post by xg15 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #141
andrepd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The much simpler explanation is that TVs plastered with ads and surveillance are more profitable to companies.

I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive a…

Would be interesting to know why consumers want smart TVs so much.

Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick.

So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this but don't understand why fiddling with two devices would be preferable to having one device where everything is built-in.

So far that's a reasonable stance, I believe - especially if you don't know all the tracking smart TV vendors already have done. This might change though if ads and other overtly user-hostile features are rolled out more widely.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#214

Post by rapind »

zasdffaa wrote: post #65

A serious, non-trolling question to all. I've not had a TV for decades and for me that's a good thing. I've watched TVs in pubs (I'm in the uk) and round my mates' houses so it's not become some strange alien thing, and I'm still happy to be without it (that is, on balance; there are good things about broadcast TV and some bad, and the latter outweighs the former for me). In your opinion, is there actual overall valu…

If you're single (watching alone), I'd say there's very little advantage over a laptop / tablet. If you're watching with others (family, significant other, sports with friends, etc.) it's more social to use a shared screen (TV). I personally never turn it on unless I've planned to watch something with the kids.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#216

Post by rosndo »

JohnBooty wrote: post #210
lotsofpulp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive a…

Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb This is one of those areas where consumerism/capitalism trips over itself and leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for. But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending c…

> There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV.

You read a few TV reviews, see that LG OLEDs have been the best choice for many years. Hard to get this wrong.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#217

Post by pluc »

andix wrote: post #37

TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner. You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway): https://nogis.at or https://www.gisbefreit.at/ Most devices are not high end though.

https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#218

Post by rosndo »

xg15 wrote: post #213
lotsofpulp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive a…

Would be interesting to know why consumers want smart TVs so much. Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick. So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this bu…

Consumers want to be able to just plug in their TV and press the Netflix button, nothing wrong with that.

Even after spending tens of thousands on home theatre equipment I struggle to understand why I should want to use some kind of stick to watch netflix from.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#219

Post by netsharc »

kesslern wrote: post #179
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until your neighbor enables an open, unprotected wifi, your smart TV connects to it and auto-updates to start showing you ads.

Are there any TV models that are proven/documented to do this? I hear this claim all the time but I can't find a single demo of it happening. A previous HN thread [0] couldn't come up with any examples either. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350

Every HN discussion about smart TVs have the same points repeated again and again... "Just wait until built-in 5G modems!".

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#220

Post by gruez »

everyone wrote: post #129
TACD wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what we did. Our ‘television’ was never hooked up to actually receive broadcast signal, we’ve always just used it as a big screen for the media/gaming PC set up in the lounge, and at some point I realised if I’m going to spend my evenings staring at Good Screen I might as well upgrade from this 40” 1080p TV with a dead pixel row. So I looked around and eventually bought a Philips 559M1 55” monitor ins…

Afaik the difference between whats called a "monitor" and whats called a "TV" nowadays is that.. TV's show a compressed or upscaled image. TV's have much higher latency. And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.

>TV's show a compressed or upscaled image

TVs can show a "compressed or upscaled image", but that doesn't mean it can't show uncompressed full resolution images (ie. HDMI input). In that regard they aren't that different from monitors.

>TV's have much higher latency.

>And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.

This is more due to their firmware containing image processing logic (to improve image quality), than TVs being intrinsically lower quality than computer monitors.

Post reply on HN