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

241–250 of 434 posts

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

#241

Post by samtheDamned »

mrjin wrote: post #41

Smart TVs were created for all kinds of agendas but none were actually for us the consumers. All those agendas require an OS which takes time to boot. Making it worse, some of those TVs' CPU are crap and thus every operation takes much longer than those dumb ones. Lots of vendors also start to ship new remotes that removed all the essential buttons, especially the video source button, and I have to press 5 or more ti…

> So we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less

I thought they subsidized some of the cost with ad money

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

#243

Post by falcolas »

sgjohnson wrote: post #154

I for one enjoy that my Smart TV is subsidized by all the morons who think that my data is worth anything. It's not connected to internet. It's connected to Apple TV box. Thanks for the discount.

What makes you think the price was discounted just because they found another way to monetize their users?

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

#244

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think it is common knowledge that much of the profit from Smart TVs comes from data collection. Last year I gave our beautiful Samsung Smart TV to a friend and bought a $199 dumb TV from Walmart, and just have an Apple TV box plugged into its HDMI port. I love this combination! My wife is not so happy with it, but went along with the change.

Everything about watching TV now just seems easy, no ads, no crap. Love it.

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

#245

Post by SantalBlush »

samtheDamned wrote: post #241
mrjin wrote: post #41

Smart TVs were created for all kinds of agendas but none were actually for us the consumers. All those agendas require an OS which takes time to boot. Making it worse, some of those TVs' CPU are crap and thus every operation takes much longer than those dumb ones. Lots of vendors also start to ship new remotes that removed all the essential buttons, especially the video source button, and I have to press 5 or more ti…

> So we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less I thought they subsidized some of the cost with ad money

It's good to keep in mind that just because a company puts ads in our faces, that does not necessarily imply they are doing it to offset costs. This is true for websites as well as smart TVs.

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

#246

Post by superkuh »

rosndo wrote: post #227
oneoff786 wrote: post #222

Use a computer and an hdmi cord as your media source and you can’t go wrong. I just wish the pi was powerful enough to cleanly stream high res content. It’s so close.

Yeah, good luck with getting dolby vision and the likes to work. You’ll also have to deal with substantially degraded experience from streaming services unless you’re willing to deal with the inconvenience of pirating everything.

These days it's the other way around. If you pirate everything it's all very easy, it's the guessing game and multiplying streaming services where you have to deal with inconvenience. It's all just a little bit of history repeating...

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

#247

Post by brightball »

agotterer wrote: post #237
sgjohnson wrote: post #154

I for one enjoy that my Smart TV is subsidized by all the morons who think that my data is worth anything. It's not connected to internet. It's connected to Apple TV box. Thanks for the discount.

I recently purchased a Samsung TV that I hooked up to the internet. When I turned on the TV I was prompted to agree to their TOS. When I tried to agree to the terms it just kept erroring. I went away for a bit assuming it was Samsung network issue. It took me another hour once I returned to realize that my network was blocking their tracking domains. I had to connect the TV to my phone to accept the terms and bypass…

That’s where I am on Roku. I love the Roku setup at this point.

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

#248

Post by doldols »

everdrive wrote: post #221
rosndo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense intended, but if you truly believe these things you might want to have your vision checked.

None taken -- I've got 20/20, or relatively close to it. It's not as if I can't see the difference, I just don't feel that sharper inherently equals better. At least in the case of watching movies or TV. My intuitive sense is that people don't actually care about increased resolution, but simply know that they're using the "inferior" option, and claim not to like it. I'm not suggesting this is actually the case -- it…

The visuals have always been a huge part of cinema. You can hardly compare the experience of watching Lawrence of Arabia projected from film and Lawrence of Arabia in 480 even on equally sized screens.

While there’s a plenty of content I enjoy watching even if it’s only available in 480, 4K DV content on the big screen offers a completely different level of immersion.

I really like DS9, but it clearly suffers from its format. Even basic things like the ability to make out facial expressions of the cast become more difficult or even impossible at lower resolutions.

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #145
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.

>But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The same argument has been posted multiple times for small phones. Yet, every time apple releases small phone, they are disappointed in sales. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se...

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by andix »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #228
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.

> Most devices are not high end though. Do you mean that their quality is meh, or whether they lack functionality?

The functionality is fine. You can turn them on and off. And you probably want to use a soundbar, because of bad speakers. But the panels are just not great. Like all the other TVs in that price range.
Post reply on HN