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

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

#401

Post by rbanffy »

Filligree wrote: post #9
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I was reading the HDMI spec. I realised, in almost full horror, it’s stupidly streaming pixels instead of image deltas. When every TV has memory enough for several full frame images, this is just crazy.

You're thinking of bandwidth savings? Rethink that. If HDMI were delta-compressed, then what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row? To be reliable, it needs to have as much bandwidth allocated as is needed for bitmap streaming. And in that case, why not just stream the bitmaps...

> what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row?

There's no way deltas would exceed deltas that are just full frames. If you can't send a full frame over the wire, then you are trying to push too many pixels and need to downsample on any of the 3 dimensions you have to play with.

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

#402

Post by rbanffy »

izacus wrote: post #14
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I was reading the HDMI spec. I realised, in almost full horror, it’s stupidly streaming pixels instead of image deltas. When every TV has memory enough for several full frame images, this is just crazy.

The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer and encoding hardware capable of delta pixel encoding is would drive costs up to the point where HDMI would not be an accepted industry standard. If you see any of popular video standards (both connectivity and formats like H.264) they avoid framebuffer and memory requirements like the plague. Having said that, DSC exists and has been adopted by both HDMI a…

> The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer

A full-frame 8K image with 32 bits per pixel takes up 128MB of RAM. An FHD one is 16 times less, 8MB. This is not a lot of memory for an appliance in 2002, when HDMI was introduced.

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

#403

Post by PolygonSheep »

andrepd wrote: post #126
lotsofpulp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does explain why smart TVs would be easy to buy and dumb TVs difficult to buy. For example, I do not care if a TV is smart or dumb. All I care is how quickly it turns on because I am connecting it to an Apple TV anyway. Even as a person who would rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV, my actions continue to support smart TV manufacturers because I am not willing to spend the time and effort required to seek out du…

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?

Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.

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

#404

Post by falcolas »

GuB-42 wrote: post #334
falcolas wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream. There’s no upside for them to do so. Even if they sell a third fewer models, the ad revenue way more than makes up for it, and it’s recurring revenue to boot.

> If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream. Inflation-adjusted, on average, AAA games have slowly decreased in retail price over the years. At the same time, they have become much more expensive to produce. Technology have improved, HD graphics, storage and computing power is now cheap, but creative work is as expensive as ever, if not…

This argument gets trotted out every time, and it's not only old, it's clearly wrong.

Why is it wrong? Because AAA games are absurdly profitable, even before microtransactions are brought into play. AAA publishers and studios are making billions, with a 'B', of dollars of profit. That's not the sign of a struggling market that's weighed down by inflation and rising costs of production. That's a sign of an exceptionally healthy industry.

Remember, cost only sets the floor of a product's price. And with a near zero duplication cost, those up-front investments are quickly paid back with no practical upper limit to the sales potential.

For example, CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 cost around $316M (including marketing). It presold, as reported on wikipedia, 8m copies. That means they made their investment back before the game had even released, plus a minimum of $20 profit per each of those 8m pre-orders (remember, $60 is the lowest price paid in a pre-order). And every post-launch sale is pretty much pure profit, thanks to that nearly-free cost of making copies.

Now then, CP2077 had issues which probably ate into the company's profits post-launch... but that initial investment, the one you've pointed out? Paid for the day the game released.

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

#405

Post by ksec »

next_xibalba wrote: post #256
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they love also facebook, which monetize all their private life or sugary food, which alter your diet balance or cigarettes who can literally kill you. Not to mention all of them are addictive. The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing.

> The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing. It does make it a good thing for them. Which begs the question: why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist. > they love also facebook Ah, yes. The old "facebook is as bad as cigarettes" trope. It f…

That is why what we need is not DumpTV, but Smart TV that is sane.

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

#406

Post by mschuster91 »

chrisjc wrote: post #352
mschuster91 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: most router firewalls only block traffic that has source: and destination: , but traffic from source: to destination: will be allowed. That is enough for the device to emit a DNS query like "pbs.12345.metricservice.example.com" to notfiy some tracking service that the device with serial 12345 just switched to a channel labeled "PBS". The router will resolve that name record at the DNS server for metricservice…

Are you suggesting that devices connected to a network that has blocked their MAC can still make DNS requests?

How many consumer routers go that length? For most of these, as long as they are on the network, they can communicate over DNS, using the router as "middleman".

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

#407

Post by hakfoo »

PolygonSheep wrote: post #403
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? Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten ab…

How much of a conclusion can we draw from that market period, though?

"Smart" sets tended to move from the top of the market downward. This meant that if I wanted a "non-smart" set in a given size, it was likely to be the lower-end product-- often with fewer inputs, a lower-grade panel, or from a firm with an inferior reputation for quality.

This makes it difficult to de-conflate if people were buying a smart TV because they wanted the smart features, or the panel/connectivity/brand reputation.

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

#408

Post by oska »

Gigachad wrote: post #395
JohnFen wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But something is seriously wrong with a society where it's impossible to avoid a thing that you consider harmful to yourself just because the larger market prefers it. It used to be that one of the strengths of our economic system was that you could find something to meet your needs even if your needs weren't the same as the majority.

How is it impossible to avoid smart TVs? I don’t own a TV at all, I just use my desktop monitor. And then there are a bunch of examples in this thread about commercial displays. It’s not impossible to not own a smart TV, it’s just the mass market caters to what the vast majority want. Outside of hacker news, no one considers smart TVs harmful. I consider cars harmful and yet hacker news gets up in arms when I propose…

> it’s just the mass market caters to what the vast majority want

All sorts of ways to dispute this assertion, the most easy probably just to point to the existence of the multi-trillion dollar advertising industry

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

#409

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

schwartzworld wrote: post #92
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But consumers would buy dumb TVs with dongles if that’s what they made. We used to buy digital set top boxes. Antennas. VCRs. DVD players. Manufacturers definitely jumped on the chance to add software and an internet connection to TVs. Why sell a product once, when you can do that and then sell your customers to ad agencies?

In the days of VCRs, they sold tvs with those built in too! An obvious convenience until the VCR part broke, which anything with mechanical components will eventually.

They had TVs with built in DVD players too. But I don't recall those ever supplanting the separate devices. I can see why you might want to combined devices. You can reduce clutter and simplify cable management. TVs with built in digital TV receivers make sense. I like monitors with built in USB hubs so I can use different computers with the same monitor by just swapping the HDMI and USB cables.

But they saw the vertical integration possibilities and took advantage of it here. I'm not sure you are even getting a hardware discount to view those ads.

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

#410

Post by Brian_K_White »

chrisjc wrote: post #346
Brian_K_White wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monitors are now starting to go smart. Not just the Apple one. And you no longer always have the option to prevent a net connection unless you live in a faraday cage. The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them. I doubt that will happen. The people that even know or care at all are few, and ev…

> Monitors are now starting to go smart. This an understatement! I recently watched a review for one of Samsung's new monitors and it turns out you don't even need to connect it to any source. I don't just mean media sources like Netflix, Amazon, TV, etc... You can literally connect to MS Office and perform trivial desktop activities on it once you connect a mouse and keyboard. All of this at a pretty compelling pric…

good god... every screen is an all-in-one.

Kicker is, I don't even necessarily mind that as far as it goes.

As time goes on it's just sort of inevitable that more and more functions get performed by little computers instead of hardcoded electronics.

There is some engineering argument against that. It makes systems more complex and thus less robust and generally less performant.

It's just that it also makes them more flexible and in some ways makes the hardware simpler even though a cpu is more complex than a few diodes. It's simpler once a cpu is taken as a black box unit where the complex magic is all hidden inside, and it's cost to design and produce is amortized to nothing by economy of scale. And it allows for potential better perfmance through tuning that isn't available in a fixed system.

So fundamentally as a general rule applied to just any random thing, you can't really say the cpuization of more and more ordinary devices and functions is necessarily a net negative.

What makes it all bad is only who controls all these cpus and what purposes they put them to.

If my freaking tv was open source, fully open including all the special modules for wifi and hdmi and booting etc, I would have no problem at all that my monitor now has a cpu and ram and net connection. Or at least a whole lot less problem.

It's only that "Who is this stuff working for?" that makes it bad.

I wish I could somehow poison the money I pay for the TV with my own agenda against the wishes of the manufacturer and retailer the way they have my tv. So that the money would somehow do my bidding after I gave it to them, just the way the tv does for them after they gave it to me.

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