191–200 of 579 posts
If you have children you have a moral imperative to pirate content and prevent this from infecting their lives. Search for a plexshare. $20 for everything, zero ads. Screw these greedy bastards.
You’re right, it’s a moral imperative to show children that if you can’t legally get what you want just do it illegally…
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Yes because consumers have history of paying more for quality in aggregate… There is a reason that two of the five most valuable companies in the US are adTech - Google and Facebook. How many consumers are going to choose to pay $300 more for an ad free privacy first TV? How many consumers right now are willing to pay for an AppleTV over a $30 Roku stick?
You need a surprisingly small number of HN crowd like folks to ruin the market. Most ad targeting - regardless of actual product - goes after people with high discretionary income. If a chunk of those folks self selected out of the video ad market, it ruins the overall economics. This is an idea I've toyed with - corner the >200K income TV market with privacy features. Make it as easy as Roku to block all this.
This type of expectation is why I've always gravitated towards Roku sticks. They're cheap, really well designed, centrally controlled on your account and you avoid any need to over-invest in specific TV vendors to have the same experience across the board. And it can't do anything that the HDMI port can't do.
They can show you ads over anything they're displaying from an HDMI port.
YouTube's advertising strategy is pushing me to get rid of my SmartTV, or at least find a 3rd Party solution to completely block the ads. I was completely fine with one or two 6 second ads randomly playing before a video, or during a lengthy video. Then they added 14 second ads, which was very annoying, but bearable since it's about the same length as the two short ads. But now they're advertising even if I simply op…
I wish that also fixed all the bad product design that results from building something corrupted by ad incentives.
You can also disable all tracking in settings.
FWIW, it is still possible to get TVs without this stuff, albeit at a premium. TVs are still made for business usage in areas like conference rooms, wall displays etc. They're often found under labeling like "commercial digital signage" or "business display" or the like, they seem to often try to avoid using "TV" (if being cynical maybe to make them harder for normal people to discover and confuse them if they do). B…
You can still get cheap ones. And by cheap I mean TLC/Hisense level quality displays. Walmart sells Sceptre's for low prices and have no smart features, best purchase I've made in years. We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV. Sure I don't ge…
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If you're paying for Twitch Prime, but still getting ads, then what are you paying for exactly? Less ads? Sadly I think it's what happens when companies are pushed to generate more and more profit each year. So you you start just a few ads to the paying users, because: "They won't mind one short ad" and then suddenly it's all ads all the time. It does make you wonder exactly how ads are so profitable and which produc…
Isn't Twitch Prime just the extras you get alongside a regular Prime subscription? I'm pretty sure Twitch Turbo is the no ads thing.
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How do you block internet if it will join open networks automatically?
firewall by MAC-address
The Amazon Sidewalk or whatever they had planned would be an example of this that might be less obvious than your neighbor just being bad at IT.
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However those TVs are not easy to get and, like you said, they come with an increased price. I couldn't recommend enough to buy an Apple TV (or equivalent) and block all Internet access to your "smart" TV. I did this and everything was instantly better.
Why don't you just disconnect it from the lan/wifi?
There is a much better option for HN crowd: Buy a large/modern computer monitor and connect it to your homelab’s media server. Literally there is no need for a smart TV so long as you are capable of setting up a small homelab.
I’d honestly rather watch adverts than have to run a home server again.
FWIW, mobile ads are worse. Avoiding them is easier, though. I almost always tell it when to show the ad and I can just look away with it muted for a while and do something else. I'm usually already watching TV while I play ad-based games anyhow. But if I had to actually watch the ads, I'd just stop playing those games.
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Eh, I’d rather get that ad subsidy and never connect the tv to the internet
For now, this appears to be feasible. And it will probably stay feasible as long as the number of people who do it is relatively miniscule. But economics being economics, we’re freeloading off the customers who hook their smart TVs up to the internet and provide manufacturers with enough revenue that they don’t care about us. But should the practice become widespread and manufacturers notice a material impact on thei…
There’s no need to start jumping at shadows here.