311–320 of 579 posts
Not mentioned: Samba(dot)TV... who are probably THE single most aggressive surveillance company operating in the Smart TV space. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/business/media/tv-viewer-... And the Pi-Hole list you want is here: https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist
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Maybe, maybe not. The mental effects of products optimized for delivering advertising don't seem to be great for people or society (see: Meta's products, Twitter, TikTok).
Do you have evidence as to the negative mental effects and how bad they are?
I feel like these anti-consumer practices by BigCorp can open the door for new companies to emerge on the market: build an ad-free tv, ad-free smartphones etc. Or is it just the effect of me living in a bubble while 99.9% of the customers don't care about this?
At home, I've never connected my TV to my network. The few firmware updates I've needed to do were applied using a thumb drive, and I use an AppleTV as my interface. When I travel, I bring along an AppleTV and plug the HDMI port into their set. This lets me keep the services I subscribe-to and use them with their display. This has worked great until my most-recent rental, which had a RokuTV -- presumably setup on Wif…
I love my ATV 4K. But it’s useless for traveling since hotels require you to login and the AppleTV doesn’t have a browser. The Roku sticks get around this by temporarily exposing a pass through wifi connection that you can connect to from your phone/computer and log in to your hotel’s wifi. The only work around with the AppleTV is to buy a second travel router.
An upgrade I keep looking for is an external directional antenna so I can get a stronger signal when RVing.
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Right but that means you're not paying full price, since the ads subsidise it. So to modify the OP's point, people are going to need to be prepared to pay more for content and IMO we're already at price saturation point now.
Not necessarily - it's what the market will bear, not the cost itself. This just means the target market will tolerate the ads, not that they are subsidizing the cost of the TV. The extra revenue could just as easily be gravy - especially because this is probably the result of some implicit collusion.
1) Video games are sold at full price and still include ads and microtransactions
2) Cable TV was originally ad free (and marketed as such), until they realized they could include ads and make even more money.
I hold the opinion that executives at many of these companies hold the view, "Why only get some of our customer's money when we can get all of it?" (though they probably word it differently, something about recurring revenue and monetizing the existing customer base).
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…
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.
You have gravitated toward Roku even though the CEO outright admitted in a podcast interview (referenced in the article) that Roku is an advertising company not a hardware company? You see those four hard coded buttons on your Roku remote that are shortcuts to streaming services? They went to the highest bidder. You see that non removable banner ad on the right side of your Home Screen? You see the advertisement for…
With tvOS 15.4, "Captive Wi-Fi network support on tvOS allows you to use your iPhone or iPad to connect your Apple TV to networks that need additional sign-in steps, like at hotels or dorms."
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/tvos-release-notes...
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Does kodi / librelec have decent Netflix/Prime/HBO Max/Apple TV+ apps? I was under the impression they don't really support the big streaming apps and aren't really of use outside of watching torrented content.
Kodi didn't the last time I checked. Note that unless you're running Windows or Mac, 4k from Netflix is not available anyway. In fact, 1080p would not be available, according to their system requirements. Linux tops out at 720p on both Chrome and Firefox. I have to assume this would extend to Kodi on whatever platform you're running Kodi on. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
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So, yes the alternative is not to use a device used by 95% homes in the US. What next the old Slashdot meme - “I haven’t owned a TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV?”
This is a non-argument - just because most people do it doesn't mean you have to do it, too. Edit: The slippery slope: 95% of people are straight.
One thing I fundamentally don't get: all this endless shoehorning of ads into everything is dependent on there being a seemingly unlimited amount of ad revenue on the table. Why? Do ads actually work this well if everyone hates them? What about ads shoehorned into marginal spaces and presented in ways that are barely relevant to the material? The only ads I EVER click on are relevant ads that come up from a search in…