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The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

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Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#341

Post by kornhole »

vonseel wrote: post #254
kornhole wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you have been following the news about Apple expanding its advertising business. If you don't want a corporation collecting data about your viewing, you could modify your approach slightly and try kodi.tv. I have Librelec running on a RPI with attached SSD as house media server. The add-ons catalog is large and growing, but it won't have all the channels you might want.

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.

It has some and more. There are many add on channels with content you won't find on any of the commercial boxes. For example, Films for Action is a great channel addon with a curated set of alternative films. They don't fit the desired narrative of commercial systems and would be difficult to get any airtime from corporate broadcasters.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#342

Post by gonehome »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #268
gonehome wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay for Premium - YouTube is one of the few services that actually lets you pay to stop the ads, it’s worth it. 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.

I pay for YouTube premium and although it stops Youtube's ads, the in-video ads from content creators are much more distracting and annoying. My brain can easily block a banner ad or tune out until the "skip ad" button appears. But when a content creator spends 90 seconds on message and then jarringly shifts to trying to sell me a mattress or a water bottle (Linus Tech Tips) for the nth time, that makes the video los…

Yeah, I don’t like that either but that’s really on the creator. I prefer the patreon model or at least when they put ads at the end.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#343

Post by markedle »

ericmay wrote: post #253
Karsteski wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words have meaning. I despise the insertion of ads in every form of media, but it is not violence. That's just silly.

We have precedent for mental and emotional harm. I'd argue that invasive advertisements including but not limited to ads that make you remember catchy jingles, billboards on highways, ads that specifically target you based on profiling ("addictive") etc. are or can be emotional and mental harm. Ever hear the phrase "stuck in my head"? This happens with commercial jingles all the time. What if I don't want it to be st…

I see where you're coming from but I think it's more accurate to call them manipulative. Violence has a different connotation and we should keep them separate. Trying to force one thing into another is also manipulative.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#344

Post by darkwater »

scarface74 wrote: post #339
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, I assumed Disney+ would basically be all profit. Can you link info about the size of the loss they're making?

https://www.investors.com/news/disney-earnings-disney-stock/ > The Dow giant still expects Disney+ to be profitable in 2024. Disney+ isn’t profitable once you take into account “transfer payments”. They may not be profitable at all yet. But they specifically mentioned being profitable including transfer payments. That basically means that when Disney movie studios use to sell streaming rights to another company - say…

That's text-book financial engineering. I understand the creators' concerns, especially the ones that signed contracts before Disney decided to create Disney+, but on the Disney side I really don't care. It's more, I'm explicitly hostile to it due to the balkanization of streaming platforms now that every big producers start to have their own end-user distribution, subscription-based service.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#345

Post by pbronez »

s1k3s wrote: post #76

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?

I guess this comes down to the balance between the marginal cost of offering an additional product line with a different firmware and the marginal revenue of winning the privacy first market.

Then there’s the constant problem with pay-to-avoid ads… the people who have the spare cash to pay are the ones the advertisers want most. Removing them from the target population lowers the overall value of the targetable group and reduces revenue for your ad-supported products.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#346

Post by asiachick »

I hate this too. I got a top end Sony TV and it was covered in ads. I left it in Basic mode but it's still covered in an ugly ad to please sign up for Google TV

Then I finally got a PS5 two days ago. It's also covered in ads with no way to turn them off. I might sell it as I don't want to support such crap and there is nothing I absolutely need to play.

The thing I find most infruiating is that someone else gets to decide what I see every time I use either of them (well the tv works in basic mode tho it's an eye sore)

Often what's being shown to me is something I find offensive or hate. I hate sports for example. Or it's a TV show I can't stand or a movie with an actor that rubs reminds me of a bad relationship .

I get there are lots of situations in life where other choose what I see but for some reason my TV's default when turning it on is one too many

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#347

Post by clusterhacks »

gonehome wrote: post #342
unsupp0rted wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for YouTube premium and although it stops Youtube's ads, the in-video ads from content creators are much more distracting and annoying. My brain can easily block a banner ad or tune out until the "skip ad" button appears. But when a content creator spends 90 seconds on message and then jarringly shifts to trying to sell me a mattress or a water bottle (Linus Tech Tips) for the nth time, that makes the video los…

Yeah, I don’t like that either but that’s really on the creator. I prefer the patreon model or at least when they put ads at the end.

Honest question, how many creators do you support via patreon or similar?

I subscribe to some very niche content creators on YT and am a YT premium subscriber. One of the creators I follow has 200,000+ subscribers and is very open about the fact that without his patreon supporters that his channel would be unsustainable.

This was surprising to me - I (naively?) thought more of my premium subscription would trickle down to my subscription channels and that 200,000 subscribers would be enough to make a channel at least somewhat self-supporting.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#348

Post by drcongo »

xoa wrote: post #87

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…

I ended up buying a Philips 55" gaming monitor instead of a TV. Seems to be the only way to get a high quality panel and proper HDR without spyware, most of the commercial displays I looked at didn't support HDR properly or had terrible panels.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#349

Post by tomjen3 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #207
1ncorrect wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking. It indiscriminately pollutes the environment, and inflicts harm on non participants by incentivising unbridled data collection.

The hard, spikey, jagged, foul tasting pill to swallow then: Society needs to pay directly for content.

We already do that, since ads presumably make the companies money. Thus the overall effect of this should be that we make products cheaper, since they won't have to pay marketing budgets.

Network effect companies (e.g Facebook) would see how useless their network effects are when only some are willing to pay, and they therefore can't get all their friends updates.

And most creators will find out just how little their content is worth (you probably need to be in the top 50% just to make pennies per hour).

I would say bring it on, but most sites would run into the problem that for their media customer it wouldn't be worth the effort to click the apple pay (or whatever) button to get access.

Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool

#350

Post by benhurmarcel »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #130

My solution is https://nextdns.io/ with a special TV profile that has basically all adblock lists added to it, and then some.

I use this but it works intermittently. It seems the Samsung TV randomly decides not to use the DNS IP I put in its settings.
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