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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

#481

Post by akozak »

cma wrote: post #459
insightcheck wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious and looked up reviews for Sceptre, but according to some discussions on Reddit, they have build quality issues. One of the threads [0] had a discussion on picture quality and build quality issues. Another subreddit [1] even has an automoderator comment that says getting a smart TV and not hooking it up to the internet is the best option. The automoderator also writes that if one is certain about going n…

Not hooking it up to the internet soon won't be enough with Amazon Sidewalk and other related efforts.

There is the dystopian version of always connected, but it'd be nice to get firmware updates (supposing those updates mainly fix bugs, add features, improve performance).

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

#482

Post by jbirer »

rendall wrote: post #57

> Some may argue that there's no need to be dramatic and that there's nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then. Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it's something else I'm cancel…

The gaslighting by companies is pretty sickening. There's nothing acceptable about ads on a device that I did not ask for.

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

#483

Post by saxonww »

SECProto wrote: post #461
saxonww wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine Not sure about this. Firefox and Opera both support 720p. But, because of their choices here - or the terms of the content deals they've signed, idk - Netflix doesn't get as much money from me as they could. 720p is not sufficiently better than 480p (to me) to warrant paying them for 'standard' service, let alone their premium tier at $20/mo. So I just get the…

> Not sure about this. Firefox and Opera both support 720p. Don't you have to enable widevine to get Netflix in Firefox?

Yes, good point, I don't typically think of that as spyware, but it is.

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

#484

Post by thiht »

jbirer wrote: post #482
rendall wrote: post #57

> Some may argue that there's no need to be dramatic and that there's nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then. Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it's something else I'm cancel…

The gaslighting by companies is pretty sickening. There's nothing acceptable about ads on a device that I did not ask for.

Especially when it comes in an update months after you bought your device. Looking at you Android TV.

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

#485

Post by nemothekid »

BozeWolf wrote: post #426
nsgi wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which brands of smart TV show ads? I live in the UK and I've had three different brands of smart TV (Philips, Samsung and Toshiba) and my experience with all of them has been pretty good. Netflix, YouTube, etc. have worked pretty well and I haven't seen any ads that weren't linked to the apps themselves. Perhaps they're tracking me in ways I don't know about, though?

Samsung frame. Hardware: It has physical netflix, prime, somethingelse buttons which immediately switch to that app without asking if you want to close the current app. Frustrating when you accidentally sit on your remote. So i modified my remote, put tape underneath the buttons to disable them. Software: In menu ads, sometimes, for some crap thing like tennistv. I have no idea how to disable it. The fucking frame st…

>You cannot disable it (i assumed it was possible). Long-hold power off to turn the tv off. Else frame mode. Sucks.

I have this TV; you long press the power button to turn it off. The entire gimmick of the TV is the art mode, as the actual panel isn't very good and you can buy the TV without the gimmick for several hundred dollars less (A regular 65" Samsung Frame is ~2K, while the normal 65" QLED is $1,200). My gripes about samsung software aside - it's an odd thing to complain about.

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

#487

Post by aheckler »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #359
antx wrote: post #60

Another case in point: my TCL series 5 has made 11K (!!!) DNS requests for scribe.logs.roku.com, just last month. As a matter of fact, it's now the top-blocked domain in my pi-hole. It's a shame Roku won't allow you to at least opt-out of telemetry.

11k blocked requests for that domain in a month? Seems low... My pi-hole is blocking that domain about 50k times A DAY. All from one TCL TV.

I also have a TCL Roku TV and NextDNS. In the last 30 days, just over 16k connections to scribe.logs.roku.com have been blocked.

Maybe your TV is a little overactive for some reason? 50k in a day almost makes it seem like something is broken somehow.

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

#489

Post by SayMyName »

akozak wrote: post #481
cma wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hooking it up to the internet soon won't be enough with Amazon Sidewalk and other related efforts.

There is the dystopian version of always connected, but it'd be nice to get firmware updates (supposing those updates mainly fix bugs, add features, improve performance).

I'd rather just upgrade firmware by downloading it and using the usb port.

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

#490

Post by netsharc »

teddyh wrote: post #451
netsharc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I would be surprised if they did... the belief in these sorts of tech urban legends/conspiracy theories that some seemingly techie people have is cringeworthy. And no, Facebook/Instagram aren't listening to users either, it would need too much bandwidth/server power to process all those conversations, and if you say "they can do the speech recognition on the users' phones", the majority of users use budget phones…

This reminds me of the pre-Snowden times, where people often assumed that governments widely recorded internet traffic, since they had both the capability and the motivation, but people like you dismissed it as “urban legends/conspiracy theories” because there wasn’t any hard evidence.

How do you know what I did in regards to the Five Eyes?

I wonder what's easier to check and verify, a secret government tapping of the Internet, or if the TVs in millions of people's living rooms are trying to connect to open WiFi networks...

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