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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

#511

Post by SergeAx »

phil21 wrote: post #80
uptown wrote: post #53

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…

> Is this commonplace or is Roku the first of what's likely to be many doing the same? As far as I can tell, it's not only commonplace but ubiquitous for any new TV you buy these days. I recently moved and had to buy a number of TV sets over the years to outfit various guest rooms. All LG and Samsung TVs I've setup over the past 3 years have a "feature" like this you can manually disable if you dig down through menus…

My LG TV plays movies from USB stick and never tried a trick like this. Not gonna lie, those were mostly relatively old movies, like LOTR or Heat, but also latest Predator installment.

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

#512

Post by Beltalowda »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #283
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.

> Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking I’ll hold my drink while you convince America why it should pay 10x for a TV because ads are bad.

Last time I bought a TV was about 10 years ago, IIRC I paid €350 for it and it had no "smart features" at all and I assume Samsung made a profit on it. Or do you want to tell me that Samsung ate a €3k loss to give me a TV?

This is just silly; TVs can maybe made a little bit cheaper by some ads, but not much, and TVs were plenty cheap for a long time well before "smart TVs with ads" became a thing (my TV wasn't a luxury model, but not the cheapest either).

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

#513

Post by asdff »

Kiro wrote: post #84
helloooooooo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re selling like hotcakes because you cannot find non-smart TVs anymore

Even if you could smart TVs would outsell dumb TVs by a great margin.

I don't know if that is true. Everyone I know with a smart TV uses some other device hooked into it (roku, apple tv, video games) to run the actual streaming apps because the TV hardware is so poor. If they could buy a TV that's just a TV and pay a little less to not have those features they aren't ever using, they'd probably do it. Most people just care abut whether a TV is a certain size and only gamers really care about 4k. If you cared about 4k for movies you wouldn't waste that resolution on compressed streaming content; you'd probably have a small blu ray collection.

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

#514

Post by d35007 »

nemothekid wrote: post #485
BozeWolf wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gri…

The person you're talking to hates TV, so they bought this one because it looks nice when it's turned off. I wonder if they're really frustrated with another person in their home who enjoys watching "shouting XL Americans" on the idiot box.

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

#515

Post by aembleton »

commoner wrote: post #368
psy-q wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android TV now also comes with forced ads (since rebranding to Google TV). I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.

It takes a bit of work, but you can replace the default Android TV launcher with an ad-free launcher, such as the free and open source FLauncher: - Instructions for changing the default launcher on Android TV: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/o96npc/ins... - FLauncher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.efesser.fla... - Source: https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher This should work on…

Thank you for this. I've now spent my evening going down a wormhole of launchers for my fire stick.

Finally got it all working, with wolf launcher and some adb commands to set it up as the default.

So much cleaner than the amazon launcher with its ads all over the.

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

#516

Post by asdff »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #421
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC's are intentionally gimped to prevent trivial copyright infringement. Netflix forces you to use Edge on Windows or Safari on Firefox to stream in 4k because they integrate with the OS's DRM. HBO Max doesn't allow 4k at all on PC's but I think will at least do 1080p if you use an approved browser. I don't think Hulu will stream anything higher than 720p regardless of which browser you use. Disney+ is the same. Good…

I think a pleasant user experience in 1080p is a great deal personally.

I also think 4k is oversold. From the couch 10 feet away, a 4k tv and 1080p tv will look the same.

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

#517

Post by asdff »

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?

Bigcorp has their hands in many cookie jars and don't care if they take a loss on selling the panel in the smart tv if it means they gain in licensing deals from having "Netflix" printed on the remote. You can come in, your offering will just be costlier than the subsidized smart tv and you will be driven out of business before long. Or, no suppliers even want to work for you because they are busy fulfilling orders from bigcorps who will gladly buy up all their capacity to keep people like you from having an easy time starting a small business.

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

#518

Post by wizofaus »

So my genuine question - asking if this post (an advertisement for AdGuard) is within HN rules - got flagged. I've since checked the guidelines and while it doesn't explicitly say product placement posts are verboten, they do seem against the spirit of the site ("Please don't use HN primarily for promotion"). But what guideline makes my comment flaggable?

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

#519

Post by brewdad »

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…

I dumped Prime a couple months ago. So far the only consequence has been having to use an alternate platform to watch a specific movie and I have much less random "stuff" arriving in my mailbox/front porch now that I have to give some thought about shipping costs for cheap items.

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

#520

Post by brewdad »

scarface74 wrote: post #417
falcolas wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something that's supposedly a myth, the expectation was spread broadly enough that the NY Times wrote an article about it. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv... Also, there were some Cable TV channels, sometimes bundled with other channels, that explicitly did not have ads (HBO, to name one), just to complicate things further.

I’ve seen that article before. Cable never marketed itself as being ad free > Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption… HBO has always been a premium add on to basic cable. Just like it is today and it still doesn’t have ads. > But scores of big companies, including General Foods, American Express, Procter & Gamble and Pepsico, are already cable advertisers, along…

In my area, cable absolutely marketed itself as being as-free. Perhaps by the time it reached your area the ad-free dream was already dead.
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