It should be noted that Vizos used to not show ads. But now in a firmware update my tv is now forcing you to go to their smartcast input option that shows ads.
You can't disable that in the settings.
The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
521–530 of 579 posts
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#522Earlier 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.
I remember paying for DVDs and being forced to watch trailers after putting the disc in the tray. Even when we directly pay for content they can't help but add advertisements.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Aside from a few Apple TVs I don't know many people who do that, especially not Roku which I presume is some American thing, but I know a lot of people who use the apps on their Smart TV. The rest are hooking up the TV to their computer. I also know a lot of people (me included) who wants a 4K TV just to watch Netflix in 4K so I don't think that's generally true. Don't know anyone who uses Blu-ray.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How could they? The big draw of cable TV was rebroadcasting network OTA channels that had commercials. They then added superstations.
If you look at the earliest basic cable channels, they also had commercials from day one.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hard, spikey, jagged, foul tasting pill to swallow then: Society needs to pay directly for content.
Much of society either is paying or is willing to pay. Note that even in places that we _do_ pay, for example cable TV, we still get ads.
The only channels that promised fewer ads because you pay for it and delivered on it (not switching to double dipping within a decade) are the ones financed by mandatory TV license fees.
People do pay and it does not work. The only thing that works is government regulations.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#526So 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?
Users flagged it as well as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554218. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I think they probably just thought the comment was off topic, and not in an interesting way.
The key for whether an article is good for HN is not its "adiness" (if I can put it that way) but its interestingness - i.e. does it gratify intellectual curiosity. In this case plenty of users clearly thought it did. It may be true that an article was written as part of a startup's effort to promote its product, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the content itself is interesting. (Of course, it tends not to be, because content marketing tends to be boring, but that's a different issue.)
The rule in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html about not using HN primarily for promotion is about how people post to HN. In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=PretzelFisch it seems clear that the user isn't posting to HN primarily to promote anything, and certainly not this particular product.
Still, I'm glad you noticed that rule! It's a relatively recent one and I think it added a lot.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#527At 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…
> Then every firmware update the flag gets reset to enabled of course :)
This should be criminal
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have evidence as to the negative mental effects and how bad they are?
It’s been discussed for years in dozens of articles on hacker news and everywhere. At this point the burden is on you to show us on how being plugged to social media 24-7 is not harmful.
No one is using it 24/7, this is about ads not social media use, and the burden isn't on disproving it just because people have talked about it often
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#529At 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…
> The few firmware updates I've needed to do were applied using a thumb drive What kind of firmware updates do you need to do on it, when its only purpose is to act as a screen?
My Sony TV came with the newest ATSC 3.0 TV tuner hardware. The software wasn't fully QC'd at launch. They put out a firmware update about 2 months after I bought mine to fully enable the tuner software and hardware.
Otherwise, it's been app updates and some improved HDR processing.
Re: The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
#530I bought a smart LG TV about a month ago. This is my first smart TV, and I was very cautious about it because of "too smart TV" stories. It is OLED and the picture worth every euro I paid for it (and it was quite a few euro, to be honest). I am downloading HDR 4k movies and playing them from USB stick. I also watching YouTube occasionally, casting it from the phone (TV plays it by itself, not receiving a stream from…
You're not doing anything wrong. I have a 65" LG C9. And nearly everyone at my company has an LG TV. I've never seen or heard anyone mention ads. My parents have used the same TV for several years.
When used with inputs such as cable box, Apple TV, or native apps like Netflix, Amazon, etc., everything works as expected.
I'm genuinely confused as to what people are referring to. The last ads I saw were in the Peacock app to watch Parks and Recreation (and they were surprisingly non-obtrusive mainly Apple and EV ads). But I didn't have a subscription--the ads weren't coming from the TV.
I purchased a high-end Samsung TV in 2011. That was my last Samsung purchase ever. I also had a Sony X900F, and suffice it to say, I'll never purchase another Android-based TV (the UI was slow unresponsive garbage, unintuitive, and user-hostile). The actual TV itself was of decent quality but hamstrung by its operating system.
In general, unless something has changed, stick with LG.