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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

#571

Post by LeonenTheDK »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #394
AlwaysRock wrote: post #378

I run an hdmi cable from my laptop and have a bluetooth keyboard with a scroll pad on it. My wife doesnt like it. But its so much faster than a "smart tv". My issue isnt even the ads. Its that half of these tvs feel like they are running on low memory because of how slow they are. Add in the streaming apps that crash just often enough to be really annoying... I wish it didnt have to be that way.

Yeah these threads pop up on HN all the time and everyone starts talking about apple tv and roku whatever and I think they're all... pretty dumb. HDMI + Computer is just the best answer. Works in hotels just fine. I'm not aware of any smart TVs that push ads over your connected devices feed even if you do let them update for no good reason. Keyboard and mouse is better than remotes. Web search is the best search. You…

I'm right there with you. Still "only" have a 1080p TV but a living room computer is the most robust option, that you get more control over, and it doesn't even need to be an expensive high-end machine either. Added advantage of being expandable and upgradable too, depending on what you're working with.

I stream games from my gaming PC with Steam too and it works flawlessly. Controllers work great too. I'm lucky to have been able to wire everything with Ethernet though, but modern WiFi has gotten surprisingly decent from what I've heard.

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

#572

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

dmix wrote: post #446
SayMyName wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get cheap ones. And by cheap I mean TLC/Hisense level quality displays. Walmart sells Sceptre's for low prices and have no smart features, best purchase I've made in years. We use a lot of Rokus here and my issue isn't the ads, its that every Roku built-in TV gets REALLY slow after a few updates, so now it's just easier to chuck a $20-30 device instead of having to buy an entire $300+TV. Sure I don't ge…

I bought a TCL with smart features and there's no ads and I just dont connect it to wifi. The Firestick 4k Max I got for $75 advertises prime shows occasionally (unobtrusively) but the UI is 2x as fast as my Chromecast so I very happily use it w/ IPTV, Airplay, and streaming apps.

Much worse than ads is automatic content recognition (which, of course, is monetized by the TV's manufacturer).

How do you use the smart features without connecting it to the network (and exposing yourself to ACR)?

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

#573

Post by asdff »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #565
asdff wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

higher resolution also makes CGI looks worse, plausibly from being passable to just distracting.

Also makes it annoying for gaming because suddenly you need a lot more horsepower to do the same thing. E.g. you need to shell out for the Xbox one series X (not the xbox one X, confusing as it is) if you want "proper" 4k to play the same exact games as the almost 10 year old xbox one can play on 1080p. For PC gamers, you will probably need to upgrade your graphics card if you want to have the same framerate you expect from 1080p gaming, certainly not a cheap prospect these days with crypto people buying up GPUs.

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

#574

Post by asdff »

Kiro wrote: post #523
asdff wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe its a generational thing with us millenials having these devices. Almost everyone I know has a game system, either a PS4/5 or an xbox.

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

#575

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.

I think there are hundreds of channel add-ons. You can also connect a TV receiver. I like playing content from Newpipe on my phone directly to Kodi. You will find that button in Newpipe settings.

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

#576

Post by rendall »

skyyler wrote: post #472
jordanpg wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a class component to ads. I find ads intolerable, but I am privileged enough to be able to afford to make them go away in almost all cases. For those on a very tight budget, Disney+ with ads, Kindle with ads, podcasts with ads, etc. are the only thing that is affordable. I suspect for many in the lowest income brackets, traditional cable TV with good old fashioned commercials is a primary source of ente…

This might seem crass but if I was in a situation where I couldn't afford the ad-free version of a streaming service, I would simply abstain from the service entirely. I understand many don't care, but I hate ads with an intensity I cannot describe with words.

> I hate ads with an intensity I cannot describe with words

As the upstream commenter, I am in complete alignment. Whenever I have been too broke not to be advertised at, I have always completely opted out.

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

#577

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

ospzfmbbzr wrote: post #568
scarface74 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I really want to deal with torrenting, Plex servers, etc. Been there done that. I travel a lot and don’t want to deal with downloading media ahead of time. I also stopped pirating music the day iTunes was introduced

How many devices are you allowed to register again? What if your CC on file expires? Well I guess you can just ask (beg) if you need assistance accessing 'your' music library

You do know that iTunes just sells MP4s, right? They work in VLC. You can replicate your iTunes library to a NAS trivially and have it Just Work (now, the iTunes client isn't very smart about network drives, so you're better off having a local library that's backed up to said NAS, but that's not the issue at hand).

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

#578

Post by scarface74 »

ospzfmbbzr wrote: post #568
scarface74 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I really want to deal with torrenting, Plex servers, etc. Been there done that. I travel a lot and don’t want to deal with downloading media ahead of time. I also stopped pirating music the day iTunes was introduced

How many devices are you allowed to register again? What if your CC on file expires? Well I guess you can just ask (beg) if you need assistance accessing 'your' music library

iTunes has sold regular non DRM encrypted music since 2008.

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

#579

Post by rendall »

ericmay wrote: post #410
yibg wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you just wrote is violence, since it caused me to feel defensive and anxious and also think about it more than I'd like.

You can easily draw lines between "I go to Hackernews.com to read the opinions of others and encountered an opinion I don't like" and "I have to listen to ESPN commercials at the gas pump and look at Jesus billboards when I'm driving down the highway". Other states have precedent for banning billboards actually. If you want to take the other extreme of your extreme example here, you should be ok with people driving d…

I'm sure upthread was being sarcastic.

The trend to conflate violence and words is dangerous. While words can lead to violence, to say that words are violence tacitly allows physical retaliation for speech that the listener does not like. We learnt as children this is wrong, and it remains so for adults.

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