Alright, fine, I'm getting an Apple TV
After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
211–220 of 292 posts
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even better, if you can avoid accepting the ToS for the apps, they don't even start. My Samsung TV is so snappy now because I reset it and ignore the accept ToS button :)
Makes sense. Telemetry takes packets out of your bandwidth. These boxes have constant calls so… yeah free that space up
This is step beyond that, none of the crappy Tizen apps or anything start at all. The TV never gets network access of course :)
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
PlutoTV is the same. I used to put on the Geek & Sundry channel and get ads from my employer.
I know what you mean but I can't help but imagine a 60 year old man pointing at the camera and saying, "Get back to work, Steve."
> imagine a 60 year old man pointing at the camera and saying, "Get back to work, Winston Smith"
FTFY
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You're making the mistake of assuming the ad is for the best offer you'd be interested in instead of the one that makes the most money from you (i.e. the worst one for you). The expected utility to you is negative. A customer buying something isn't a zero-sum transaction. My default assumption is that the product that stands to make the most money from me is the one that would most benefit me. For example, the groce…
That's again assuming the system is making good recommendations for you. That's not what they're meant to do. A much better analogy is you go to the grocery store. The clerk knows you like apples and says "hey, I've got a bag of Johnny's apples here for $6", and pulls out a bag with a sticker that says "Johnny's" on it. Next person comes in, and the clerk offers them a bag of Dan's apples for $3. The bags come from t…
It's not even that... they aren't recommending Apples at all, but they're going to try to get you to buy something else that is more profitable. It's like going into the store and then they're like "Here's a bag of oranges."
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#215The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.
My solution was to just get an old box that was cheap, plug it into the TV with an HDMI cord, add a wireless mouse and keyboard, and viola. I have a viewing experience that is on par with what most other people have without having to have a locked down device that I don't control attached to my tv and spying on me.
Plus I can use it to play Steam games, so gaming console and media device all in one.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making the mistake of assuming the ad is for the best offer you'd be interested in instead of the one that makes the most money from you (i.e. the worst one for you). The expected utility to you is negative.
>You're making the mistake of assuming the ad is for the best offer you'd be interested in instead of the one that makes the most money from you (i.e. the worst one for you). The expected utility to you is negative. A customer buying something isn't a zero-sum transaction. My default assumption is that the product that stands to make the most money from me is the one that would most benefit me. For example, the groce…
> My default assumption is that the product that stands to make the most money from me is the one that would most benefit me.
Well, see, that's where things like cigarettes, liquor, and gambling just blatantly violate that assumption. Ads are psychological manipulation for the advertiser's benefit, hands down.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#217If you own a FireTV stick or display you'll notice that the FreeVee streaming app has started to become more and more prominent. It's deceptively simple - they are taking old shows like Murder She Wrote and streaming them non-stop on a "channel" much like the old terrestrial broadcast networks did. They're solving the streaming problem for older customers that don't grok Netflix or Hulu. These shows take pseudo-comme…
I recently bought a "smart TV" and I was pleased to see that it comes with essentially 'cable TV' (IPTV, I guess?) without even needing to run an app or set up an account. You just click CH+/- or guide and you watch another channel. One of the channels plays 21 Jump Street (the 80's show) and a few other 80's classics, another 2 just play 80's/90's music videos exclusively. I think it's kind of neat that the internet has finally come around to make cable TV obsolete.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things. I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.
See - that would work if our TV was sending out DNS requests. It doesn't though! Like, it seems like it has its own truly internal DNS resolver, which gets updated I presume via OS updates.
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Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's again assuming the system is making good recommendations for you. That's not what they're meant to do. A much better analogy is you go to the grocery store. The clerk knows you like apples and says "hey, I've got a bag of Johnny's apples here for $6", and pulls out a bag with a sticker that says "Johnny's" on it. Next person comes in, and the clerk offers them a bag of Dan's apples for $3. The bags come from t…
It's not even that... they aren't recommending Apples at all, but they're going to try to get you to buy something else that is more profitable. It's like going into the store and then they're like "Here's a bag of oranges."
If the system has a higher expectation that you will buy the apples, making them the more profitable option to offer, it'll do that. So people aren't entirely wrong in that way. But the point is even when it's "helpful" (by coincidence), it will still do everything it can to screw you. And yeah it'll happily offer you oranges if it thinks it can get you to bite. Or beer, particularly if it knows you're an alcoholic!
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#220> The changes [showing more ads for money] mirror similar moves from others in the TV maker industry. Tbh this is every industry at this point and its driving me nuts.
Some product categories are nearly monopolies too:
- Garage Door Openers. Chamberlain (also Liftmaster). They have like 80% of the market. Its them or Genie. Almost everyone else got out of the market. Decent products with OK prices. Competition would bring prices down some but not by a huge amount. However they are desperate to generate MRR and so despite originally having openers with WiFi and local APIs they've locked everything down to MyQ so they can force everything through the cloud and charge both you and 3rd party integrators money.
- Sink Food Disposals - Insinkerator (part of Emerson) has almost the entire US market. Three product lines for the low, middle, upmarket segments.
- Luxor. Owns basically all retail eyeglass sales in the US. Charges literal 10x-100x markups on simple plastic frames. Also the easiest slam-dunk for anti-trust action even under the super high bar used by the government today... but no one seems to care.
For everything else we have a missing middle situation. You can't buy a "decent" TV, microwave, toaster, etc. There's only bottom-feeder dreck or high-end. Everyone else disappeared or doesn't want to serve that market.
A lot of the products are objectively worse than they were 20+ years ago. We have a restored Sunbeam Radiant toaster... besides automatically lowering and raising the toasted items it also makes toast about 2x as fast as anything you can buy at Target/Walmart today regardless of price.
Kitchen appliances are similar. Your standard GE/Whirlpool/etc ovens, fridges, washers, and so on are uber cheap, not as repairable as they used to be, and are intended to be used for about 10 years then thrown away. To get a well engineered appliance that has proper service manuals and are designed to last you have to make a huge jump to something like Thermador, SpeedQueen, etc.
TVs? The only way to get one not jammed with ads and tracking garbage is via "commercial signage" which is what I ended up doing. I bought a Sony Bravia "commercial signage" display. It runs Android but you can reject Google's license agreement and the TV works as a display anyway. It also has a documented API I can use to control it. Oh and it has a higher brightness rating than equivalent consumer TVs and is rated to be on 24/7. The extra money was worth it to me.