251–260 of 268 posts
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Wouldn't the data be a lot less useful to them? Instead of 'customer watched X show for Y minutes' it'd be 'customer X watched Y minutes of unknown on HDMI1'.
As edge AI gets better they will be able to send smaller textual descriptions of the screen content.
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The FAQ says you can't but apparently that's wrong (or intentionally deceptive?). Someone posted instructions below.
Just reading it wrong. You can't turn off ads in scenic mode, but you can turn off scenic mode. Vizio kind of has a lot of dark pattern messaging. As an example, they make it seem like you HAVE to enable the microphone on the remote or install an app to change the TV volume. They don't provide a diagram of the remote, so if you don't notice the volume rocker on the side, it seems like you only have two rather invasiv…
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That's crazy of you to sacrifice your sleep enough nights to notice a pattern. The extent of my patience would be 1st night - disable CEC on the TV 2nd night - to hell with you, into the garbage it goes
I think there should be "pull out the cord" step somewhere
Very afraid we will get to the point where new TVs will refuse to boot and let you use external inputs unless they have network connection. I’ll live with watching Plex on my phone before I buy a TV like that.
Am I the only one here that read the part where you can absolutely disable this? I don't understand the performative outrage. The TV has an ad-supported screen saver, which they claim is used to support free streaming content. You can disable the screen saver entirely. No, you cannot just disable the ads but keep the screen saver. What is the problem? Meanwhile half the posters here work for Google or other ad-survei…
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Unlikely. Every Smart TV I've used requires you to agree to a EULA before any "smart" features are available.
I’d be surprised if you could even use a smart TV at all without agreeing to an EULA.
About 2 years ago we got a deal on a smallish Samsung for our nursery. The thing is haunted. On more than a couple occasions in the middle of the night I've heard people talking. On working up the courage and getting out of bed I've found the TV tuned in my daughter's room to one of those Samsung Internet TV channels. My wife and I never use those, so it's absolutely bizarre.
The good news: large-panel TV sets are inexpensive for their performance. The bad news: like many modern products, and as freely confessed in the linked article, you don't own the TV, it owns you . The remedy: Connect the TV to your computer as a dumb monitor -- make it show only content you directly control. And disable the TV's network connection -- without that connection, it can't show ads. My large-panel TV serv…
You skip over the ones that are obvious, but not the ones that are more stealthily integrated into the content. IMO if a video creator sells out and adds sponsored content of any kind they are no longer to be trusted to not be manipulative in other ways.
OK, related, so I have to share, because it's driving some valley residents crazy. It is currently the portable air conditioner season in Arizona. Home Depots now have them stocked in the front of the store. All Wi-Fi enabled Toshiba models (which are white-label rebranded Midea units,) their overwhelming predominate stock, are susceptible to a bug where your unit can be remotely turned on or off randomly, without yo…
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To be honest, this is part of why TVs can be offered for so cheap these days. Same reason really cheap phones are stuffed with bloatware. Luckily with TVs you can freeload: just never connect it to the internet and only apply updates via USB. Stick an Apple TV / Chromecast / console into it for playback. This might even become standard operating procedure considering Samsung is getting into the ad game, and LG and So…
I think it’s only a matter of time until TVs refusing to work without internet or randomly interrupting your watching experience to ask you to connect to the internet. Heck, they can even learn from Microsoft now and demand a Vizio account, iPhone apps, etc. Additionally they could start producing them without HDMI or other ports to prevent Apple TV or other similar devices from connecting. What I’m trying to say is…
When a company treats its customers like crap, that opens an opportunity for someone else to come along and do better.
Corporations are copying each other's bad habits right now, the kind of behavior you've described is a trend and the ones partaking in this race to the bottom will fail. I'm looking forward to a "revolution" when one rediscovers there's actually a market for quality consumer electronics that treat you decently and are a joy to use (think Apple's earlier iPhone models, auto manufacturers going back to knobs and buttons, etc) and might pursue this myself if nobody else does.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to legislation enforcing some basic, much-needed principles (like privacy preservation, requiring opt-in consent, attaching more liability to collected user data even to the point of establishing fiduciary-like duty on the sensitive stuff, stricter transparency and better user controls promoting consumer choice). I just think you need to be careful about getting too prescriptive on the "how".