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Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

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Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#161

Post by mcv »

bleepblorp wrote: post #28
Shivetya wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that does get very difficult with TV since a large number of people stream, the app on my LG is actually better than my Apple TV but it is toss up with the Roku on the other TV. So I am going to say, for the technically inclined its time to chase down your router firewall logs and find where the TV is going to for ads and block the IP or port range. Would be curious what the TV does, properly engineered it shoul…

It's just a matter of time until Smart TVs deactivate themselves if they can't connect to their telemetry and ad servers -- or the manufacturers enter into agreements with streaming services to proxy ads through the same IPs used to stream video. This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP t…

I haven't seen any of this behaviour on my Samsung TV yet, but I'm going to pay more attention to it now. And definitely avoid Samsung in the future.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#162

Post by kmlx »

rini17 wrote: post #7

When I wrote about phones "Mass market is demanding products nonsensically thin to the detriment of other properties, because it was told to. It could be told otherwise." I got laughed off. That the market isn't going to serve my fancy preferences. But this is the same thing, the market is repeatedly told to ask for smart devices, even when dumb TV is all the users need.

i disagree. i think that age has passed and tvs without the netflix app will simply not be bought.

for myself, having no 4k hdr, no netflix, apple tv, youtube, bbc, and many others is a deal breaker when it comes to buying a new tv.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#163

Post by adriancr »

huhtenberg wrote: post #151
fxtentacle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I'll start selling a little $50 box to emulate internet and route all update / advertisement requests to /dev/null :) Or maybe we (the tech community) just agree on one model and produce an open source firmware. If you look at MagicLantern for Canon, you'll see how amazingly far people will go to control their hardware.

That won't last long either if at all. They will just require an SSL connectivity to their servers with a custom CA root. The end.

so...

1. Order TV.

2. test if it works without agreeing to anything and without internet.

3. return if that's not the case.

I have yet to accept EULA on samsung on anything and it works...

Right now the ACR is troubling. Telling a remote server what you're watching... Only solution I found - not connected + hdmi to Linux box I control.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#164

Post by m_eiman »

fyfy18 wrote: post #124
fxtentacle wrote: post #84

... and that's exactly why my TV will never have an internet connection. By now, it doesn't really matter which brand you use. I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data about your usage to NetEase in China and ALL of them have ToS that say that they might record your voice and store it for improving their AI or whatever. Plus all of them shove suggested apps in your face, so I'd say it i…

How do you force WebOS to default to HDMI? I replaced my parents TV with a LG LED last year, and it defaults to showing "No signal found" when turned on, then you have to switch to HDMI.

If possible, make the device connected to HDMI turn on the TV via CEC, that should switch it to the correct input automatically.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#165

Post by galad87 »

covercash wrote: post #63
FooHentai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever has the best panel for the best price, then strap an apple TV (or your choice of NUC) onto it and completely ignore whatever on-board smarts exist.

The biggest drawback to this is the lack of support for 4K in the YouTube app on Apple TV.

YouTube app is supposed to support 4k on tvOS 14. I don't know if Google already updated the app or not.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#166

Post by ckastner »

fxtentacle wrote: post #84

... and that's exactly why my TV will never have an internet connection. By now, it doesn't really matter which brand you use. I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data about your usage to NetEase in China and ALL of them have ToS that say that they might record your voice and store it for improving their AI or whatever. Plus all of them shove suggested apps in your face, so I'd say it i…

> I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data

I always suspected something like this, but never went through the effort of checking.

Did you by chance document and publish your analysis somewhere?

If they do this with TV sets sold in the EU, then unless they offer some opt-out mechanism (actually, opt-IN, but whatever) directly on the TV set, this is a blatant GDPR violation.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#167

Post by tangjurine »

avian wrote: post #122
neya wrote: post #31

Fuck the guy who wanted to suck up to the management in some stupid meeting projecting estimated revenue out of this to ask for a raise later because he "contributed to a revenue increase" to the company. There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the…

In some stupid meeting somewhere: A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up. B: People don't like ads on their TV. A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much . B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on you…

We're in the middle of transitioning from making decisions based on pure intuition to being purely logical and data-driven... I wonder if that's such a good idea.

There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.

Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#168

Post by lucasverra »

random_visitor wrote: post #119
flucivja wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just thinking what would happen if I block connection to Ads services in my router...

That's pretty much what a pi-hole is. According to my friends who use a pi-hole to filter their connection, it makes almost everything ad-free

Also https://nextdns.io/ on the cloud. I run my ios devices with no ads thanks to this honest service. Can i modify the DNS resolver on a samsung tv (i do not intend to have one ever)

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#169

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

can16358p wrote: post #70
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have the right to do that? Do customers in any country have a right to demand a product's firmware be restored to factory-state (on the grounds that what they received isn't what they were sold)?

Even though if customers do have that right, I'd like to see how many % of the regular users actually demand it.

You have no idea how much I want Apple to be forced to allow me to restore my iPhone to its original firmware!
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