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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

#181

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

logicallee wrote: post #157
izacus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never buy a consumer product that expects an Internet connection. This is a nice trite trope, but getting an affordable TV without these features might be nearly impossible for most people these days.

Let's play a hypothetical game. Your TV attempts to literally control your life. And is ultra HD and really cheap. But you have to keep its front facing camera uncovered or it blares an alarm saying that its front camera is covered. The alarm also activates, but more quietly, if it loses its internet connection. Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing wit…

>Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.

There was literally a Black Mirror episode about something very similar.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#182

Post by deergomoo »

flucivja wrote: post #105
huhtenberg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it Just don't connect it to the Internet. The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.

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

It does exactly what you would hope, at least for Samsung TVs. Ads disappear, other functions are not affected.

Upon discovering the ads I was gonna return mine for a comparable LG, until I learned LG also have ads—at least this way I can pretend I'm not being taken for a ride.

At the time I didn't have any external devices capable of 4K Netflix or YouTube; now I do I should factory reset the TV and set it up without network access,

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#183

Post by cmckn »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #98
cmckn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, my Bravia was worth every (numerous) penny. I do update to get features like Airplay, but have never seen an ad. The $400 Samsung in my bedroom, however, starts streaming an ad-laden TV Guide equivalent automatically when I turn it on. Beyond awful.

Worth noting that Sony also produces Android TVs AFAIK which I guess have the same prob. My older Bravia doesn't, but then isn't all that smart ;) and the lcd technology is outdated.

Mine is an Android OLED model from 2019 — I guess it’s more correct to say I haven’t _noticed_ an ad. I use my Apple TV exclusively for “smart” functions, and the TV wakes up and goes to the correct input whenever a connected device wakes. I never see the Android TV home. It’s still a far cry from the Samsung.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#184

Post by aronpye »

lucasverra wrote: post #168
random_visitor wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> you can but if it cant resolve it will fallback to googles resolver automatically. At least this is what happened on my model.

I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns server configured via my DHCP. Letting pi-hole block the requests helps prevent errors from dns request timeouts.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#185

Post by deergomoo »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #93
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…

I don't trust most smart TVs, that's why I bought a dumb TV from TCL. If I want any fancy smart functions, I'll just connect an android box via HDMI.

I would love to do this, but dumb TVs pretty much top out at the upper-mid range. If you want a high end panel you're getting all the bullshit too, unfortunately.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#186

Post by mercora »

thom wrote: post #130

If I'm reasonably happy with Chromecast (not interested in litigating who spies on me most here), is there some setup I can achieve with just a large PC monitor and some HDMI jiggery pokery to hook up a sound system? I hate the thought of paying for all this gunk I never use, I really just need the panel.

this is probably a good use case for an AVR (audio video receiver). you can plug the chromecast and your monitor directly to the amp and let the AVR route signals appropriately.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#187

Post by Siira »

tangjurine wrote: post #167
avian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a general counterargument to anything different from the status quo. You should never trust general counterarguments.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#188

Post by cmckn »

boudin wrote: post #175
cmckn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, my Bravia was worth every (numerous) penny. I do update to get features like Airplay, but have never seen an ad. The $400 Samsung in my bedroom, however, starts streaming an ad-laden TV Guide equivalent automatically when I turn it on. Beyond awful.

I have a Sony Android TV from the 2015 generation. It always had a row to advertise random app I don't use (Netflix, Playstation Video, Disney something etc...) It also always advertise content from those platform, you have to disable "recommendations" from apps one after one as you can only disable recommendations for an app that pushed its crap at least once. The last update also broke hardware video decoding for a…

What TV’s fall into the “dumb” category these days? I can’t go back from OLED and I don’t think anything at that price point will lack the “smart” features, unless it’s a commercial offering.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#189

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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 recently built a HTPC/home server based on a Gemini Lake Celeron ITX board in a compact case. The CPU/GPU is passively cooled and can decode 4 simultaneous 4K streams in realtime. It has hardware decoding of x264, x265, VP8/9. All-in, aside from the storage disks (for a Btrfs RAID1 pool) that I took from my desktop PC, it cost me less than a QNAP/Synology NAS with room for a similar number of disks.

I still use my Chromecast for Youtube, because the UI in a browser isn't great for couch use. On the CC, multiple people can add videos to the playback queue, I haven't found a good replacement for that yet.

For anything longer than a typical Youtube video, it's not an issue finding a movie and starting it from a wireless keyboard.

Our current TV is a 42" LG that I got for free from work. It's old enough to not have any "smart" features, it has no networking at all. The picture quality is great and no ghosting unlike a lot of older LCDs. I am not looking forward to the day I eventually have to replace it.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#190

Post by [deleted] »

huhtenberg wrote: post #79
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…

> If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it Just don't connect it to the Internet. The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.

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