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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

#261

Post by wastedhours »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #252
wastedhours wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with TV panels is that they're essentially a commodity, right? Once every TV from a large brand becomes "smart", would the next logical step be for a small privacy-minded collective to go to an OEM and commission them to start making dumb TVs? Usually I disagree about niche hardware in this way (for example, usual mentions about a similar approach for phones and laptops), but the dumb screen might just be d…

In theory, that's how the free market should work; in practice, it's very hard for a new player on the market to get brand recognition and a share of the market. It can be done, I think, but it has to be VERY well funded - you need to send salespeople / lobbyists to the various on- and offline shops selling TVs, you need "SEO experts" to try and beat the competition's "SEO experts" on the internet and e.g. Amazon's s…

I mean, marketing's my background so I get that. But you see small brands like Pine64 and System76 doing it for specific types of (often generalised OEM, "off the shelf") hardware.

If they can pull it off for more sophisticated integrated solutions like phones, tablets and laptops, I'd have thought that a TV brand would be even easier.

Surely buying a commodity panel off of an existing OEM would negate a lot of the legal issues, and going DTC to the kinds of people who are specifically looking for a dumb TV is quite a decent niche to market to?

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#262

Post by snarfy »

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 an LG. I never connected it to the internet, but it still has a built-in, always-on, no-way-to-disable wireless access point that pollutes the wireless channel it broadcasts on.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#264

Post by ziml77 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #232
auggierose wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just buy an Apple TV, and then whatever TV you like.

Apparently according to other comments a lot of TVs still do ACR on content received by the apple TV (or any hdmi signal) so we still need dumb tvs...

Disable the TV's network connection. Or if you really need it connected, decline as many of the ToS & privacy agreements as possible

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#265

Post by jiggawatts »

donatj wrote: post #138

I don't understand destroying your brand like this. Samsung from the early 2000s to ~2015 meant quality. Is it worth the short term gains from ad revenue over long term customer loyalty? I myself was a pretty loyal customer up until very recently when it came time to buy a TV and I specifically wanted one without ads ruining the experience. I'm reasonably certain this will make this many peoples last Samsung TV.

It's absolutely certain. I'm in the market for new, high-end OLED or equivalent TV. There is no way in hell I'm ever buying a Samsung, under any circumstances, ever.

Their corporate executives clearly have no ethics whatsoever.

But that's not the only problem. My coworkers have been to Samsung's headquarters and worked on their core IT infrastructure. They both rattled off an endless horror show of security lapses and outright violations of common sense that would make your eyes pop out of your head.

There is zero chance that your data is "safe" with Samsung. None. They will get hacked. They're almost certainly hacked already, and don't know it. Or they know it and simply don't care.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#266

Post by tzs »

JorgeGT wrote: post #95
reallydontask wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's an interesting point you make, but perhaps companies should make these trade offs transparent. You can get the version that phones home or you can pay extra for the version that doesn't. I suppose the problem is that they'd make this transparent and there would likely be a bit of backlash ... thank goodness that regulatory agencies have our best interests at heart /s

Precisely Amazon is one of the few companies that make this explicit with their Kindle, here the Paperwhite without ads costs 10€ extra. I'm curious, does anyone know other examples?

I'm curious how many people pay extra for no Kindle ads.

I originally bought Kindles without ads, but for my third Kindle I decided to buy it with ads to see how bad they were. You can pay the extra later to get rid of ads, so if it turns out buying the version with ads was a mistake it is easy to fix it.

I don't see the sleep screen except briefly between the time I open the cover and the time the Kindle wakes up. I'm rarely on the home screen. I do almost all book shopping on my computer rather than on my Kindle. Thus I almost never actually see an ad, and when I do it is almost always not interfering with what I'm there to do.

The few ads that I do briefly see in those rare times I'm not in a book or in my library are static images without sound. For the sleep screen it is usually an ad for a book and the image is the book cover, which is often actually nice to look at.

After actually seeing the ads, I now feel like I wasted my money buying the ad-free versions for my first two Kindles.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#267

Post by torgian »

What happened to just buying a "normal" TV? No internet needed or anything?

Seems dumb. Seeing this link has already made me to decide I actually won't buy a Samsung tv. I'll just get something else.

If we truly go the road of the dodo, I'll just make a side business rewiring "smart" tvs.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#268

Post by paulus_magnus2 »

Can someone with 1st hand experience reassure me I would be able to use a commercial digital signage as a TV??

From what I learned so far the difficulties are: [please also correct me on these]

- stand is not included (need to buy that separately / do a wall mount)

- hard to find a seller

- prices are higher than for equivalent consumer TVs

- brightness is higher -> more power consumption

- there is no antenna (terrestial DVB-T/T2, satellite input) so you have to drive content from USB or PC / Raspberry / xxxCast dongle

The benefit is that you get a "dumb" panel with no spying, ads, software taking snapshots of what you watch. The TV is then also designed to last more hours - commercial panels are on 20h/day.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#270

Post by brahyam »

Nextgrid wrote: post #211
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…

I suspect that a large part of this ad- and marketing-driven economy is based on this. The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs. Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was fo…

> looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money

Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them

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