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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

#281

Post by II2II »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #254
Nextgrid wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The truth is noone buys anything from any ads... however brand awareness is a real thing. If you see a fancy ad from a company, they must be a profitable company that has a great product so you might be inclined to buy it or suggest it next time you're looking for this category of products.

I don't buy that for two reasons:

- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.

- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#282

Post by ta8964586 »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #274

Are non-smart TV's still a thing? Smart TV's aren't necessary from a consumer standpoint.

Lots of companies have "digital signage" TVs built for business that don't have the consumer software. They are typically more expensive and optimized more for continuous usage (16hr/day 7days/week for samsung), but as of now I don't believe they get ads pushed to them.

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/displays/4k-uhd...

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#283

Post by Kipters »

paulus_magnus2 wrote: post #268

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 (terre…

This is rather interesting. My biggest doubt is how many HDMI inputs they have and if it's possible to easily switch between them. But I'll definitely look into this kind of devices when it's time for me to update my current TV. (And no antenna input means the Italian law doesn't consider it a TV, so I can avoid the TV tax)

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#284

Post by codeduck »

pja wrote: post #277
snarfy wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose you could open the back and unplug the aerial cable from the motherboard. Unless they’re using one of those tiny surface mount aerials of course :(

nothing a hot soldering iron won't fix.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#285

Post by pseudalopex »

deergomoo wrote: post #182
flucivja wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article says LG removed the ad.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#286

Post by Freak_NL »

bluGill wrote: post #176
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.

It is called a monitor. Works just fine for whatever and people use it for work. The factory I work at had large one scattered around to show line information. Some of the information is safety critical and so if it is inyeruped with an ad there will be legal issues.

I've wondered about this. The TV I have (a Sony Bravia) is now almost a decade old (works fine). We got it specifically because it has a slot for a DVB-T module (terrestrial broadcast). DVB-T is now gone (replaced by DVB-T2, but I doubt this will remain in the air long), so we have no broadcast TV now, only our HTPC connected to it with Netflix, local media files, and a browser.

Frankly, we don't miss the TV channels. Streaming works okayish for the public channels, but we rarely bother.

The TV is just a dumb screen connected to a receiver, which has the HTPC as input as well as record player.

So the only thing a 'TV' offers me is its screen. Is that any different from a high end computer monitor these days? Is there a difference based on the viewing distance perhaps?

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#287

Post by tolbish »

JohnBooty wrote: post #207
obscura wrote: post #46

Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance. It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR…

Yet another example of the customer coming last. Unfortunately, it's worse than that. It's more like a case of the consumer coming first. The vast majority of consumers don't care about this. They're trying to get the biggest screen for the least money. And TV manufacturers are giving it to them. However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue. So, we g…

Not really. We are asking for TVs without internet access, but the market has decided for us.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#288

Post by mavhc »

ChrisRR wrote: post #67
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.

Exactly, we bought my 75ish year old father in law a new TV because he was using a small SD flat panel and his eyesight is going. But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers. It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing unt…

What tv can't you just type a channel number in, or press an input button to switch inputs?

If you don't plug it into the internet it's not going to be a smart tv

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#290

Post by pjc50 »

qcq36 wrote: post #226
tangjurine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There’s something rather extraordinary about this community, in particular, throwing a fit about advertising in products. This discussion has gone from “fuck that guy” — overlooking that almost every employer represented here has one and the larger employers have entire divisions of them — to “capitalism is bad” in three messages. That’s impressive. It’s almost as if the root cause of why these business models are ho…

Fairly sure HN has been complaining about this for years. We're not a hivemind; it's not even the case that most posters work for FAANG, ycombinator or even "startups" per se.
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