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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

#301

Post by rrobukef »

mrweasel wrote: post #219
rrobukef wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My TV needed a firmware upgrade to get HDMI working. You need to accept EULA's before connecting and updating.

Can't you just yank the internet connection afterwards? I did a firmware upgrade and just disconnected from the internet right after. I also don't use the built in apps, because let's be honest, compared to an AppleTV, all SmartTV apps are basically garbage. I understand that the AppleTV is somewhat expensive, but it's my baseline for the quality I'd expect from a SmartTV. Netflix on the AppleTV, starts instantly, an…

Yeah, I did. and at least it is an Ad-free TV.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#302

Post by remote_phone »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #294
jiggawatts wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got one today. It's so much better than the "Smart" Samsung TV it is plugged into that it's not even funny. The remote control has touch. I can use my phone to type text input. It's fast . It's elegant and slick. It has no ads. It has options that I care about. It doesn't waste my time with options I don't care about. The Samsung TV on the other hand was a flagship model. Top of the line. Best of the best. Jus…

There is one thing Apple TV has so backwards that I can't even. Text input. All the letters lined alphabetically with only left-right movement allowed. Takes ages to input anything. Also no corrections allowed. I actually exit appleTV and use the built in TV apps for when I need youtube and the like, because their input mechanism is not insane. I know there is a remote app for iPhones, but you do provide an actual re…

Use voice dictation. It works remarkably well for entering text

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#303

Post by petargyurov »

TVs have gone completely the opposite direction of what I dreamed of.

On top of all these ads and snooping, there are so few TVs with a smooth, responsive UI. Seriously, even in top brands the UI chugs along at a snail's pace. And most of the time the UI design itself is terrible.

Who cares about 8K if the UI takes 8 seconds to load.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#304

Post by troydavis »

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…

I looked in to this about a year ago and found that many digital sign models either (a) omitted relatively basic features like HDR, HDMI ARC, or CEC or (b) weren’t 10% or even 50% higher priced, but 200-300% more (compared to fairly high-end consumer models, not to the cheapest consumer model).

Make sure they actually do what you want, even things that every consumer model has had for years. The situation may have improved in the last year. Also, I only looked at 82-85” models, so the situation may be better on smaller models.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#305

Post by Silhouette »

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 wonder how true the old saying about all publicity being good publicity really is any more. I can't speak for anyone else, but as I've become older, I've also become much less tolerant of unwanted interruptions and distractions. I don't mind a relevant ad that is tastefully integrated into whatever I'm looking at or listening to, but the patterns of behaviour I've developed online or when watching TV or listening to radio are definitely geared to minimising interruptions and disrupting the kinds of security- and privacy-threatening tracking that supports the big ad networks. Pushy ads that manage to break through tend to result in instant closing of browser, changing of channel, etc. so definitely aren't doing the host site/channel any favours, and they tend to leave a bad impression of whoever was advertising if they leave any impression at all.

The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#306

Post by mFixman »

FooHentai wrote: post #24
jmull3n wrote: post #19

Curious to see what HN users believe is the best smart TV to buy in terms of OS functionality, privacy and user experience?

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.

Any reason why an Apple TV and not a Roku or a Chromecast?

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#307

Post by logicOnly »

sasaf5 wrote: post #292

Don't buy a TV, buy a screen and connect it to your own media source. Preferably offline media. You can be a lot more deliberate about the content you consume and there won't be tracking (though there might still be ads in the media).

I read about these problems and they really only effect low information consumers.

Anyone that researches can get a TV without ads for hundreds of dollars.

I don't buy anything from Samsung, it sounds like a user issue. Samsung is notorious for being awful.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#308

Post by jskdvsksnb »

Siira wrote: post #187
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…

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

> You should never trust general counterarguments.

Noted.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#309

Post by vinceguidry »

cced wrote: post #300
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.

This is not the solution. Adding a PiHole to your network is not the solution. Disabling features in other places of your network is not the solution. What if Samsung decides that it will try to connect to open networks for updates or what not? What then? Ask your neighbour to install PiHole on his network? No. This is an example of a game of cat and mouse that shouldn't exist - you pay money for a TV and that's not…

Until they all start doing it.

Real solution is regulation. But that can only happen if the outcry is large enough. Having two revenue streams is always going to be better than one.

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