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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

#311

Post by adriancr »

belorn wrote: post #178
adriancr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an older comment mention, they can easily add an delay that makes it work without an connection only for the duration in which an return is possible. It is very hard to win against hostile design.

I agree with you it's hard to win against hostile design but there are options for now.

If it stops working after return period I call under warranty that it stopped working (2 years), they are forced to fix the issue.

Explain the issue, explain you cannot connect to the internet.

If it doesn't work, forward the whole info to the customer protection bureau if you're in the EU.

Edit: I will test this out by setting a date far in the future when I buy new equipment (will also hopefully cause SSL failures due to expired certificates internally in the firmware)

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#312

Post by strken »

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…

In practice, there are already people who need dumb screens - airlines, railways, offices, and so on. Those people will pay a premium to get "industrial grade" products, but it's not always an enormous premium, and most people on HN could afford to pay it.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#313

Post by Swenrekcah »

remote_phone wrote: post #302
Swenrekcah wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, thanks for the suggestion, I didn't know it was an option.

But what if I need to input a language that's not supported or I just don't want to yell at my TV to search a video?

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#314

Post by JorgeGT »

tzs wrote: post #266
JorgeGT wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My Kindle is old so there wasn't ad-supported versions back then, but my GF's Kindle does have ads, and they're almost always terrible, terrible books, displayed full-size in the sleep screen. We joke that they try to shame you into paying the no-ads upgrade (or for a cover!).

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#315

Post by swiley »

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…

This is always the way commercial software works. If we can't legislate it then the only way to help people is by educating them.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#316

Post by vinceguidry »

m463 wrote: post #198
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.

I think that will just create a market opportunity. There was a company that made just a good tv, no smarts, but I can't find it right offhand. It think it was a european company

Market opportunities are for companies to make more money, not less. If everyone is doing it, it’s because the market, us, told them they could get away with it, and therefore will, because two revenue streams will always be better than one.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#317

Post by _zzaw »

I wonder how many people who buy TVs read reviews on them beforehand. I always do, and I wouldn’t consider any device that came with this garbage.

I have a feeling this will last about as long as it takes for consumers to get a sense for what models come with ads. No one wants this on a device they already paid for.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#318

Post by tzs »

yholio wrote: post #129

The life time of TVs is simply on a different time scale than most smart thingies you connect to them. It's an appliance like the air conditioner or dishwasher, not a gadget you throw into the bin and replace. The intelligence of your media center should be elsewhere, in a dedicated gadget that you can easily replace and upgrade, connected via a standard, dumb interface like HDMI. I own a 2012, 60" Sony Bravia and th…

I really wish the whole home theater was way more modular.

I'd like separate boxes for video display, video signal switching, audio signal switching, stereo and surround sound decoding, speaker driving, OTA TV tuning, AM radio, FM radio.

I want these boxes to all support a common control protocol, with another box or boxes handling controlling the system.

My current system with a receiver that is 8 years old and a TV that is around 3 or 4 years old is fine, except for three things: (1) the receiver cannot handle 4K video, (2) the receiver does not work with any voice assistants, and (3) the TV does not work with any voice assistants.

With a modular system, I'd just replace the video switching with a 4K switching box, and replace the control box with one that supports a voice assistant (or add another control box...no reason a module system has to have only one such box).

With the current approach, I'd have to replace the receiver and the TV for that.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#319

Post by chadlavi »

Who could have predicted that putting an android OS and an internet connection in a device that should only function as a display would have negative consequences?

At this point, is it even possible to buy a high quality tv that isn't a smart tv? And will these smart TVs work properly if you keep them disconnected from the internet?

(Side note: this is why TVs are so much cheaper now, isn't it?)

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#320

Post by paulus_magnus2 »

troydavis wrote: post #304
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 im…

The price premium is there but also plenty opportunities to shop around for a last year's model https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/ProductCategory/31784.h...

for example, Samsung QP82R is an 8k "TV" for €3500.

My worry is can I it decode all standard codecs from USB source? Apparently Samsung in 2017 removed DTS and DivX /Xvid support. Decoding on the TV is key as only then you get the best motion interpolation algorithms. Playing from Raspberry via HDMI you don't get these.

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