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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

#731
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…

Well it's more like "people hate ads, but next time they buy a new TV, the ads will make our TV $10 cheaper than the other guy and they'll buy it anyway" It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.

US mainline carriers unbundled the legroom for folks that didn't want it.

The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#732
Exactly this happened to me. We bought the TV and for years things were great. Really loved the functionality of the smart TV. Being able to stream YouTube at a moments notice was great.

But then the adverts started. We paid $3000 for this TV. Not a low end “ad-supported tv” The only way to “opt out” is to disable the “smart” TV function which I have done. Any smarts now comes from my Apple TV which does not thrust averts in my face. Needless to say, my last Samsung purchase ever.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#733
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…

Lol Sony just pushed an update to the homescreen of android TVs that pushes ads for shows and services on the very top of the screen.

They do it, because we let them do it. They obviously can get away with it.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#734
post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and my 2019 model recently started showing this: > Support for the Ambient mode Headlines Service is scheduled to end on September 30, 2020. We thank you for using the service and we look forward to providing an improved alternative in the near future I'm not going to buy a new TV every year. "Smart" features that are discontinued after ~1 year are worse than worthless, it's just clutter in the menus at this poi…

Those extra buttons are requirement by those companies, to integrate those services in the TV. Now you could argue as to whether you want Netflix preinstalled on your TV, but while most smart features of smart TVs are useless, having Netflix is useful for many users.

I'm not sure that's the case, rather I think that companies pay to have their apps featured on the remote, not the other way round.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#736

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.

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

On mine I was able to do an offline firmware update by loading the new firmware onto USB flash drive. Was hoping the new firmware would fix a bug in the built-in video player, but it didn't.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another difference between a typical TV screen and a typical monitor is many TVs will dynamically adjust brightness depending on what's displayed, and maybe other factors. Sometimes this is on by default and you can turn it off in a menu, but I've met TVs where you can't turn it off.

Using a TV which adjusts the brightness depending on what's displayed can be very unpleasant when trying to do computer work on it. E.g. opening or closing a window may cause other windows to abruptly change brightness. Scrolling through a document may cause the brightness to vary.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#738

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…

I worked on a very popular free desktop product (BitTorrent/uTorrent) when a major revenue stream was the bundling of crapware in the install path, depending on people clicking the dialogs without reading them. I remember an executive announcing in a meeting that "search engine replacement" (reconfiguring your browser and/or system to a shadier alternative that made us money) was viable because the telemetry data sho…

> reaching solid conclusions about user sentiment is a black art and numbers can be presented to show whatever point of view you want.

Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's more like "people hate ads, but next time they buy a new TV, the ads will make our TV $10 cheaper than the other guy and they'll buy it anyway" It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.

> It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option. Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.

On google flights, if you click into the individual flight segments in the search results, it shows the legroom alongside other features like WiFi.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's more like "people hate ads, but next time they buy a new TV, the ads will make our TV $10 cheaper than the other guy and they'll buy it anyway" It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.

If the flight-booking website offered a "sort by legroom", I'd click that. The trouble is there's no good way for me to know as a consumer which planes from which operators (and which affiliates) have which legroom, so it's not a meaningful choice I can make. If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.

United had economy plus which was exactly the same plane with more legroom. It was nice the one time I got it (my boss wouldn't pay, but I got an upgrade... otherwise I rarely take flights longer than an hour so it isn't worth $20 or whatever the difference was)
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