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- cross-posted to:
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is this a new trend? last time i bought a tv was 2019 and it doesnt even have a menu
That’s one reason I ditched cable years ago. Why the hell should I pay Comcast for the “privilege” of watching commercials?
Fun fact, Mythbusters episodes have a longer international edit length because America has substantially longer commercial breaks.
My attitude is if I’m paying, I’m not watching a single ad.
If it’s free you can send me ads.
And it’s driving up the price of commercial flatscreens.
Pi-hole, nvidia shield, custom launcher = less ads for the whole family
Do you know of a good tutorial on how to do all that? I’m planning on buying a new TV towards the end of this year and want to have the pi-hole, etc working first
Pi-hole is super easy. Literally just install it, and set your dhcp on your router to push out that IP as your dns server. Configure pi-hole to use an upstream dns server.
There’s a bunch of launchers out there. I did mine a while back and used Wolf launcher, but later found out it was a “hacked” version of some other paid launcher. I used launcher manager to “enable” it on boot. Right out of the box, it has all apps and no ads. I suspect any launcher you go with will be similar.
Cool. Thanks!
Which custom launcher are you using?
Flauncher here, and its great
How did you set it as the launcher? Adb?
Wasn’t even needed. Just downloaded the app with another downloaded app and then installed it. Then it props you what launcher you want. Plenty of videos on yt about this.
Oh cool!
I don’t have a TV. I have a beamer as a screen for my PC, playing media with Kodi from my NAS, which runs Radarr (for movies) and Sonarr (for series) to download using usenet. I don’t have to give consent for the stupid agreements from streaming services, I’m not limited by them either, I don’t have to pay 10 different services to see everything I want. I pay for usenet, VPN and indexers. My VPN (Proton) blocks ads, trackers and malware. I watch YouTube using the Grayjay app (including sponsor block). I live ad free. I have more rights, freedom and access by piracy then I would have by paying those fucked up companies.
I don’t want to pirate, I want an honest transaction where I pay just money so I would own the content I bought. Instead I have to pay money, agree to have no rights, give all my personal information which they are free to sell, all for limited access to watch content I do not own. Fuck that. Piracy it is.
Whenever I see an honest company providing a decent service, I gladly give them my money. Even if it’s kind of expensive. They deserve to exist. I gladly pay for quality. Like Proton for example. Larian studios, I wish I could give them more money. They deserve every penny I payed for baldur’s gate 3, I even bought the useless deluxe pack just because they deserve it. It Takes Two is a game I pirated. It is so good, I wanted to purchase it to support the devs. It was on sale, so I waited for the sale to end before purchasing it. Sadly it’s not on GoG so I still do not own it, because with Steam you just pay for access to a game you do not own.
I only pirate to avoid asshole companies and ads. I do not wish to pirate, I feel forced to do so.
My phone is a billboard. My TV is a billboard. My PC is sometimes a billboard.
Like, what hasn’t advertisement infected?
I think it’s about time we just harass marketers back, but not with advertisements, but with other means. Enough so they get the message.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if your screens are showing you ads then they aren’t your screens…
“We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures.” ~Nolan Sorrento
Ironically the billboards in my town seem to be disappearing due to lack of use.
The billboards are the only thing that aren’t billboards.
“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Fuck me, this is the amount of money that’s enough motivation for them to ruin my experience and make me angry?
I guess regular users have much higher tolerance to ads than me, but our home has a strict zero ad policy.
If a company could pay $5 a customer for a competitive edge in customer satisfaction over their competitors, they would. Either they are getting way more than that or there is some cartel/monopoly action going on in the market. Maybe they are playing the long game to introduce an ad free model at a premium.
Still don’t see how nobody is undercutting existing players with ad free, smart tvs.
Why is basic math.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
I’ve heard somewhere else that it’s a 50/50 split between the TV sales and ad revenue
Roku is selling televisions at a loss with the intent on injecting ads based on whats on screen including detecting when you pause a show/game and injecting ads
Patient Pending…
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That was the sentence that stuck out to me the most in the whole article as well. Incredible how much is lost for so little. I imagine it’s like drug dealers though, maybe $5 for the first seller, then gets chopped up and cut again and sold for less and chopped up again…
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
I’d like for us all to stop for a moment and appreciate just how thoroughly and comprehensively fucked up it is that Linux, which is what all these TVs are running and which is supposed to be Free Software (which exists for the express purpose of empowering the user’s right to control his device), has been subverted so goddamn badly!
Wow had no idea TVs ran on Linux. They should pull the license.
They should, but they won’t. Between Torvalds’ (wrong) opinion and the logistical issues of getting approval from all the other copyright holders, the Linux kernel will remain vulnerable to tivoization in perpetuity.
“commercial display” is a worth while route to explore. They do cover a wider range of image quality and features, so it does take paying close attention to specifications.
Be cautious with the commercial display route. A lot of them come with “management system” software the company is trying to push which can paywall control features or break things on you if they get online for firmware updates.
In general though they do make good displays: they are typically a lot more expensive (and heavy!)
A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.
It’s even better for them: those $190M are per-year for the lifetime of that TV.
So if for simplification we said they also sold 9.5M TVs in 2021 and again in 2022, in the year of 2024 the will be making $570M from the TVs they sold in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
If Samsung TVs are used in average for 10 years, in 2033 they will still be making money from TVs sold in 2024 and all the years in between. If their rate of sales remains 9.5M per year and how much they generate per quarter in data and advertising revenue from those TVs remains $5 (true, all big simplifications), by 2033 they will be making $1.90 BILLIONS from just this in addition to what they make from selling TVs.
No wonder they’re full in on this monetization of users even whilst making user experience significantly worse - they would need to lose a huge number of sales due to this for it to not be worth it for them.
That’s just 1 year’s sales. If the TV lasts 5 years it’s raking in 5 times the data. 190M x 5 = 950M/year, and 5 seems conservative.
Good point.
Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.
This should add to their profits.
Experian, the
social credit scorecredit rating company? FuuuuuckExperian has a program where you connect your bank account and they monitor transactions for things that could improve your credit by a couple points. I’m sure they’re not also harvesting the rest of your data to use in their analytics, right?
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My jaw dropped when I saw that. Not sure how many people are aware if it.
That deserves to be its own headline. Something like “consumer electronics companies now conspiring with credit rating companies to surveil the public even more invasively.”
The cheapest 40" Bestbuy TV is a solid “dumb” TV. No software at all.
Yet another justification for piracy
Smart tub and stremio. I’m good.
Amen. I recently switched over and I haven’t been happier. I even got my parents onboard with it instead of satellite TV and streaming services.
First thing I thought of, Idiocracy, love that movie.
Pro Tip: Connect your TV to your Wi-Fi so the TV doesn’t bother you constantly, and shut off access outside your network at the router level.
Ummm why even connect it at all…let the dumb thing stay offline
so your TV doesn’t bother you.
Many TVs have a constant “no wifi connection” visual error if it’s not connected.
It also bugs me to turn on voice recognition by connecting
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I can’t speak for all TVs of course, but from what I have seen, yes.
LET US LISTEN TO YOU IT WILL BE FINE.
IGNORE ME!
Take the stupid thing back.
My tv hasn’t seen an ad since i plugged it in.
You sure you pay the electric bill?
Nah, same here. I never connected it online. I just use it as a display
My TVs are pre-smart TV and only 1080p and I have yet to feel that I was missing anything important.
Problem is getting an 55+" Screen with an OLED panel and support for HDR in a non-smart package
There are commercial displays that don’t have any of the bullshit. But you’ll have to jump through some extra hoops for the sound.
I have a dedicated sound system anyway
But if your display has no digital output, you may need to plug it into the analog output of the computer you’re using to drive the display. That’s not optimal.
No, I just plug the video input into my AV-Receiver and let it split it up, and then an HDMI cable from the receiver to the TVs input
It’s not smart if you don’t connect it to the internet
But it will try to start into a crippled user interface ever so often.
My Sony just goes straight to the HDMI that turned it on via CEC
I haven seen my LG OLED’s smart OS for years.
