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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.
“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.
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.
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? FuuuuuckMy 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.”
Experian 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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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.
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!)
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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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.
GO AWAY!! BAITIN’!
I unironically wanna watch “ouch! my balls”, that looks like quality programming i could get behind
Isn’t that basically what Jackass was?
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Pihole on your network… And block Internet access to the TV…
Tho… a while back the wife and I bought a dirt cheap 32 inch TV from bestbuy… it will literally turn itself on to deliver an advertisement if you power it off while in an app. (Skipping the home page)
Pihole crashes it.
We bought it for watching football outside so it’s unplugged for the majority of the year… but that’s still absolutely unacceptable. Imho
Ah that’s a terrible sign of where things are going
…bought a dirt cheap 32 inch TV from bestbuy…
Pihole crashes it.
I wonder why…
That’s some fucked up shit
it will literally turn itself on to deliver an advertisement if you power it off while in an app.
Name and shame that brand.
The more the word is spread about who the worse offenders are, the more people can effectively vote with their wallet.
It’s a visio.
Literally the cheapest 32inch TV that best buy had.
It’s absolutely unusable with the ads disabled.
Horrific television.
Vote with your dollars. Unplug. Fuck them
My TV is a smart TV whose smart features I never, ever use because the first thing it does is switch to the input my Apple TV is on.
Ironic really that the reason I chose an LG is because webOS seems less cunty than Android TV and whatever shit Samsung are offering. But I still never use it.
webOS seems less cunty than Android TV
Every time they do an update, things get worse. But my last TV had some dying pixels, so there’s no going back.
I was pleasantly surprised that my Sony tv has a basic option so you can use it just as a screen. All smart stuff disabled.
Can you install separate launchers on webOS? I installed a launcher on my Android TV and haven’t seen an ad since, even with smart features.
I only connect to internet if my tv needs an update. Generally hardware inside TVs are super slow too.
Do I have Nvidia shield connected that been debloated with a simple launcher, which is connected to my router that’s running a VPN + DNS filter.
do we have ads in computer monitors yet? monitors often have mediocre speakers so people that weren’t going to bring their own sound system have that option
Even when you are paying for the product you are still the product.
imho adb works wonders debloating many smartTVs. mine shows zero ads outside of commercial tv breaks. not even suggestions for amazon shows or anything in the dashboard. smarttube,kodi etc are just great!
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.
There is a certain unfortunate irony in the realization that one of the easiest ways to avoid this kind of thing is to buy a commercial digital signage panel intended for advertising instead of a consumer TV.
I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.
That is beyond the capabilities of normies.
My wife would agree with this:
And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.
This is the way
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).
If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile (edit: apparently the default 1080p quality profile has the 1080 remux quality enabled so this might have been the problem). By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main quality profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 (which is just below remux) with custom formats copied from trash guides set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.
Thanks. Really helps to know where to start looking when I get time over the weekend.
You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.
You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.
Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.
Plus, no flaresolverr required!
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It seems like way more stuff than I want though
I mean yeah there’s a lot of stuff it does, but you can pick and choose what you want to use it for so it depends on what you would find useful - you don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place where you are still picking exactly what you want it to download. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.
I think it’s a common misconception that if you use sonarr/radarr you have to use download automation and set up trackers but it’s not the case. It’s a useful library organization tool even if you don’t ever have it download anything.
That was definitely my misconception
I’m glad to clear it up! It’s a super powerful tool, and I still occasionally skip the automation and just use it for manual searches since it reduces that process to a single click to search all configured torrent sites and a single click to download and have the rest automatically handled.
Before when I was visiting friends and wanted to quickly add something to plex, I used to need remote access to my torrent client and separate remote access to my NAS filesystem to move/rename files when downloads finish which was a really manual process. Now all I need is the reverse-proxied sonarr/radarr UI since it handles moving/copying/renaming on download completion - and while the UI isn’t mobile-first, it’s very usable and feels less error-prone than moving/renaming files remotely using a file explorer app.
Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
Exactly what I’ve been looking for too, and have come up wanting. I got excited recently about finding KDE Plasma Big Screen, but then it falls at the last hurdle on the app selection.
That gave me abandoned vibes when I looked into it. Maybe they just didn’t update anything on their site but I struggled to find any recent info or reviews on it. A shame honestly. I loved the idea.
Looks like it was released in 2022, and I haven’t been following the development but the github looks like it has changes as recent as two weeks ago. I had just assumed that the lack of apps is primarily the big streaming content providers not opting to allow apps on an OS without a shitload of telemetry because it’s not in their interest.
My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.
This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.
It seems we have similar backend setups 🏴☠️
I’ll need to dig into an android solution a bit - smarttube seems pretty nice but has no Linux version unfortunately.
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
That makes perfect sense and explains why you can’t fix it just by bypassing blocking temporarily and reinstalling the app.
This is the case with Rokus as well. If you also redirect or block the hard coded DNS (Google) from bypassing your local DNS it starts to get extremely sluggish over time… presumably from background processes repeatedly resending requests out.
Depends on your blocklist. It would freak out every so often on me when I was preventing it from bypassing my DNS with its hard coded ones until I added in a forced redirect instead.
Ew.
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
With HDMI-CEC you can achieve what your wife wants. I have one remote to turn on my Nvidia Shield (with Plex, Jellyfin, Netflix, etc), and that same remote also controls all TV functions.
We had a samsung 4k curved tv that has ads on the input menu, and the ad space is filled with a samsung ad if the set has never connected to the internet.
It also harasses you with a pop up about connecting occasionally on startup.
It’s bearable but absurd. We returned it on principle
Yeh, if I ever see my TV’s OS I’m like “fuck off! HDMI4!”
Mine is a monitor and nothing more.
Bonus points for buying a smart TV to get the heavily discounted price and never connecting it to the internet.
Some of the brands have been reported to not allow you to do anything until it has an internet connection to do its “initial setup” (or some such excuse).
I hope I can find a list of which ones to avoid when I have to eventually replace my old dumb TV.
Then right back to the store it goes and labelled as defective so it gets tossed resulting in losses for all companies involved.
Of course, but that’s a lot more effort than it should be.
Even then, you’re still having to wait for its CPU to fuck around with the image and sound before it actually outputs it,
Literally came here to say that. HDMI is king!
DisplayPort is superior
Definitely, but unfortunately TV’s don’t usually have DP.
Any TV can have DP if you watch the right videos.
Not mine. My TV’s my absolute digital bitch. It lets me do anything I want AND nothing, unlike Warren Buffet’s kids
