“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.
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.
“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.
I am so genuinely surprised that there isnt a bigger movement to hack TVs to replace the OS’s on them with non-invasive open software alternatives.
Especially with shit like this.
Because it’s not actually necessary; leave the TV isolated from the internet and use a set-top box (Apple TV, Shield, game console) as the media player.
While I agree, I think this solution is some nonsense. I bought a “TV” and paid for all the hardware and software that went into it, but I essentially have to use it as a monitor with my own hardware to escape the enshittification.
I also agree, but I view it more as ‘I bought a TV, and that’s all I want it to be’.
I don’t care about the built in software features foisted on me because I wanted an OLED panel; simply because they are going to be abandoned within 1-2 years, are powered by some anaemic chipset that is already multiple generations behind what is already available in my TV stand; and will likely end up as an attack vector to my network some period down the road.
The article mentions that TV manufacturers make ~$5 a quarter from selling your data. So those ‘features’ aren’t even free, they come at the expense of your personal information, privacy and likely security as a result.
So to quote a famous Dave Chapelle skit: “fuck ‘em, that’s why!”
First thing I thought of, Idiocracy, love that movie.
I wish the programming we got was that good
Instead we get reality tv where as soon as someone says they like it. I find them unattractive
It’s not a movie, it’s a documentary. :(
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.
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.
This is the way
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.
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.
i for one cannot wait for this future
I went to a buddy’s house to watch TV and that’s how his Xbox Live looks like.
Like they’re so oblivious and he’s paying for that shit.
Have you guys started the new season of oww my balls?
Disconnected my TV from the Internet. I stream media from a PC on my lan to Kodi running on a fire stick. Setup openwrt to drop all packets to wan from the fire stick. These companies can get fucked and if they ever figure out a way to stop me from owning my devices, I’ll just take up some new hobbies and be done with it all.
Your TV may still search for open network and send telemetry back home this way. Connect it somewhere and drop all packets here too if you want to fix this.
Didn’t think about that, thanks.
That’s great for you, but people like you vastly underestimate how much hassle people are willing to go through as far as setting up tech goes.
I connected my PC to the TV via HDMI. i use Firefox with ublock.
See, that’s more realistic.
I’d need a dedicated computer, because my PC doesn’t live in the lounge, but I’m seriously considering doing it. My Chromecast has been pissing me off lately.
You can buy small PCs for cheap now. A lot of them don’t even need active cooling
I revived the old LCD my grandparents were throwing out because it had good specs and no built in ads. Tossed in a new capacitor and it was good to go, otherwise I would just not own a TV.
I would like a machine that gives me the nice clean 4k resolution without throwing unprompted notifications in my face.
What colour do you want your dragon to be?
Some combination of red, blue, and green
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.
My HiSense Vidaa OS TV shows ads for newer TV’s from their online store.
Is an Apple TV box a good platform choice to avoid this?
I’d probably opt for an external streaming box and simply use the TV as a monitor instead of the whole system (as it was originally)
That’s what I’m planning to do and curious if Apple TV box is a good option. Fire stick is riddled with ads. Not sure about Roku and Apple TV.
No matter how you feel about Apple in general, Apple TV boxes are really the only way to go these days. Everything else is designed to aggressive sell to you whether you like it or not.
It’s either that or use something like a Raspberry Pi and settle for websites, which also have a habit of streaming you lower-quality content.
