There's a simple reason why your new smart TV was so affordable: It's collecting - Sensationalist Headlines

Hah suckers, I bought the only 1080p dumb TV I could find. It was also the only one with Composite in. That’s getting pretty hard to find now.

Seems like a fair trade off to me, since there are plenty of options for TV that dont have this.

Show me just one that is: not smart has 4K resolution (which is really a standard thing nowadays) is made by a company that is at least somewhat known

That latter part is kinda the entire issue. There's not plenty of other options and they're becoming less common as time goes on.

Is this post an ad for Pi-Hole?

I would hope not since I am not being paid for it

Show me ANY popular "smart" device that doesn't sell your data. I'm talking about TVs, not smart TVs specifically. If you're talking about ones that have no native ads, then premium ones like apple TVs and higher-end samsung ones. Apple TVs don't come in the TV itself but tbh that's better since AIO's lock you.

I hope, and pray, that the rumors are true that whoever patented this did so mostly because they realized what a terrible idea it was and wanted to ensure it couldn't be implemented by someone else for a few years at least.

I know it can't gather information that way, but the OS is still there, which is unnecessary at best, and irritating at worst (Android OS on Sony and Philips TVs is notorious for slowing down to the point where even switching channels can take seconds not to mention turning it on and off). As for my criteria, I meant brands that are at least somewhat known (Sony, Philips, Panasonic, TCL, Vizio, even though the latter doesn't exist in Europe, etc.). I'm in the process of buying a new TV, and the only 4K capable ones I could find without a Smart OS are made by some Romanian and Turkish companies (Star Light and NEI namely, I sure never heard of them before).

well, i'd recomend you guys buy some older tv's secondhand. its a shame what companies are doing with tech, really.

This shit will only get worse when ATSC 3.0 becomes the standard.

It's crazy how cheap TVs have got, too. In 2012 a 4k TV was $2,500 at the CHEAPEST and a good sized one cost up to $8,000. Now a 4k TV that size you can get for $350. It's nuts. And yet a phone is still going to cost $1000?

Well if the benchmark is that you want tech which would have been considered top-of-the-line in 2012 for cheap, then you can just buy a new Sony Xperia XA off Amazon for $110 which beats the 2012 iPhone 5 in almost every aspect (which cost something like $650 off contract back then).

Didn't Sony create blurays, who are they paying license to?

My solution is to wait for people smarter than me to start flashing TVs with some OS and then do that.

A bunch of companies created it (including Sony), which form a consortium (Blu-Ray Disc Association), and the fees are paid to this entity. In the end Sony probably gets some small fraction of the licensing fee back through this, but the rest still gets divided between other companies.

I mean at that point why get a smart TV?

Because you still get that thicc discount from the assumption that you'll use it

This is exactly why I never hooked up my TV to the internet. And besides, my Vizio TV is from the time they decided to go with Yahoo of all companies for ALL it's smart features. It wouldn't be worth using anyway.

Smart TV capabilities are more or less standard in most if not all modern televisions these days. You have to go out of your way to find one without them, and in most cases it's going to either be a shit TV or an older 1080p one.

At this point I have to simply surmise you're a paid corporate shill especially with your unrelenting yet half assed defense of mobile game microtransactions, which are also completely spurious gouging. At no point in any predatory mercantile exchange do customers have to settle for this shit. At all. There is no means nor mantra wherein simply acquiescing to gouging is a good, or fair, or even reasonable practice. Quite the opposite, and there are years and years of data to back this up. Greed is never and has never been a sum positive for the overall health of ANY industry, up to an including industries based on the creation and processing of wealth, much less anything else. Giving the customers a 'discount' in order to violate their privacy and peace of mind is patently a dick move, in virtually any context your care to imagine or name.

I work for a tech support company for private customers, and a few weeks ago I had an appointment at a customer requiring assistance with their Samsung smart TV. Even though it had a proper network connection, the internet was working fine and all that jazz, the web browser or any other application requiring internet access would fail to open with an error message I forgot about. Googling that error gave me results that those TVs are depending on the Samsung Smart Hub servers, and from what I can tell those have been shuttered completely. On the same day my dad asked me to help with our smart TV, where we never use its "smart" functions, and guess what? It threw the EXACT same error. So in other words I guess those TVs are sort of a paperweight.

Is this legal?

Fuck this shits me off with my TV. It’s an LG smart TV and it has an ad banner on the menu screen, which you simply cannot turn off, despite me paying a shitload of money for it. Yes, I could turn off the Internet connection to the TV, but half of the reason why I got a smart TV in The firstly place was so that I could access Netflix and YouTube from the TV itself, as opposed to fiddling about with a media centre which might not even support 4K+HDR output to the TV. But LG would be joking if they think I’m going to buy another LG TV. Not only is there the aforementioned ad banner horseshit, but the UI is really bloody clunky and unresponsive for a TV with a ‘quad-core processor’ and built in 2017, and programs have to automatically restart themselves on a regular basis to ‘free up memory’. Also it has that ‘dirty screen effect’ bullshit, and LG won’t honour the warranty because ‘it’s within manufacturer tolerances’. Fuck off cunts

Sony also did this on the PS3 with WMA playback, it is indeed just to save money on licensing.

My grandmother's smart TV is in the same boat, sometime a go my grandfather asked me to come over to figure out why his TV's youtube working. Turns out the servers werent responding, some googling later and I found out they were shut down for good. It wasn't easy trying to explain to my grandfather why he couldn't listen to his favorite music on the TV anymore because something somewhere stopped working.

This only works as long as the ads are fetched externally. If they're served directly via the content provider, it won't work. It will either not load or it will ask you to disable your ad-block. I have this and I've been forced to disable it to use some legal streaming sites, player wouldn't load otherwise.

Pretty happy I was able to score a brand new 55" 4K TV for under $400, fair trade-off in my opinion - but hey, that's just me.

Redirect all DNS lookups to the Pi-Hole from router firewall.

Have a different opinion than me? You must be a corporate shill! Also, I literally never defended that. I defended specifically lootboxes as being no worse than other microtransactions, which I have always said are bad. You literally don't have to settle for it, which was the point of my post. That aside, if you use even a semi-reputable maufacturer, your marketing data whill be completely anonymized, meaning that you're leaking no more data than you do while surfing the web. This is the exact same as sites being free due to ads, in hardware form. But please, continue making manic posts in which you attack character and imply that questioning your opinions is mortal sin instead of actually having any form of real discussion.