buying a ‘dumb’ tv is getting harder and harder to do…
how long until you are forced to hook a new ‘smart’ one up to the internet, just to “set it up”–even if you have no plans on ever using the ‘smart’ features or embedded apps?
That’s the point they are making. Currently that’s possible. But what is stopping the producers to force you to hook it up to the internet?
O… damn.
Not buying the tv might work… at mass. Like everyone. Please people, vote with your wallet/privacy.
They already do, vizio sets and roku TV sets require an internet connection as soon as you power it on to set it up
I’ve tried getting a way too cheap, really bad projector running Android to work once. From Wish or something, I guess. It was a truly unpleasant experience. Fortunately, it wasn’t mine!
Also, I had a good ol’ dumb Epson projector 10-15 years ago, but it had a very noisy fan, meaning you had to always turn up your HiFi to try and camouflage the fan noise in louder sound than you else would’ve had. Are low-end consumer projectors still that noisy?
I have a Ben-Q and sit under it without noticing fan noise at all. It’s 1080p and the lights don’t need to be dimmed. The projector screen is mounted to the ceiling so I just roll it up when I’m done.
Not always an option. You’d need to dim the lights every time and - most importantly - have a whole spare wall in your home.
Im sure you could mount a rollup projector screen anywhere you would put your TV, but your first point is huge. The light issue is a huge non starter
Roku tvs already do that, you even need to put in a credit card number for it to work.
You can choose not to connect a Roku TV to the Internet during the initial setup, and you just get access to live TV and the HDMI inputs with (obviously) no streaming channels or updates. It works fine as a dumb TV.
And the credit card thing? That’s after you create your account on their website, you can just close the browser window. Or click the button saying “skip” or “later” or whatever it is.
does this link to make an account without a payment method not work anymore?
https://my.roku.com/signup/nocc
Agreed. You can buy the displays that are marketed to businesses and usually come without all of the invasive smart features.
They definitely cost more on average, but they’re also built to run more often or constantly, and hold up far better. They’re even a lot more customizable.
You can buy some that come with slots where you put in a raspberry pi or another computer of your choice, instead of whatever OS that comes with smart tvs.
At this point, I’m starting to regularly check if there are “for business customers” options available when I need something, because the options for regular consumers are getting so bad with all this data hoarding and ad pushing.
I can’t figure out why the cheap TCL I bought 5 years ago isn’t packed with ads. Maybe because it’s Roku-based?
Probably because it’s Chinese spyware. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/tcl-smart-tv-security-flaws
Disturbing; thanks for sharing that. Seems like the Roku flavor may be okay-ish, but I just walled it off from rest of home network anyway.
If you buy a Sony Bravia you can put them into “pro mode” which keeps all the signal processing, but lets you turn off android.
Looking forward to the 1 yr free trial of my new TV, before I have to subsribe to Samsung+ for just 15.99 per month to turn it on.
