I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues.
I make it a point to NEVER connect my new 2022 LG C2 to the Internet, as any possible improvements from firmware updates will be overshadowed by garbage like ads in the UI, removal of existing features (warning: reddit link), privacy violations, possible attack vectors, non-existent security, and constant data breaches of the manufacturers that threaten to expose every bit of personal data that they suck up. Not to mention increased sluggishness after tons of unwanted “improvements” are stuffed into it over the years, as the chipset ages and can no longer cope.
I’d much rather spend a tenth of the price of my TV on a streaming box (Roku, Shield TV, etc.) and replace those after similar things happen to them in a few years. For example, the display of my OG 32-inch Sony Google TV from 2010 ($500) still works fine, but the OS has long been abandoned by both Sony and Google, and since 2015-16 even the basic things like YouTube and Chrome apps don’t work anymore. Thank goodness I can set the HDMI port as default start-up, so I don’t ever need to see the TV’s native UI, and a new Roku Streaming Stick ($45) does just fine on this 720p panel. Plus, I’m not locked into the Roku ecosystem. If they begin (continue?) enshitifying their products, there are tons of other options available at similar price.
Most people don’t replace their TVs every couple of years. Hell, my decade old 60-inch Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD TV that I bought for $2200 back in 2011 still works fine, and I only had to replace the streamer that’s been driving it twice during all this time. Sony Google TV Box -> Nvidia Shield TV 2015 -> Nvidia Shield TV 2019. I plan to keep it in my basement until it dies completely before replacing it. The Shield TV goes to the LG C2 so that I never have to see LG’s craptastic UI.
Sorry, just felt the need to vent. Would be very interested in reading community’s opinions on this topic.
You actually can buy quality dumb TVs, but you have to do the legwork and do research on what are often referred to as “commercial displays.” I see them everywhere in businesses for ads and showing the menu. They’re sometimes a little pricier, but they’re usually built a little “beefier” too, as they’re expected to deal with more rough usage in like a restaurant context.
However, the other solution is the one you’ve already mentioned where you never plug the Smart TV into the internet, and instead bypass the “smart” on the TV with your own streaming boxes.
I think as more people realize there is a market for dumb TVs, you’ll start to see that market grow more and more until they no longer just “commercial displays.” Just gotta get enough people buying them and not buying Smart TVs.
I think if enough people never gave them Internet access, the manufacturers would start adding in cellular modems to ensure they get the data flowing (that is, data on your viewing habits and sending you ads).
Having worked in this field, I can tell you how it usually operates: You want the most data for the least amount of investment. As soon as your operational costs start to eat into your already thin margins, the equation falls apart.
Complex solutions designed to capture data from that 1-3% of users who actively avoid it end up costing a lot more money than their data is actually worth. In order to make this particular solution work, you need to make enough money selling whatever tiny amount of data you get from those 1-3% of users to cover the cost of putting a cellular modem in all of your TVs plus the ongoing cost of paying various regional cellular networks to deliver that data to you. You are likely tripling or quadrupling the total cost of your data collection operation and all you have to show for it is a rounding error. And that is before we factor in the fact that these users likely aren’t using the built in streaming apps, so the quality of the data you get from them is below average.
The cheaper option would be to set up an ad-hoc tv-to-tv network. You might not let your TV talk to the internet, but I bet your neighbour does, or if not, then their neighbour will.
1-3% of users might not be enough people, but what is the break-even % of people to justify adding a cheap cellular modem? 5%? 10%?
You are likely not even doubling the cost of the data collection operation. We’re talking under $0.50 in additional hardware per unit, with a relatively low data usage requirements. The servers to collect that data are likely already more expensive, and you can easily sell user viewing habits for way more than $1/month/user. You can use a prepaid low usage data-only eSIM with global roaming for less than $5/year, only renew it for the devices that don’t get hooked up to a user’s WiFi. If it was only needed for 5% of the users, or 1 in 20, you could still get a ROI of under a year.
With a device life of 5+ years, it’s definitely much more than a rounding error. Keep in mind the profits go directly to the manufacturer, so it’s a % of product cost in origin, not of MSRP… which is pretty much the reason why all manufacturers have jumped onto the data collection bandwagon in the first place.
I feel like the market is only going to grow in the top end. Audio/videophiles sort of areas with large, high quality, top end feature sets.
The low end tends to be partly subsidized by the “smart” features. Think TVs that show ads in the menu, or Amazon or Google screens that want you to use their services because it’s “easy” and they’re “right there” so maybe people will subscribe. Couple that with the “feature” that it’s already built in so it saves you an extra box/purchase for people who want cheap TVs, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.
Exactly this.
Manufacturers are NOT INTERESTED in selling low-cost dumb TVs when they can sell smart TVs and get long-term returns. They are even willing to sell the TVs at cost because they will monetise later with ads and selling your data.
Manufacturers don’t want you to have a dumb TV, they want everyone to go smart - which is part of why business-targetted dumb panels are priced higher - to disincentivise regular end-customers from buying.
oh…is that why all these nice smart TVs are so affordable these days?! damn!!
There’s no down-side to selling a smart TV to someone who doesn’t want one/doesn’t use the features.
The features we “want” from modern TV’s like DolbyVision and all the shit they do the image to make it stand out in the store requires a significant amount of processing power.
It’s simply better business to sell smart TV’s to everyone than to make dumb TV’s that compete for a tiny fraction of the market when people buy Smart TV’s in every price segment.
The paradox being that if therr were “premium” smart TVs for people like us - with proper support, privacy, customization options and no crap like ads - we’d probably buy it, and pay a premium for it.
But that’s just too much work for them and they probably don’t even realize that kind of market exists.
I think they know it, I just don’t think they care. It’s a niche market. On top of that, they’d have to convince the people in that market to trust them.
If they can get a 10-20% return on 10,000 Smart TVs, why waste the effort on properly developing and supporting 3 PrivaTVs (patent pending, exclusions apply, see your local drunk for details)?
I could be wrong, I just don’t think the market is large enough that they’d be willing to throw manpower at it.
They aren’t very good though. They are durable, but usually expensive and missing a lot of features you might actually want for that price tag. For example, I’ve yet to find any OLED “commercial displays” that support Dolby Vision, VRR, and eARC.
It’s way cheaper and easier to just buy the TV you want and not connect it to your wifi.
Computer monitors should work too, and are more readily available. Just dig through the business oriented monitors and ignore the gaming ones, as cable providers aren’t really going to have anything that can take advantage of >60 fps display rates.
My personal experience with computer monitors is that they work great except they always seem to cheap out on speakers if they have built in speakers. Tiny, tinny things whose volume is always way too low.
I don’t mind having separate speakers, but once in a while it would be nice to not need them.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard what my TV speakers even sound like. I’ve never used them.
Even on a high end TV the speakers are going to be bad. It’s just there to check a box. TVs are so thin that you cannot physically fit in speakers large enough to sound good.
A cheap sound bar will make a huge improvement to audio quality over any built in speaker system.
Since I’m going to be skipping the TV part with my HTPC, then why not simply use a computer monitor. Nowadays you can also get a 40+” monitor, and that should be big enough for most people. These things might not even have any speakers, so you might need to plug it into an audio system to make it all work.
The other option is to buy the smart TV, turn off the networking, and hook it up to a Shield, Apple TV, or Roku. All those box makers are going to support the devices longer than TV manufacturers, and the streaming apps can’t ignore them.
so is using something like an Apple TV or Roku box actually more secure than just using the apps directly on the TV?
Last time I looked for commercial dumb TV, a SHARP was like $4000 for a 65" 1080p or something :-/
$910 for a 65" 4k Samsung display.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/qe-series/qe65t-series-65-lh65qetelgcxgo/
However, the other solution is the one you’ve already mentioned where you never plug the Smart TV into the internet, and instead bypass the “smart” on the TV with your own streaming boxes.
I did this for a long time on my old Vizio TV, but the experience was notably worse with external devices compared to built-in, due to the limited framerate support over HDMI. This led to awkward juddering when e.g. trying to play 23.976fps movies with only 30hz or 60hz output. It also meant built-in video features like motion interpolation did not work effectively.
I guess this is less of an issue today with VRR support on high-end TVs, but still, a lot of devices you might connect to a TV don’t support VRR.
Your streaming box was either not configured properly, or was very low cost.
The most likely solution is that you need to turn on a feature on your streaming box that sets the output refresh rate to match that of the content you are playing. On Apple TVs it is called “match frame rate”. I know Rokus and Android TV devices have similar options.
Newer TVs can detect when 24 fps content is being delivered in a 60 hz signal and render it to the panel correctly, but this doesn’t usually work if you have the selected input set to any low-latency modes (“Game”, “PC”, etc)
Good to hear newer devices support this.
My experience was from quite a few years ago (2015ish). At that time, there was no such feature in any of the devices I tried connecting, including a few brands of Android phones, Fire TV sticks, and MacBooks. I remember reading into the documentation on other devices at the time to find something better, with no luck. That said, documentation was pretty poor all around so who knows? The most useful info I found was in threads on VideoHelp or AVS forums where other users reported similar issues on various devices. Android TV was still very new and very shitty back then.
At this point I would simply not buy anything that doesn’t support VRR.
This is one of the downsides of the widespread adoption of HDMI, it has quite a few downsides. Something like display port would be better, but it’s far less common. Such is life.
How is this a downside of HDMI?
It sounds to me like the user’s TV or streaming box are configured incorrectly. DisplayPort doesn’t magically remove judder from 24fps content being rendered to a 60hz signal.
DisplayPort never saw widespread adoption in the home theater space because it never tried to. The standard is missing a ton of features that are critical to complex home theater setups but largely useless in a computer/monitor setup. They aren’t competing standards, they are built for different applications and their featuresets reflect that.
Newer revisions of HDMI are perfectly good, I think. I was surprised and dismayed by how slow adoption was. I saw so many devices with only HDMI 1.4 support for years after HDMI 2.0 and 2.1 were in production (probably still to this day, even). It’s the biggest problem I have with my current display, which I bought in 2019.
Is it just me or is it really fuckin’ easy to not connect your TV to the internet?
I’ve hated “Smart TVs” for a decade now, but I solved my problem by just buying a set top streaming box (Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc) and leaving my TV off my WiFi.
Some smart tvs’s will whine incessantly about not having the internet.
Thankfully mine (Philips) only bitched about it for about a week, and gave up. Now the only real complaint I have with it is that it takes forever to boot, considering it has to fire up android after it’s been off.
LG doesn’t do this. They also have the good sense to allow firmware updates via USB. Which is great, because turning on WiFi long enough to install an update fills the home screen with junk.
I have an LG that is a couple years old. Never connected it to the Internet and don’t intend to but have wondered about firmware updates for it. I am afraid of an update adding ads or something else I don’t want. What is your experience? Or is there a resource that details everything (and I mean everything) that the updates change?
Is it just me or is it really fuckin’ easy to not connect your TV to the internet?
I prefer not to reward corporations by buying equipment with built-in spyware.
(Also, “easy to not connect” depends on whether the TV nags you, or disables features, or uses any open wi-fi it finds, or includes a cellular or mesh modem.)
You’re just giving the same companies even more money when you buy their much more expensive “dumb” digital signage products.
Nobody’s been able to show me a TV that actually does those other things you suggest. If one did, I wouldn’t buy it, but I won’t base my current pruchasing decisions on hypothetical future products.
You’re just giving the same companies even more money when you buy their much more expensive “dumb” digital signage products.
No, I am not.
(And even if I was, it wouldn’t boost the sales numbers of spyware products, encouraging more of the same.)
Nobody’s been able to show me
If you don’t want to believe it’s a problem, I don’t expect anyone wants to waste their time trying to change your mind.
(Jay did report seeing examples in the wild, though.)
Yeah they can try and push as much BS as they want but in the end I’m never using their software and always using a shield
Isn’t it the Shield that introduced ads on the homescreen since a few years?
Yes, but one benefit of the Shield over other android based devices is that it’s pretty hackable. You can replace the launcher and get rid of the ads and while it’s more than a single click to do that it’s easy enough by following a guide.
On my older shield that had the older launcher without ads I disabled updates for the launcher and reset it to its original version all through the normal settings interface.
I tried doing the same with a FireTV without success, Amazon forces you to use their launcher unless you’re willing to put in substantial effort.
Back in 2019 I wanted a nice LED screen with high resistance to screen burn but the only economic option was a Samsung Smart TV.
I actually ended up getting it, ordering a custom mount for the ARM Chip, and using an input method on the chip that makes it run Java natively so that I could make the Smart TV drop it’s firmware onto a USB and from there I could modify it, since it was just running a version of Linux.
So that’s the story of how I un-smarted my TV. Get fucked, Samsung.
What a fucking ridiculous workaround that’s completely unavailable to the regular consumer…fuck Samsung (and the industry in general) for this approach.
Well, now that the community has had a few years to reverse engineer it I assume there are a lot of better and easier ways to replace the firmware with an open source quick fix. So, it’s not like my way is the only way. It was just necessary at the time. In fact, the community worked very fast to find a way to hack these “System on a Chip” architectures since the ARM chips were first released. They’re used in Macs, phones, TVs etc and have a very high power efficiency, but it is a very clear design choice to make them extremely difficult for the user to access and customize.
Unless it’s “load this file on a USB stick and plug in in your TV”-easy, it’s still out if reach to most consumers.
But my point is, it shouldn’t be necessary to do these things in the first place. Fucking drop the “smart” element from them completely, they always suck ass anyway and are laggy as hell to navigate.
all cars are headed there too… so very soon you won’t be able to get news or transportation without someone else’s permission…
Please drink a confirmation mountain dew to activate your air conditioner. Sorry, we didn’t hear the sound of the can opening, please open another where the microphone can hear it. Sorry, our servers are down, we apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. Sorry, getting your family out of the vehicle is an optional feature which you have not subscribed to, please say “Do the Dew” to get temporary access to the friends and family doors. Sorry, I didn’t get that, please say “Do the Dew”. Sorry, I still didn’t get that, please call customer service at 1800-luv-cars to give your ad consumer confirmation phrase to a customer service representative.
I mean you have technically always needed a drivers license to drive which I would classify as “needing someone else’s permission.”
The bus on the other hand?
it sounds like you’ve already surrendered your right to transportation… that license is something that i hold myself to and others… that’s the way citizenship works… i don’t ask for permission… i agree to abide by minimum functional requirements because i expect others to as well, and carry proof… you are confused…
if you think getting your driver’s license is “asking the government for permission” you are already a slave
Smart devices are basically data sniffers scooping up any info about you and your family, your habits,. They watch network traffic, listen to your conversations, and record video,. I’ll stick to dumb devices thanks.
