it's an interesting point you make, but perhaps companies should make these trade offs transparent.
You can get the version that phones home or you can pay extra for the version that doesn't.
I suppose the problem is that they'd make this transparent and there would likely be a bit of backlash ... thank goodness that regulatory agencies have our best interests at heart /s
Precisely Amazon is one of the few companies that make this explicit with their Kindle, here the Paperwhite without ads costs 10€ extra. I'm curious, does anyone know other examples?
I'm curious how many people pay extra for no Kindle ads.
I originally bought Kindles without ads, but for my third Kindle I decided to buy it with ads to see how bad they were. You can pay the extra later to get rid of ads, so if it turns out buying the version with ads was a mistake it is easy to fix it.
I don't see the sleep screen except briefly between the time I open the cover and the time the Kindle wakes up. I'm rarely on the home screen. I do almost all book shopping on my computer rather than on my Kindle. Thus I almost never actually see an ad, and when I do it is almost always not interfering with what I'm there to do.
The few ads that I do briefly see in those rare times I'm not in a book or in my library are static images without sound. For the sleep screen it is usually an ad for a book and the image is the book cover, which is often actually nice to look at.
After actually seeing the ads, I now feel like I wasted my money buying the ad-free versions for my first two Kindles.
After a couple months of nothing but ads for bodice-ripper romance novels with semi-clothed, entwined bodies on the cover (based on my consumption of biographies and Fantasy?), I went to Amazon support to pay for the ads to be removed and they did it for free and gave me a rather large credit for kindle books.
I've done this with one other Kindle and several other people have done it based on my experience and they've all gotten ads removed for free and some have gotten store credit in various amounts.
I didn't even mention why I wanted the ads gone, I just asked how to remove them and they gave me free books and a typically $20 upgrade for free.
After a couple months of nothing but ads for bodice-ripper romance novels with semi-clothed, entwined bodies on the cover
There was a time that the Kindle ads were actually appropriate. I've even purchased the odd sci-fi book that showed up on the wake screen. But that's been a couple of years. Now I get the same bodice-rippers you're seeing. What a waste; Amazon has my book purchase history going back 20 years, and that is what you're showing me? Do your advertising customers know this? Because, shallow guy that I am, I read sci-fi, philosophy, and books on distance running. That's pretty much it. I did read part of a Danielle Steele book (imagine GPT-3 wrote a romance novel...) 35 years ago when I was married to a woman who read those, but I doubt Amazon knows that.
My Kindle is old so there wasn't ad-supported versions back then, but my GF's Kindle does have ads, and they're almost always terrible, terrible books, displayed full-size in the sleep screen. We joke that they try to shame you into paying the no-ads upgrade (or for a cover!).
I'm guessing that in addition to them pushing their data stats to AWS they don't make that data available to you for free or indefinitely? (kinda like how Nest only lets you see 10 days' worth of thermostat data via their own service with absolutely no option or ability to download a CSV of all data since day 1 even though they have that data in a SpannerDB somewhere in a Google datacenter)
Exactly, we bought my 75ish year old father in law a new TV because he was using a small SD flat panel and his eyesight is going.
But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers.
It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing until we drove 150 miles to accept the update for him
We just wanted a TV that receives terrestrial TV and has a couple of HDMI ports for his DVR which he knows how to use without over complex menus, is that so much to ask?
In the case of TVs I think it also has to do with there being no real hardware difference between a fancy Smart TV and a dumb TV. A dumb TV nowadays is going to be implemented as essentially a computer and monitor running a set of TV applications, just like a Smart TV. The only difference will be that fewer programs will be loaded onto the dumb TV.
Just looked at a price checking site, checking the oled and "no smart tv" boxes. Zero hits.
It is not a question about affordable TV. The only ones that does not have smart features (as far as I can identify) are the cheapest LCD ones at the bottom of the price list.
The best alternatives that I can find is projectors or monitors, as those seems to so far not expect an Internet connection.
Let's play a hypothetical game. Your TV attempts to literally control your life. And is ultra HD and really cheap. But you have to keep its front facing camera uncovered or it blares an alarm saying that its front camera is covered. The alarm also activates, but more quietly, if it loses its internet connection.
Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.
So say the sponsor is Coke and it sees a 2 liter bottle of pepsi in your home. It displays something literally equivalent to (not in exactly so many words) "we are punishing you for bringing pepsi into our home, because our sponsor is coke." It then counts down a 30 second punishment timer. As a shopper you dont have THAT strong of a preference between coke and pepsi. So the next time you need to watch a movie on the dictator (name of TV set) you buy coke that night instead of pepsi.
Does that cross a line? How would you legislate against it? Devices shall not act as slave owners over humans who have bought them?
yes, you're right. (Though I think it wasn't about a TV watching your food choices.) So what happens legally if, today, a company literally does it? How do you legislate against this?
It is literally possible for a television to include a punishment timer (as in, it is pretty trivial to code up, if the device isn't rooted.) What happens if a company sells one that literally identifies shopping and uses a punishment timer for people who buy a competitor to their sponsor instead of their sponsor? can you make it illegal?
Do you? Manufacturers can easily require an Internet connection to make the device work. They can also include their own radios and modems. All in the name of being user friendly!
Not that I know of, I always skip the smart TV bullshit. Another commenter pointed out that a Philips model pester you with a pop-up to connect it every two weeks or so but that seems like the most manufacturers are attempting at this stage.
Well that does get very difficult with TV since a large number of people stream, the app on my LG is actually better than my Apple TV but it is toss up with the Roku on the other TV.
So I am going to say, for the technically inclined its time to chase down your router firewall logs and find where the TV is going to for ads and block the IP or port range. Would be curious what the TV does, properly engineered it should just act as if its not connected at all.
It's just a matter of time until Smart TVs deactivate themselves if they can't connect to their telemetry and ad servers -- or the manufacturers enter into agreements with streaming services to proxy ads through the same IPs used to stream video.
This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP to make sure that they're being used in the country they're sold for.
The best solution for streaming is a low-end PC with hardware video decoding and the ability to run Ublock Origin.
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Edit: I see from other comments that Samsung TVs already go into degraded functionality mode if they can't connect to their ad servers, and already serve some ads from endpoints used for necessary functionality.
I recently built a HTPC/home server based on a Gemini Lake Celeron ITX board in a compact case. The CPU/GPU is passively cooled and can decode 4 simultaneous 4K streams in realtime. It has hardware decoding of x264, x265, VP8/9. All-in, aside from the storage disks (for a Btrfs RAID1 pool) that I took from my desktop PC, it cost me less than a QNAP/Synology NAS with room for a similar number of disks.
I still use my Chromecast for Youtube, because the UI in a browser isn't great for couch use. On the CC, multiple people can add videos to the playback queue, I haven't found a good replacement for that yet.
For anything longer than a typical Youtube video, it's not an issue finding a movie and starting it from a wireless keyboard.
Our current TV is a 42" LG that I got for free from work. It's old enough to not have any "smart" features, it has no networking at all. The picture quality is great and no ghosting unlike a lot of older LCDs. I am not looking forward to the day I eventually have to replace it.
This was my setup recently too but then Amazon disabled their cast button inside their prime website a few months ago which meant we had to switch to the app route. Despite their fuckery, we've found streaming from the phone apps (Amazon, Netflix, + Plex for torrents) is actually a better experience than the laptop on the couch or wireless keyboard option. Also YouTube Vanced + nextdns.io takes care of YouTube ads.
Anything that requires Internet connection (i.e. Youtube, including casting from mobile device).
I just found out this weekend; with an older, cca 2013-ish samsung tv, connected to a network that has OpenWRT router with Adblock, and forced redirect of all port 53, 853 traffic to the local resolver. It cannot resolve its mothership (the rules were already in the Adblock list, I didn't add anything). The TV shows up a messagebox that it cannot to the Internet and asking the user to check the connection.
I have also a LG TV, and I used to keep it disconnected at all times as all my streaming comes from the nVidia Shield anyway.
However recently I wanted to setup my home automation system to automatically turn the TV off when I go to bed or outside, and for that I needed to connect it to the home network.
I solved this by confguring the router firewall to drop any package from the TV to the internet. It works!
Integration brings unneeded obsolescence and reduces choice and control. May be hard to avoid in space constrained phones but should not be needed on tvs.
My TV can connect, but is happy to live without. Though I've never used the smart features, just terrestrial digital TV, a PC over HDMI, a Pi running Kodi over HDMI, and an old DVD player via SCART. The TV doesn't enforce an interactive menu to pick those sources from, it is a simple selection on the remote, so it doesn't have anywhere to force ads.
If it becomes impossible to buy a TV that doesn't just display what I chose by the time this one is due for replacement, I'll take a device sold as a computer monitor instead. Or a projector. Maybe I'll pay extra, but I'll be fine with that.
LG still makes them, if you carefully navigate to their Business "Commercial Lite" or digital-signage options. I love my 55" 4k dumb TV. But you might not get some high-end features like HDR.
Never buy a consumer product that expects an Internet connection.