Comment by jenga22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jenga22 | Hacker News Reader

The whole notion of owning a TV is becoming ridiculous. The cost of ownership is simply not worth it. Fist, you have the cost of the screen itself. You buy a TV, spend lots of money on it, and then it simply spies on you. We've seen this already on Vizio and Samsung TVs already. This is another feather in the cap for this trend.

Then there is the cost of cable, which is absurdly expensive. To get all the channels you want, you end up spending a couple of hundred dollars per month.

Want to do the cord cutting route? Well that is trending to be even more expensive as each service charges about 10 dollars per month. That doesn't even account for live sports.

The TVs themselves seem to be going obsolete every two years. First it was HDTV, then 3DTV, then HDTV 4K. On the tech side it was LED, LCD, ULED, now OLED. Remember when your CRT TV lasted 10+ years?

Edit: Also they don't get updates after six months. Apps stop working as people have mentioned. But more importantly, they don't get security updates. So your Smart TV morphs into a Creep TV where hackers have their way with it to do their bidding.

Overall, it is easier to just not do the whole TV thing. You will save a ton of money and be much happier at the same time.

You forget to mention that after a few years, if not earlier, your TV doesn't get any updates anymore and apps disappear or stop functioning and gets 50% useless (the "smart" part).

I cannot speak for the American market but mostly in the Netherlands a TV is essentially used as a big computer display, because most people have a settopbox that has COAX/Ethernet in -> HDMI out.

My Samsung TV got an update that added adverts into it UI. There's no option to disable it and Samsung's support team insist that the ads come from apps that I've installed, but they come from preinstalled apps I can't remove or disable.

I wrote a guide on blocking it. TL;DR DNS blacklist ads.samsung.com

https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...

The real question is why on earth would installing an application on your TV give it permissions to display ads outside of itself?

That's one of those corporate excuses that sounds good in the moment but really just makes the whole situation way worse.

This is exactly the problem. Samsung make the OS, they sell the space, they make the money. They just flatly deny they can do anything about it.

I was recently looking for a 4K TV to use as a monitor and was reading good things about Samsung when one of the reviews mentioned this advertising stuff in a single sentence somewhere near the bottom. I googled it, but most "reviews" don't mention it. It seems you can't trust the devices or the online reviews any more. Nobody wants to make a product for me, it's all about them.

The problem is, most reviews happen just before or just after launch. My TV was fine for approximately half a year before an update added them without warning or an opportunity to downgrade.

I have been banned from Samsung TV's Instagram for warning potential buyers.

I agree with most of your points but a couple of hundred dollars a month sounds like a ton of packages. I think I have hulu live with no ads, HBO, and Netflix for well under a hundred. You could divide the $99 bucks I spent on Amazon Prime by 10 and add that too if you wanted although I can't tell you the last time I used that service. It's still a bunch of money though.

The best deal here in NYC is a 50 dollar (or cheaper but the best ones are about 50 I believe) antenna which picks up maybe fifty or sixty channels in a variety of languages (which I think is neat although don't particularly use). That's a one time cost and you get Fox, CBS, ABC, etc, etc.

Seems like trying to be on the cutting edge would be a total waste, I don't have a 4K TV or some super huge screen and that's fine by me.

Don't buy a smart tv, hook a chrome cast to it, don't buy a new one just because there are better ones out there.

As for streaming, choose one service and switch to another to binge a new season, then cancel when it is over.

All TVs are smart now.

But there is absolutely no reason for you to hook it up to your home wifi. At least, until they are 'cloud'-enabled, and they require an internet connection to verify DRM before it plays ANY content... I shouldn't give them ideas.

My current one that I bought back in 2014 (or 13?) won't start up unless it thinks it has a network connection. I've actually setup my router to just block all traffic from it, but let it on the network so it'll actually work as a panel. Otherwise it has an unskippable menu demanding to be given the wifi password (or hooked up over ethernet).

What brand and model?

Samsung UN60F6400 60-Inch

I would have returned that crap back to the store so fast it would make the sales person's head spin.

Just do not connect them to the WiFi and suddenly they all are dumb

Just hope your neighbours don't have an unlocked wifi connection and that the tv doesn't 'helpfully' auto connect

All TVs are smart now. Fortunately, you can now buy TV-sized monitors. They're usually sold as a "commercial monitor" or a "digital signage display".

I want a 50-55" curved monitor. Does that exist and is it way more expensive than a TV? I can get a TV for $800 or less.

A relative just bought a new TV this month, and asked me whether they should choose the "smart" TV or the normal one (I recommended the normal one, which they bought). So this is false, one can still find normal TVs.

You’re not obligated to upgrade, obviously. An LCD TV still works perfectly fine. You can also still get non-smart TVs, though it has become increasingly difficult. Most people probably don’t want _all_ of the on-demand things. And terrestrial TV is still a thing.

And since they went LED-backlit, they last practically forever (the old CFL ones did often eventually die).

I purchased my Samsung 46" 1080p LCD TV in 2007 for $3000 AUD. It's still going strong now. The only single thing I miss from it is a lack of HDMI-CEC support.

You don’t WANT HDMI-CEC; it almost never works properly.

HDMI-CEC is great and works flawlessly if the equipment you have supports it, at least in my personal experience. On some older equipment, not all of the functions worked though. For example, my old TV could uses CEC for volume and power on but not power off. New TV does it all perfectly.

We have a similar plasma model, which we got for free because the owners were upgrading to a new one. I love how it doesn't do anything except display signals; we pair it with a Chromecast for most things. Of course, the electricity cost of a plasma TV adds up over the years...

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