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Comment by siffland | Hacker News Reader

When i got a new TV last year, the kid at Best Buy thought it was funny i wanted a non smart TV. I managed to get a 55" with no networking or applications. I know i am the minority, but i just want the TV to turn on and display a picture. i have a blu-ray player that is like 8 years old. It has netflix and vudu and MLB and about 4 more apps. None can work anymore, they stop updating devices after a year or so. I would rather have a roku or something that gets updated.

Remember when Samsung warned about having conversations around TV sets...

https://theweek.com/speedreads/538379/samsung-warns-customer...

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I was quite pleased to find that my LG webOS TV doesn't even associate to the Wi-Fi unless it's switched on. Will be interesting to see how well it works in 5-10 years of course, but it does work as a non-smart TV even if I don't connect it to the Internet, so at least that functionality should last.

I just opt for not connecting them to the internet.

I'm guessing it's just a small matter of time before they start adding cell connectivity.

I'd imagine Verizon or ATT wouldn't charge too much since they'd be sending logs, voice snippets, and maybe a few images. If the TV companies offered to share the data, they could probably get cell companies to do it for free.

At which point I'd only buy TVs without them, or just buy projectors instead. That'd be too ridiculous.

Until they start shipping cellular modems or connecting to open and unsecured networks.

> I managed to get a 55" with no networking or applications

I'm surprised you managed to find one. They seem quite rare these days outside of some budget brands that don't bother due to cost.

It is an Insignia from Best Buy, so it is a budget brand.

My 5 year old Roku TV has stopped updating, and the extremely buggy apps are slowing stopping working one by one. I may get a 2019 Roku stick and use it on my once smart, but now pretty dumb, TV.

The first Roku TV platform was launched in Fall 2014 with TVs by TCL and Hisense; those TVs are still getting software updates -- 9.1 was released earlier this year, and Roku OS 9.2 is in the process of being pushed to all models now. Releases often occur in stages, with Roku monitoring a release to see if there are blocking issues that need to be fixed before doing a wider push. Also, Roku OS releases do usually arrive for set-top boxes before they arrive on TVs due to the complexity of the TV feature sets and validation on all the models.

You can see a hardware comparison chart at https://developer.roku.com/docs/specs/hardware.md -- Liberty was the platform name of that first generation of Roku TVs.

I had a similar experience. Hard if not impossible to find a non-smart tv. Like you said we are probably the minority but I think there is a market for dumb, large screens.

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