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Comment by humps | Hacker News Reader

On the Samsung TVs I own, when you first set it up there's a yes/no agreement screen and if you choose "no" none of the smart features are accessible and you don't get any phoning home or ads by simply not entering Wi-Fi details. I haven't bought a new TV for a few years, though. So this may be different now, but the best way I found to create a dumb TV experience.

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I recently bought a Samsung 4K TV and it came with a "free tv" service (that's also crammed with ads). It's intrusive, it auto-plays and can't be disabled and I just don't want it. I've never owned a TV as an adult before and was interested in buying a video console to play some games, so it's kind of my fault for not understanding how these modern TVs work. But even so, if I'm paying £600 for a TV how is it acceptable to have all this nonsense pre-installed on it that can't be disabled or deleted? Nowhere on the sales page does it mention any of that and all the reviews seems to be from happy people on day 1 of purchase. The only way around it is to connect up a third party receiver to it such as Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV...but still feel cheated as a consumer if I have to do that.

People should start making complaints to trading standards and simply return these as not fit for purpose.

This is what I did for my TV, as well. Unfortunately, they'll eventually do something about it - they'll make pop-ups that appear continually until you sign in, or straight-up disable critical features. Just like jailbreaking, this is just a hack that happens to work for the time being - the only long-term solution is to vote with your wallet, lobby for regulation, or (ideally) both.

My LG TV wouldn’t upgrade without me consenting to it.

Mine wouldn't even boot out of the box without agreeing to the terms. Saying no would just turn it off.

Yikes, that's extremely bad. (I don't consider being unable to upgrade your TV's firmware to be that bad) Next time, could you drop the model of TV that you got, so that the rest of us can avoid it?

LG C1

yeah I have a cheaper vizio and I found that just not connecting it to wifi is a much better experience. the 'smart tv' features are not very good compared to a dedicated chromecast anyways.

Which features are still accessible? Only HDMI input, or more?

yeah you should be able to still watch OTA tv channels. Hdmi cable boxes should of course work. same with picture adjustment

I do this with my several-years-old Samsung as well. Inputs, menus, TV tuner, and the OTA program guide all work. No smart apps and no ads.

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