(I recommend LG over Samsung - Samsung TV has native undismissable ads from 2019 still)
I've been doing the same; get an AppleTV or GoogleTV dongle and never, ever attach the LG or Samshung TV to the network.
Benefits of this strategy:
* So simple, even non-savvy folks can follow the rule
* Protects your privacy
* Eliminates an unnecessary, highly invasive, and parasitic advertising vector (ads directly from LG or Samsung)
* Protects your TV performance and functionality from surprise degradation due to "updates"
I don't see any significant downsides compared to the upsides :)
It's unfortunate the manufacturers are in a position where such perverse anti-customer incentives exist.
All we really need and want is a great product crafted with love. What we got was a creepy spy box that eventually gets so slow it becomes unusable and worthless e-waste.
Instead, it will have its own upgrades which will degrade performance and/or UI.
A recent Android TV update on my Xiaomi Android TV brought ads covering a 1/4 of the screen from services I'm not subscribed to. Had to revert the upgrade and stop it from updating.
Why can't we have a consumer organization that protects us from having to buy stuff that we don't want.
Wouldn't it be great if any product sold in mass quantities would have to pass a consumer/environment protection committee first?
Because of too much money from corporations in politics
that's why I said "in mass quantities".
> ... don't have to rely on government agencies to enforce ...
Who's enforcing the mandate?
You don't have to buy stuff you don't want.
You just can't buy the stuff you do want without it being bundled with stuff you don't want - the manufacturers have decided there's no market for it.
Evidently it's more profitable to persuade a large fraction of people that they are “consumers”, whose lives are a series of branded commercial experiences, than it is to cater to the unlucrative number of people who object.
As ever, the problem is consumerism.
Depriving people of TVs, phones and computers is not the solution. Redirecting them to the FOSS alternatives which are more expensive, have less features and are harder to use is also not a solution.
I recall seeing some pictures of models that eventually refuse to display content until they get a network connection to update (well, really, download new ads).
If they refuse to run built-in apps (like netflix/hulu/etc), I can see that, makes sense. But if you dont use those TV apps anyway and just get all content on TV through Chromecast/AppleTV, that refusal doesn't matter at all.
Source: that's how I've been running my own setup for a while, zero issues. Tried with both a 5+ years old 4k Sony smart TV and a more modern LG C1.
> "* Protects your privacy"
these two things are at complete odds. appletv is only marginally better, but it is better. anything google is going to spy on you for its own benefit and those of its advertisers.
If you don't then you probably don't need any of these dongles! Just connect your TV to OTA and you're fine!
it's the least bad option right now (that still allows you to watch just about any content), not a great long-term one. as apple establishes itself more and more in the content business, i'm sure they'll eventually succumb to more invasive tracking and targeting for advertisers as well.
The thing gets warm only when you play 4k youtube video.
And now you have to deal with windows privacy :)
For example, imagine you want to keep a smart TV offline but you also want the latest greatest eARC features over HDMI 2.1; or you want that new Dolby tech to work with your PlayStation 5. That's stuff that came out in the last couple years. Assume it will take the TVs five years to work seemlessly. In the meantime you're gonna need firmware updates. It won't work out of the box. Or maybe it will, but with a noticeable lag.
Whatever smart TV model you're considering, read the patch notes and visit the fan reddits so you know what you're getting into.
An alternative is to get a gaming monitor; however these rarely reach TV screen sizes so if you're looking for 45"+ you're stuck with smart TVs
A quick search shows that at least some Samsung models have this capability as well.
You might have to agree to a ToS when you first connect to internet. Who knows what privacy you give away signing that.
The update might be a trojan horse containing both the bugfix you need and a new mandatory streaming service tile on the home screen.
I also don't care about tiles on the home screen, because I literally never see the home screen. I always have a device plugged in (and have never connected a TV to the internet for software or other updates, thankfully).
My 2016 OLED LG model had a firmware update that supposedly would halve the max backlight to the point where the TV was unusable. Since I never connected the TV, I was safe from this but as you said I might miss out on some features.
Wow you get ads even when you never connected it to the internet? That's really user hostile design.
If I get a tv it'll be LG anyway because they do real OLED, not that Qled stuff that Samsung does.
Owner of 2 LG OLEDs
I can see it still, but I don't care. And thinking about it, I quit caring at 1080i. (Growing up with CRT video, interlace isn't something that bothers me)
I super appreciated 1080p :)
And that's all I really need. What I've noticed is that my appreciation of the material doesn't improve with the resolution beyond 1080p. And I really like glowing phosphors in tubes, first the CRT, then a pretty great plasma that I plan on camping on, until whatever OLED thing makes sense at some point in the future.
That set will probably run well beyond 1080p. I won't care, might even run it at 1080p anyway.
Extreme detail seems to take me out of the production sometimes, or I see artifacts that I would not see at a lower resolution. Think people call it the "soap opera" effect.
How bright do you want them to be? Do you watch Netflix in a sun-lit room?
Edit: Actually, one thing that LG do is that they have a white pixel (RGBW layout) for the really high brightnesses required for HDR. This means colours get paler when the white pixel is used. This could be what they meant.
I currently have a 32" LG LCD which I'm also pretty happy about. It's obviously no OLED and it's not 4K but for a cheap LCD it's pretty decent. I also love the serial control options (over USB) and I'm working to integrate it with Home assistant (so my screen will dim also when I dim the lights in the room).
So yeah that would be super important. Thanks for the comparison!
> AppleTV or similar
Pick your poison. Doesn't have to be Apple TV, you could use anything from a Roku to a kodi stick to plugging a computer into the TV and playing things locally. What you're criticizing isn't the point.
This really is the most nitpicking anti-Apple comments I’ve seen in a while. A friend of mine had a TV that would randomly interrupt films and programs he was watching (even in the middle of an action sequence) and show an ad that was inserted by the TV software. Luckily only happened for about 6 months - I’m guessing viewer reaction was too much for this ‘feature’ to survive.
To see the ‘ad’ you’re referring to, you’d have to go into the Apple AppStore, search for an app, go to the result screen and maybe see a small section at the top of that view with a sponsored application.
I think this feature was a commercial failure so hopefully it's universally unsupported.
The answer is not giving these companies money.
Second best, though, is getting out the soldering iron.
I’ve had to do it myself once as well.
I don’t care about voiding my warranty.
And that won't work easily, or for too long. They will just embed stuff in chips.
Maybe we will see "Brazil" style setups with TV's in some sort of Faraday Cage
At present, connecting your device is an opt-in since you have to give it wifi creds. In the future, devices will be connected by default and you'll have to opt out if you want to disconnect. Even if you're one of the few people who opt out, devices are going to have fine print that they can always receive "critical" updates via mesh.
Eventually many devices simply assume they are always connected, it's baked into their operation. They'll delegate key features to the cloud and opt-out won't even make sense.
Do these TVs start up and boot directly into the selected input for something like an Apple TV, or do you have to go to extra hoops when it starts up to switch to your desired input? I'd actually be perfectly happy with a smart TV that's disconnected if it never throws its UI in my face when I'm trying to just use an input for something.
However, these days, most of the streaming sticks have their own shitty recommendations and ads anyway, so unless you're doing a self-hosted Plex box or something, expect ads. And then of course there are the actual streaming service ads.
I only had the TV online once to update the firmware, not sure that was needed.
The TV also have one other nice feature: you can remove the logo, there’s just one screw holding it in place.
This is when it's plugged into the HDMI ARC port on a Samsung TV, which I think is a CEC port as well.
https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/7199917
> What is CEC?
> CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) allows for HDMI devices to be controlled with one remote control.
> If you try to cast to a CEC supported TV while on a different source input (local TV channel, Cable, USB), source input will automatically switch to the HDMI port where the Chromecast is connected. Certain TVs will also power on (when powered off) when trying to cast to the Chromecast.
There's no nagging on a Samsung when you do this and use a Chromecast.
Amazon FireTV also phones home quite a bit , but since it runs android you can sideload a firewall like Netguard to try and contain some of the telemetry and usage data being siphoned off the device
They also run near-stock Android TV so even if I decided to use the built in smarts, the experience probably wouldn't be too bad. They do come with a content ID daemon preinstalled, but that's easy enough to remove with a laptop connected via USB with ADB.
Additionally, Sony has been great about supporting firmware updates via USB flash drive, so you're not missing out on fixes and improvements by opting to keep it offline.
When researching, what blew my mind is that the HDMI spec now includes Ethernet-over-HDMI (called HEC - HDMI Ethernet Channel). The end devices just need to support it. That got me thinking that perhaps we might see popular set top boxes like AppleTV transparently start giving internet to the connected smart TVs, perhaps against our wishes and with no way to turn it off.