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Comment by plushpuffin | Hacker News Reader

I haven't bought a TV in about ten years and I've started shopping recently, knowing I'll probably have to get one soon. What I'm interested in, knowing I'll probably have to do this (smart TV with no internet), is what the out-of-box experience is without internet.

Will it have preloaded ads that will never change because it can't download new ones? Will there be huge gray boxes where the ads should be in the UI? Will it try to connect to open WiFi or use HDMI to share my streaming box's internet connection? Will it nag me with an alert box in the middle of the screen asking me to connect it? Will it disable features if I don't give it internet access? Will there be bugs and performance problems requiring me to update the firmware, and if I do, will that firmware update introduce any of the above?

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From personal experience, Roku OS TVs (TCL mostly) have a very good non-internet user experience, with a dedicated mode for being a dumb display. WebOS (LG) is decent. Tizen (Samsung) ones are okay, although the one I have is from before they started putting ads in the menus so I don’t know if there are placeholders. None of them have disabled any features or nagged me, or tried to sneakily connect to the internet. Google/Android/whatever-it’s-called-this-year TV (Sony) might not even be usable without internet, I’m not sure. It’s also terrible.

Generally, firmware updates on modern TVs are used for creating bugs and performance problems, rather than fixing them. They also add advertisements. Don’t ever connect it to the internet, and it’ll be fine.

I'll give you my anecdotal experience with a TV that has Amazon's FireTV built-in. It is disconnected from any network. It allowed me to set a setting that says "remember last input" so it always looks at a particular HDMI input for signal when it's turned on (because I always have it set to viewing input, not the smart interface itself). Set like this, it essentially acts as a non-smart TV.

The only downsides are that, being a smartTV, even in this pseudo-non-smart mode, if the TV loses power (rather than just being in an "off/standby" state) then it takes a bit longer for the TV to start up the next time. I wish I could avoid a TV having a "boot sequence", but my experience is close enough to a non-smart TV that it works for me

This doesn't answer all your questions, but the Rtings search tool can filter on whether TVs are ad-free: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table

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