Sony Patents Anti-Piracy Blacklist for Smart TVs and Media Players

I bought a Sony Smart TV for my mother. She wanted a TV with Netflix.

The legacy fallback of "Sony is a great brand" I really take back. While being home for new years, flicking through the channels I ended up on a public TV channel (UK) and got a popup of "This channel is using analytics, please consent".

Flabbergasted for the fact that I face cookie banners and now on TV channels? For my mother that would of been on a phone call. Not only is the UI attrocious in that it downloads meta-data "Latest trending netflix" which causes the whole TV to become unresponsive where your unable to skip though channels. BBC iPlayer displays a OSD on any BBC channel which you can't turn off of "Do you wish to watch this show from the beginnering". Maybe good features just rubbishly designed

Why is it so hard to just create a smart TV that just TV's?

It's okay for private companies to spy on us and restrict our activities, in pursuit of their own profit, so long as it's to fight piracy... or for security. Or telemetry so they may better serve the consumer. Or really any excuse at all.

But don't worry - even though entertainment industry profit has been growing for decades, they'll totally return to respecting our freedom, privacy, and autonomy, as soon as piracy (including circumventing DRM) is stamped out. Until then, just keep paying the Danegeld, and things are sure to improve.

Turns out buying a smart TV was not such a smart move, eh?