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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

That works fine with a TV. I bought one knowing that the "smart" features weren't all that great. I tried connecting it to the internet, and it felt more sluggish, although it's a brand new 2023 model. I was able to reset it to factory defaults and it's working well enough for what I bought it for (the image is very good, at least for my needs). For reference, it's a TCL with Google TV.

But the Fire TV TFA talks about... well, the whole point of the thing is to stream internet content. So not connecting it to the internet kinda defeats 90% of the thing's purpose.

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The fire stick is the pure streaming dongle, a Fire TV is an actual TV which includes that dongle built in and sold at a discount.

So, buying a cheap Amazon fire TV and not connecting it to the internet is a reasonable choice for a cheap ‘dumb’ TV.

There's also the "Fire TV" which is a streaming box and not a stick, sold from 2015 to 2022, which doesn't help the confusion in the naming.

you can still stream stuff - just use something else and just leverage it as a cheap display.

Unless it won't work if not connected to the internet (wouldn't put it past them).

I bought my Xbox mainly because it was the best/cheapest option for a 4K bluray player. I think I've loaded a game on it a handful of times at best, but watched lots of movies and other content with it. Thanks gamers for subsidizing a great BR player!

The key is to verify that the TV will return to just showing "HDMI 1" or whatever after power off.

Because the smart TVs have a history of returning to whatever ads they want to show after power on.

My particular TV, if it's never been connected to the internet, will not show any ads. It will show a notification that it isn't connected to the internet when you turn it on, but it will work fine otherwise. It'll even switch to the correct video input if you power it on through that port, say through a firetv stick. Otherwise, there's a setting for power on behaviour: 1. go to home screen 2. Go to last used input.

Even better, if you can avoid accepting the ToS for the apps, they don't even start. My Samsung TV is so snappy now because I reset it and ignore the accept ToS button :)

Makes sense.

Telemetry takes packets out of your bandwidth.

These boxes have constant calls so… yeah free that space up

This is step beyond that, none of the crappy Tizen apps or anything start at all. The TV never gets network access of course :)

The FireTV is not an actual television set. It's the "something else" that you use to stream content to a screen with no internet connection.

No, in this case it is actually a full size TV that has the same OS as the FireTV stick.

My bad, I only quickly skimmed TFA, didn't think these were actual TVs since they're not available where I live last time I checked.

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