TVs became a nightmare… is there really no market for pay 1000 more and get a non spyware, repairable tv? I know the answer. Same as with buying away ads. The greater fuckery makes more money even than the rich people plonking down money.
Vizio for exmaple in 2021 made 85% of its revenue from selling the TV, just 15% from the "platform". If the $400 TV was instead $470 they would make the same. These scam companies just see it as "free profit" on top of a captive audience.
PC manufacturers used to do this, with Microsoft's consent. Buy a laptop 20 years ago and you would get tons of shovelware from Dell which made them a few extra pennies. Nowadays I believe Microsoft themselves got into the game.
Companies aren't happy with making a product for $50 and selling it for $60 (or $200 or whatever), they have to make a little more by double-dipping. This is of course partly the consumer to blame -- they just look at the headline price. Buy the plane ticket for the lowest price on the middleman interface, but then it's $15 'check-in fee', $50 'landing-fee' etc, but that doesn't matter because look at the shiny advert for $9.99*
What percentage of their profit comes from that 15% of their revenue ?
I suspect it's a lot.
I've done that with last 3-4 TVs and never had an issue. And the $50 dongle is much cheaper than paying $1000 more.
Never happened. It’s just a thing we know can happen, but doesn’t for myriad reasons like humans flying in drones.
Or just buy a normal TV and never connect it to the internet, what's so hard about that? Cheaper than paying more and getting less for a digital signage screen.
These devices aren't at all exclusive or difficult to purchase.
Where would you live that they would be hard to find?
The point of a sign is that it shows what you want it to show. Whether that's an advantage depends on whether that's what you're looking for. But every feature of the display is going to be oriented towards that goal.
Notwithstanding the Amazon review that says "Yes it has wifi", you might find it noteworthy that this model does not have wifi connectivity. (As can be verified from its spec sheet, https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/samsungbusiness/pdf/s... , or from its page on CDW, https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-qe43t-smart-signage-qet-... )
Your comments elsewhere in this very thread seem to indicate that this product is exactly what you want, a display that won't show ads and, in the general case, isn't connected to the internet. What exactly are you imagining will happen to someone who uses one?
Having gotten a 40" sibling that was sold as "desktop monitor" with otherwise identical panel (besides of course pixel pitch) spoiled me with it's "technically counts as HDR" native contrast from a burn-in resistant LCD, also suffering just barely perceptible loss of contrast with no significant color shift at all viewing angles that aren't already too extreme to comfortably read text due to distortion.
Sure, it's slow and thus not suited for competitive counter strike, code editing and SDR-mastered visual media look about as good as an LCD can. They do though seem to not consider factory/nominal color calibration for the panel with the signal processor and a regular operating system on an attached PC something they want to offer on these, which is annoying because with 8 bit and the nominal 5000:1 static contrast mild banding isn't even unexpected. So it'd be preferable to just drop an ICC profile onto the computer that's valid for when the screen is set to native gamma and native white balance (I.e. dumb panel mode) and get to make full use of the panel without the excess expense of individually calibrating devices to do digital proofs ahead of actual production/view the material during actively ongoing color grading work. A decent color managed (but not individually calibrated) screen will suffice happily for most tasks, to the point where further calibration won't be perceptible in a double blind test with the screen isolated from reference light sources for most untrained eyes.
End users and consumers can buy digital signage and commercial displays without any trouble.
Here is one on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/NEC-Commercial-Public-Display-Speaker...
Most of these are resold by niche small businesses but I don't see any incentive for them to reject a private individual buying it? In the UK I got mine from https://www.projectorpoint.co.uk/displays (no affiliation beyond being a satisfied customer) and after wiring them the money I got it next day.
I've had good experience with Sony professional displays (model number FW-65BZ35F) - they are reasonably priced and come with stock Android TV with very little bloatware. My understanding is that these Sony units are not billboard displays or optimized for high-brightness/24H runtime, they're what looks like standard consumer hardware just running a different firmware - the upside is that the price is actually competitive with consumer-grade TVs.
If you're never gonna use the built in OS anyway, there's no reason to risk it. Most TV manufacturers are engaged in a brutal race to the bottom and they have to enshittify the software to make money.
It didn’t. Fixed some other bugs, introduced some new ones. Not my best bet, not my worst. Still no ads, luckily, though.