Got new LG OLED.
Also got Nvidia Shield TV Pro.
LG has no connection to the internet, Shield's home page is the only thing I see when TV turns on. No ads, no hassle, one remote for all, fully customer controlled environment
What happens? I get a popup every few times I turn on the TV telling me that I can enable Alexa support by connecting it to the internet. It's an ad. For itself.
I connected it to the internet. Now I get other ads in that way instead.
LG is no savior in the anti-ad race.
If you're willing to settle for less than the best, there might be options. I didn't really look into them, though.
https://www.lg.com/us/business/digital-signage/lg-65ep5g
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/qe-serie...
The Roku TVs I put in my family’s vacation home are terrible. They oversaturate the image to account for the shitty display. Don’t use it a lot so I don’t care.
FWIW - on most LG TVs, you can 'revoke' your acceptance of the EULA, which essentially returns the TV to non-smart status. Most of the tiles will disappear from the home screen, as will the ads. Depending on the model you might need to futz with the settings to make sure that the TV defaults to the hdmi input instead of the homescreen when you turn it on.
And when a guest accepted EULA it promptly filled my home screen with "recommendations" of documentaries about Porn, with explicit posters included.
I then threatened to sue them. The porn recommendations stopped and they sent me an apology, but the other ads remained.
With the development time and money saved they could afford to implement a few thoughtful touches like a physical master on/off switch. If that switch is on, then the TV is on whenever power is present. This allows it to be controlled with a simple home automation power plug. A soft on/off control can still exist downstream of the physical switch.
Is full of ads due to Android TV mandating it.
No, I don't need to learn about this new show you have on some service I don't have a subscription to. No I don't want this app to setup an applet on the homepage.
All I want is a list of apps, a settings button and a shut down one. On a plain black background with no moving part.
The only drawback is the lack of HDMI passthrough for Plex. I have an Nvidia shield just for this use case.
HDMI passthrough is really the only good solution.
The Apple TV app might advertise their services, but that doesn’t mean the Apple TV platform is doing any advertising. You only see the app’s ads if you hover over it on the Home Screen and if you remove the app or move it out of the way, you no longer see its ads.
Android TV has an "Apps only" mode that does exactly that: https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10070784?hl=en
The downside (which some might consider an upside) is that that mode also breaks voice control.
> In Apps only mode, you don't get personalized recommendations on your home screen. You’ll find a list of installed apps that you can open to find something to watch. You'll also find sponsored content and teasers for popular movies and shows.
Projectivity launcher
(note: Since SmartTube will spoil you making regular YT unbearable, a similar fix for desktop browsers is to install a collaborative community UserScript called "Nova YouTube".)
Occasionally it may break because for obvious reasons Google does their best to force people to use their unwatchable page, but usually the fix comes out very quickly. How to make it perfect? Move from Electron to Tauri and make also a Kodi extension. I use Invidious on LibreElec/Kodi, but it's not even close.
plus almost every other app follows suit on the appletv (hardware, not the service), so that all apps on the appletv (hardware, not the service) end up having ads, not just the appletv (service, not the hardware) app on the appletv (hardware, not the service).
nope, not confusing at all, but still lots of ads.
Or has Apple TV+ itself started doing that
Apple TV+ shows, on the Apple TV app, on the Apple TV hardware now often (not every time, but very often) have ads in the front the show, and before you ask, yes with a paid Apple TV+ subscription.
and yes, of course the other shows that can play in the Apple TV app also show ads at the beginning, but they do that in their own apps on the Apple TV hardware as well.
can I just note that calling hardware, app, and service the same thing is a bit confusing?
sometimes reusing a common single word for a product works well, and sometimes it's just slippery as hell.
"Samsung TVs have NEVER spontaneously connected to Wifi. That's just internet BS."
I know there are patents for it. There are patents for a lot of things that never make it to market. I'm not sure whether this has ever happened or people just assume the well-publicized (relatively speaking) patents mean it has actually happened.
I've tended to guess that the legal implications of connecting to random hotspots are complicated enough to prevent it from happening at scale. It's clearly not a technical problem to hook up to hot spots set to be open without passwords, after all.
Previous gen could probably afford images, but I'd bet 4G video where the manufacturer is paying for the cell connection probably couldn't swing the price of video.
It does push paid content (as in rented/purchased movies/tv shows); I don't consider these to be adverts, per se, but obviously you might.
There is a popular guide for downgrading to v8 somewhere online as that is/was one of the more stable versions of the OS.
You can use a different launcher like Projectivy instead, though.
It's like an open-source Apple TV.
Then someone replies, "I connected it to the internet. Now I get ads ..."
It's like commenters submitting replies just skip over certain sentences like they do not matter.
What I am curious about is what happens if one gives the TV an internet connection but no DNS. I am assuming it gets its DNS server IPs from DHCP, TV owner controls DHCP and sets up a local authoritative DNS server with wildcard RR pointing every domain to nowhere.
> I get a popup every few times I turn on the TV telling me that I can enable Alexa support by connecting it to the internet. It's an ad. For itself.
The decision whether to let the TV have an internet connection still rests with the TV owner, i.e., the internet subscriber.
The one who pays the internet bill decides when internet connections are made. Software developers might believe someone else's bandwidth is theirs to use as they please. They might employ dark patterns to get "permission" or "consent".
But neither developers nor advertisers are paying for the victim's internet connection. It is not their choice to make.