An ad giant wants to control your next TV's OS
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I feel like this should be illegal. It's kind of like billboards on the side of the road, it's something I never want to say but it's forced upon me. I bought your product, why is it allowed that you can just throw ads on it? I understand they sometimes sell these TVs at a slight loss to make up for that, but I feel like they should be required to sell the same TV without Ads for the same 3% margin added on. I bet most people would pay for the latter if it was provided.
Free market at work.
/s
edit: not just OLED
I don't know about the other supliers though.
I think you've answered your own question here.
The AppleTV remote will also turn your TV on and off automatically
This not only removes ads but also content capturing and tracking.
As to the actual matching strategy, I would guess a perceptual hash that is robust to some amount of noise and varying resolutions. Since you are comparing repeated hashes, say at 1Hz, you have multiple chances over the observation window to match a fingerprint to the lookup database. 30 minute show x 60 frames per minute = 1800 hashes to make the id
So TL;DR: it's probably possible to configure Pi-Hole (or dnsmasq) to block the ads/phone-home behavior of the TV.
I’m just going to use the hdmi ports.
Though I suspect that the processors inside TVs don't have publicly available datasheets, and the actual boards get changed pretty often, so it will be a lot of work for little payoff.
One thing to look at though is to see if your TV has a signage or commercial mode, and switch to using that instead.
Unfortunately for me, the operating system for many TVs is region specific! Once the product appeared on Hisense's Australian page it did mention having VIDAA instead of GoogleTV, but this was after I had purchased it. I can confirm that VIDAA is quite bad, demanding agreement to several fairly ad-driven user agreements before you can use any smart features. "Enhanced Viewership Program" or something, which in the text says that VIDAA will monitor what you are watching on the screen, then use that information to display relevant ads. Yuck.
Fortunately it does switch to HDMI when you turn it on, but I've got to decide what system I get to drive that HDMI port. I wanted not to have to bother with an additional device, but that's how it is I guess.
As a bonus comment, VIDAA's kid-mode- content includes a very large number of purported TV programs - but they are actually Youtube playthroughs of video games, cut into "episodes" and presented as a "season".
The TV is pretty much exclusively used as a 85" monitor for a media PC so I think the risk is low, but this was the final prompt to finally block internet access for the TV at the router.
I didn't want to completely block it from the network as it's useful being able to hook into it from Home Assistant
"If you do not agree to this EULA, you do not have the right to use the Television or the Software"
The enormous "gotcha" games being played under the guise of "if it's not illegal, we're going to exploit it" are grotesque. TVs are just one of hundreds of examples of products and services being used to invade and exploit privacy with no commensurate return on value for what's being exploited.
We need a law constraining this shit to 100% opt-in voluntary features with no dark patterns, with penalties for anything that even vaguely looks like a dark pattern. Fines and jail time time for c-suite for any violations, enough that they'll stop playing the stupid games.
At the same time, "not agreeing with the EULA" is a valid reason to return a product to the store, as I did. Consumer protection laws would be on your side here, in the jurisdictions I'm aware of (Canada/US)
If you didn't see and agree to the TOS prior to purchase, and you find the TOS you discover later to be unacceptable, then I'm confident that you'd win in court.
That changes the decision considerably: not many people feel strongly enough about this to pay more, and even people who do care about privacy or find ads annoying usually aren’t willing to pay much more for it.
An Apple TV is the clear market leader on streaming devices but even there you see people talking like it’s exorbitant to pay an extra $50 for something which will last twice as long as a FireTV or Google TV, and for TVs it’s even less favorable because the people who care enough to buy our hypothetical safe TV are going to need one of those anyway so they’re probably going to pick the cheaper (advertiser subsidized) one and never connect it to the internet.