Buying a TV in 2025? Expect lower prices, more ads, and an OS war | Hacker News Reader

Buying a TV in 2025? Expect lower prices, more ads, and an OS war

arstechnica.com

54 pointsrbanffy81 comments

Buying an Apple TV has been one of my best purchases. It's amazing having a box that just lets me get to my content rather than bombarding me with ads.

It's also amazing how much better the box is. The UX is fast and responsive given that it has an A15 processor (same as an iPhone 14, but 5 core instead of 6 core). Single-core Geekbench scores are over 10x competitive players like the Google TV Streamer and multicore are around 7x. Given that a Google TV Streamer costs $100 and an Apple TV costs $130, you're getting a lot more value for your money with an Apple TV. Even an Nvidia Shield TV is 1/6th the speed in single-core and 1/5th the speed in multi-core.

The Apple TV is a bit over-engineered, but most players are woefully underpowered and it leads to a terrible experience using them.

Plus, it's just so nice buying a product where I'm not bombarded by ads and UX anti-patterns trying to confuse me so I part with my money.

And I spend less money on the box too. $130 for an Apple TV is a lot less than what I've spent on Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast with Google TV, and Tivo Stream devices over the years - hoping one of them would work well.

Not an Apple TV, but I've had a similar experience with a cheap mini PC velcro'd to the back of my TV. A lot cheaper ($30), less plug'n'play, more software options. Pretty fantastic way to go!

What do you use on the PC? Plex? Something else? I'm curious about this because it sounds appealing but I've found the software to be clunky and unreliable and often neglected by the streaming services.

Same story here, I've got an old laptop and a wireless keyboard / trackpad combo. I haven't touched the TV interface since I set this up.

Hard same. An underrated feature of the ATV is that it will reach out and prompt you to use a keyboard on your phone when you need to enter values onscreen, which is WAY better than the character-by-character selection you get with lesser devices.

We got our Samsung on a Black Friday sale in 2019. It's capable of being online, and we briefly experimented with using those features -- not the streaming apps, but the ability to have it show art or amusing graphics when idle. Ultimately I decided whatever info that was leaking wasn't worth it, and so I blanked the wifi settings, which had the effect of freezing the "suggested movies" list in amber at that moment.

Its job is to show whatever external input we use -- AppleTV most of the time, but there's also a cable box/DVR, a Blu-Ray player, and an Xbox. The whole setup runs through an AV receiver, and the sound comes out of the surround system, so we really only need a dumb panel anyway.

I wish they’d just make a normal remote though. They at least got rid of that “glass plate” version for one with more actual buttons but even the new one is still sometimes frustrating to use. I mean yeah it’s our daily driver and we’ve adapted to it but still. Just make a normal remote, Apple.

And while I’m at it, make the remote truly genuinely support the same level of “find my device” that something like an air tag has. It needs to beep. And it needs that “hot or cold” positional thing to nail it dead on like it does an air tag.

And I guess if I’m going to complain I might as well also bitch about how the YouTube app doesn’t support 4k UHD or whatever the top end video format is. The TV’s YouTube all supports it just fine. But apparently Apple and Google would rather get into a pissing match about video codec support than just work.

That all being said my Sony TV’s smart tv stuff isn’t some ad-laden hellscape at all. It’s responsive and fast and gets me where I’m going. Honestly don’t even need the AppleTV. I hear these horror stories about other people’s smarttv’s here and I can’t relate at all. At least on our living room TV. The bedroom Vizio on the other hand… it’s not ad-ridden but it is way underpowered and we only interact with the appletv on it.

I think your SmartTV experience will vary wildly depending on the manufacturer and brand.

I can highly recommend getting a remote from https://function101.com/pages/button-remote-for-apple-tv-hom... It's a "normal" remote which works with the Apple TV

Its funny, I regularly feel like I am under utilizing my Apple TV given its price since it can clearly do more than Disney+, Youtube, and connect to Dolphin.

But thinking about it, the 2 I have I am pretty sure I bought in 2018 or something like that and they still work great. Zero pressure to upgrade. (which is likely not what Apple really wants). But it feels wild that my device released in 2017 is still getting software updates.

I think Apple likes having a bit of a premium, low-pressure position.

One of the reasons I love Apple products for my relatives who aren't tech savvy is that I can just send them to the Apple Store when they have problems. I know the Apple Store isn't going to give them some high-pressure sales pitch to get them to upgrade an iPad that works fine for them or try to put some scummy anti-virus on their MacBook and charge them for it. Sure, people on HN might know how to avoid that, but I'm so sick of relatives buying a PC and then calling me 6 months later saying "I'm getting notices on my laptop that my computer is at risk and I need to subscribe to anti-virus," because it had a trial of some crappy AV. Windows keeps putting more ads into its system. It's just infuriating trying to help non-tech-savvy relatives in an increasingly user-hostile tech world.

The apple tv app itself is pretty great as well, its really nice to have something that aggregates my "continue watching" list across most of my streaming apps, now if only netflix would integrate with it.

I have yet to have a bad experience with Roku. There's a lot of variety depending on what you want, but the UI has always been fast, effective and gets out of my way. Great app selection.

+1 for Roku as a general thing. Fast UI, very broad app support, good cross-app search capabilities.

The downside, and I think the trend is unfortunately in this direction, especially given the article's comments about Roku's potential acquisition, is the increasing obtrusiveness of advertising, both for random shit and for Roku's own streaming offering. Hard-coded streaming service buttons on the remote. I want them out of the advertising business and the content business and in the hardware and platform business. At the very least let me buy my way out of the advertising model.

I've still got a 55" Sony HDTV from around 2008. Zero network or smart features at all. Just a way to display images from another box. It's been so good and still is. I kind of of want to upgrade to something larger and in 4K, but every time I see an article like this I remember what is actually available in the market I feel like I'd rather just save my money and keep what I have that works how I like it

I have a 56" Panasonic plasma TV of the same vintage. It's great -- dumb as hell and displays images and turns on right away (not as fast as an old CRT, but compared to a modern TV fuggetaboutit). Its internal input switching is janky so I bought an external HDMI switch and I couldn't be happier with the setup.

It's mounted on a wall and weighs a ton. Every time I think of upgrading I see the mess of software that they shove on a TV and it's horrifying. I would love to see a dumb TV but I think the best I can do is to have a smart TV that I don't connect to the network, lock on to HDMI1 and never touch the TV remote ever again.

Or just use pihole to block all ads

Youtube is now embedding ads midstream - I think it's just a matter of time before other providers adopt similar approaches. When adblockers were tools exclusive to nerds it didn't make sense to build countermeasures - as advertising has grown more pervasive and obnoxious adblockers have gone mainstream and there is now an arms race that adblockers are currently on the losing side of.

With adblockers disabled, I was seeing ads midstream ages ago. Ads that I don't see with an adblocker. Anecdotally, my subjective experience when adblockers are disabled seems to get exponentially worse whereas my adblocker experience seems to degrade at a much slower rate (e.g. manually skipping author recited ads on a podcast). Currently the TV is the weakest link, and people should be publishing layman's guides to pihole, or as others elsewhere have mentioned, refer them to a adblocking DNS redirect from an adblocker company. Midstream ads are especially obnoxious with music streams and I hope the majority's intolerance tips them over the edge.

Em... Adblockers still work perfectly? It's an annoyance to keep uBlock Origin updated, but it still blocks all ads on youtube. So it seems they're keeping up just fine.

I purchased a television in 2019 and recently gave it away because I never used it. It was an LG and there were so many annoyances with it - slow software; branded buttons I could not change their functions; lack of transparency that it wasn't spying on me; advertisements and so much more, for more money.

I have an LG OLED from ~2020 in my office which I've never connected to the internet. The picture quality is great. When I turn it on (using my video game console or Apple TV), it goes straight to that input. Other than first setting up the picture and audio and changing volume, I've never seen the interface nor have I seen ads. I have a much cheaper TCL TV with Roku built in, and I still have never connected it to the internet. It works similarly with an Apple TV.

Having a large TV isn't a choice everyone makes, and that's ok. However, I don't think either TV is spying on me in any way that I care about.

I mean you may not think TVs are spying on you but it’s not something that just came out of nowhere.

News stories nowadays have enshittified the knowledge on it, I tried to search for the Vault7 leak without the keyword Vault7 in it but by searching for “tv spying on you leak” paraphrased a bunch of different ways and all I got back from Google was the awful clickbait SEO optimized GARBAGE.

But if the CIA was exposed for doing this shit 7 years ago back in 2017 when Smart TVs were a thing for sure but far from the only option compared to now where if you have a TV people automatically expect it to be a smart TV.

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

PS: its so messed up what they did to Julian Assange

If the CIA is spying on my TV using zero day exploits, I have very big problems!

I don't think it's worth TV manufacturer's time and effort to find ways to exfiltrate the BS I might say around my TV in ways that go beyond using a configured network connection, which I said is not something I have on any televisions under my control.

I hate the branded buttons. My tv has ones for apps Ive never even heard of, but I cant just assign one to plex: the only streaming app I actually use

On my Google Chromecast it was possible to download an app that lets me reassign the Netflix button to Plex. I also reassigned the Youtube button to Freetube.

That's the worst. My remote doesn't have numbers, not even arrows in a traditional sense. But it does have 4 branded buttons, 2 of which I never heard of.

Hopefully this will help someone else with a similar issue.

I had this problem as well, so I bought the Google TV Streamer box and installed an alternative launcher called Dispatch. $10 for a lifetime license. No ads and the interface is Content, not app focused. Works pretty great and the dev is super responsive.

The future should be monitors with HDMI/USB input where you can plug whatever you want. Firesticks, Chromecasts, or your own open source alternative.

It should be the future, but it won't be. Roku's ARPU (average revenue per user) is around $40/year. If a company sells you a TV and there's a 50% chance you end up using the built-in smart platform and you keep the TV an average of 7 years, that could be an extra $140 for them. If the TV is selling for $300, that's an enormous amount of extra revenue.

You might say that high-end TVs shouldn't come with ads, but the kind of person who buys a $1,000 TV is the most valuable kind of person to advertise to - rich, or at least willing to part with their money for high-ticket items. ARPU over 7 years might be $140 for all TVs, but the revenue from premium-TV buyers might be double or triple that.

Would you be willing to pay an extra $140 for a TV? I'd guess yes - we're in this thread because we're more likely to. But most people probably wouldn't. And when it comes down to it, are we going to pay the extra $140 or just hope that we can disconnect it from WiFi and it's almost the same difference?

That's the future I chose about a decade ago and I'm as happy as a clam. The technical reality of my future is an oldish computer hooked up to a projector with some wireless keyboards and mice that bounce around to control it and the ability to steam stream onto it if I want to use it for gaming.

It'd be nice if there was an actual competitive market for those sweet high res OLED screens without all the software and firmware junk - just give me a display-port/whatever and let me do my own thing. I've encountered newer brands of smart TVs in airbnbs and the like and one thing I have zero patience for is a TV that needs time to boot up. It's a display device I should push button and it should be on before my brain realizes the button was pushed.

That was ~2007-2017. You are literally describing how TVs worked in the past. Still one of their core functionality.

but think of the products! Dont you want ads?? You havent thought of the corporations poor bottom line at all :(

I get the impression that TV manufactures already know that a large percentage of people are going to circumvent the built in OS with an external device so they put in very little effort into making it good.

> large percentage

I'd imagine it's dramatically less than even 1% of TV owners; we live in a tech bubble. My relatives aren't even interested in my going out of my way to do things like this for them. "Just let me watch TV"

Normies don't care.

Roku’s pending demise—it seemed apparent to me back when my Roku 4 was EOL’ed. Seemed like there was some kind of battle over streaming channels and some apps weren’t available.

I understand the Roku 4 EOL was a little early due to some quirks of the device itself, since the Roku 3 is still supported today. The remote control was also poorly designed—it chewed through batteries like it was on a mission to prop up Duracell stock, and there was a noticeable delay between when you pressed a button and when the button took any action. The overall experience (declining app selection and poor experience with hardware) had me leaving Roku behind.

My next TV will be a commercial digital signage display, unless somebody convinces me otherwise.

As long as it's possible, never connecting the TV to the home network, setting it to auto start to last HDMI used, and using a technician remote or HDMI arc control and mainly interacting with my apple tv / gaming console / audio receiver remote, has been able to suppress most of the TV OS garbage. Hopefully that continues to be an option.

Given the cost of an LTE modem these days I wouldn't be surprised if they start coming with integrated mobile service as a "feature" to ensure the ads and surveillance data always flow.

Why would they ever add that? Mass market means every penny added to the BOM counts. I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if some manufacturer added that but I imagine 99% of people who buy “low cost” TV’s walk right through the WiFi onboard screen and connect to the internet. The number of people who go out of their way to keep the TV off the network has to be incredibly low.

People have been saying this as long as smart TVs have existed and it still hasn't happened.

I have heard that there are apparently some TV's that won't let you use them without connecting them to the internet. But yeah, as long as thats possible than its fine.

But if I am always put into their home system, or some other crap I don't want to interact with even if I am offline. Or I get regularly prompted to connect. It is going to be very frustrating and I am honestly not sure what I will do.

Thankfully it wouldn't be too hard to get around the auto start on the same HDMI with a harmony remote or something with a hub to automatically switch it. Annoying, but fixable as long as it doesn't put up a box prompting you every time to connect.

I have a Vizio tv from 2019, been looking at getting a new tv. and I am honestly starting to wonder if I have just been living in bliss that I can ignore its OS completely past my initial configuration.

With many modern home theater setups relying on the audio return channel (ARC), you may need firmware upgrades to handle compatibility with your speakers. Sideloading these upgrades via USB is mostly deprecated across all major brands.

Or in my case, my “TV” is a large monitor. It’s a bit more expensive, but in return you get no smart features whatsoever.

Anyone know of good TV's? Either a "dumb" TV (HDMI and HDMI only), or the built-in electronics are easily rootable so you can replace the shovelware with Kodi (or stock Debian / Alpine / whatever).

My LG C2 OLED is great. I never connected to the internet. I have never seen an advertisement or pop-up or anything. For all intents and purposes, it is a dumb TV more like a computer monitor. I do not use any of the built-in applications, just literal HDMI1 (appletv) and HDMI3 (gaming pc). I adore it as a TV and would buy one again in a heartbeat. Not cheap though.

the closest thing to a dumb TV are "commercial displays" that are designed for business signage, etc. sadly some of those now are even coming with OS's in them so if you are interested in going that route be careful what you purchase

"Dumb" TVs don't really exist anymore, unless you get something from the very low end, but those have crap picture quality and build quality.

Best option is LG OLED, never connect it to the network and set it to startup on HDMI1 always.

Perhaps "TV" should be in quotes as well.

In many cases, e.g., where the owner does not have good reception of digital free-to-air stations, the "TV" is effectively used as a monitor used to watch video downloaded to a internet-connected computer with an HDMI port ("set-top box", small form factor SBC, etc.). Despite cheap storage there is a culture of throwing away the downloaded video and replacing the word "download" with "stream".

A monitor may also be combined with a computer in the same housing, but the fundamentals are the same: monitor, computer, video downloaded via internet.

To me, "smart TVs" are just a way for someone else to keep a running list of everything the owner watches.

I bought a Samsung "dumb" TV, actually a commercial display from B&H. Other than an annoying popup at the bottom for the terms of service confirmation that goes away in 5 seconds, it is completely off-line. I did connect it to web once to update the firmware, and even then it only had a few apps installed but zero ads. I did reset the network settings and the apps went away.

Do you absolutely need the antenna connector?

If not, consider a large computer monitor.

My Roku stream bar doesn't work with some of my computer monitors. I guess it's due to some DRM protection with the HDMI.

I like the Sceptre TV's

My TV is old and dumb and I love it. But the majority of my streaming is done through my Roku, and increasingly I am bombarded by advertising and attempts to sell Roku's own streaming service.

Ironic because the reason that Roku exists rather than being part of Netflix is that Hastings didn't want the streaming to be tied to distribution.

Looks like whatever they're doing isn't working as a strategy though if they're this close to being bought out.

I personally wish that Roku would sell an ad-free no-self-streaming version at twice the price; three times the price. I'd snap it up in an instant and never look back.

Do people have thoughts about the pros and cons of the alternatives? Amazon Fire TV is the only one that I've used extensively other than Roku and it is terrible. NVidia Shield? Plex? Google TV? Android TV? Apple TV? What do people like now?

> "Today's TV selection has a serious dependency on advertisements and user tracking"

Well, no surprise there, people vote with their wallet after all, and as a manufacturer you either go with the flow and subsidize your devices with ads and spyware, or you go and sink: TVs these days are commodities, unlike earlier times there is no reason for brand loyalty.

Only chance if you want to escape the racket is pay the true price of the and get a Digital Signage line, bonus benefit, the components might actually be higher quality.

Personal opinion: governments should go and ban selling goods of any kind below-cost. All that does is help create oligopolies where only the rich can participate because everyone else can't play the games of scale.

> governments should go and ban selling goods of any kind below-cost

This is called "dumping" and is usually already illegal based on anti-competitive grounds, though mostly seems to only be enforced for international trade.

It's also really REALLY hard to prove dumping tactics, unfortunately, at least if there isn't a global commodity for the resource in question - it is easy to prove dumping/loss leads for stuff like grain, rice, coffee or whatnot, but a TV with its complex supply chains?

I imagine one of the most important things to pay attention to on sites like rtings.com will be - what does the TV do if you don't connect it to the internet? The ads and the tracking are just the norm for people who can't be bothered to care, just like browsing the web is now. And those of us that can't stand it will continue to use external devices like the Apple TV (until Apple decides to start tracking or degrades that experience with ads, hopefully they won't).

I continue to be confused as to why there is such uproar over this.

If you don't want ads on your TV... don't connect your TV to the internet. It will work exactly like a dumb TV.

Wait until some genius PM decides that it is okay to open a "please connect your TV to the internet to update your device" while you are watching a movie...

Or that they simply put a SIM card on the TV that phones home and fetches the ad inventory...

I will continue to not care, i think. Why would I want a TV when i can get a monitor and stuff a soundbar on the bottom, and an apple TV into HDMI1?

That may be a great solution for you. But if you want anything larger than 24 inches or so the cost is going to be astronomical compared to a TV.

"Today's TV selection has a serious dependency on advertisements and user tracking"

Pretty much like every device we own. We need to go back to local-first software. I'd be happy to pay premium for a device, which is truly my, without big tech sniffing all my dataor deciding what can I do with it

It’s an interesting problem. At one point does someone just give up on buying TVs? I don’t necessarily mean “switch to a monitor + speakers” (which is a great alternative) — but rather I just mean at some point if the pain is great enough, why even have the TV? This is a technology category where people complain, but don’t actually change their behavior. Maybe in the current system there is no real market opening for dumb TVs; but if people actually cared, they’d just move away from watching TV altogether.

The vast majority don’t understand what is going on nor do they have the knowhow to do the things they want to do that the said smart TVs claim to do for them. For now at least.

Being technically-savvy doesn’t have anything to do with not buying a TV. I think it’s the HN crowd which might make firewall rules or use pihole, or something else to successfully subvert a smart TV. But you don’t need any technical prowess to simply _not own one._ (you would, however, need to have at least some understanding that where is a privacy / datamining issues, so I would admit these two issues could be intermingled.)

Nonsense. The majority could figure out how to install games or Microsoft Word. Why can't things be this simple? It's a failing of the tech companies and a $ issue.

I bought a dumb TV to use with Kodi. The TV is so dumb tho I wouldn't do that again. Ex. Audio out exists only as 'headphone jack' output. Which is excluded from volume control. The OS, whatever that is, boots before it enables HDMI, adding nonsense waiting time. ...

Wonder what will happen after Vizio loses the GPL lawsuit against them.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

Software that comes on the TV is always garbage or soon to be garbage because it won't be updated. An external player device will get you what you need being a Firestick, an NVidia Shield, RPi, Mini PC etc

So, what is the recommendation for buying an ad-free TV in 2025?

Buy a large monitor instead.

dont

Back in the day you could buy a commercial display Plasma, intended for trade show booths or display walls, as your home TV.

Does that type of thing not exist more ?

It does. You can still get commercial displays. They just tend to cost a lot more than a consumer grade TV.

interesting. In case of plasma displays, the consumer ones used to be the more expensive by a wide margin.

Enshitification just pushes people further to the grey market.

I recently visited family and while there tried to watch YouTube without an adblocker, and the experience was unbearable.

Just buy a monitor or projector and plug in to home media server.

Expect lower prices?

Doesn't the author realize that they are all produced abroad--and Trump has promised massive tariffs.

“more ads”

if youre buying a smart tv (vomit) yeah

To be fair, it still hasn't caught up to how many ads are on cable. Broadcast is probably still a rather gross place, in this regard.

At least broadcast doesn't microtarget their ads by snitching on what I watch or game.

To be better than the worst is not to be good.

I said to be fair. Not that this was a good. :(

Which, to be fair, I should have flat said. I'm always terrified when I watch mainstream television while on a trip. The amount of advertising on normal television is mind boggling.

Reminds me of places that don't have limits to billboards. So many billboards.

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