Microsoft Copilot AI Comes to LG TVs, and Can't Be Deleted
techpowerup.com
techpowerup.com
1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.
2. Use an Apple TV for the "smart" features.
3. Avoid Fire TV, Chromecast, or Roku.
The logic is simple, Google (Chromecast) and Amazon (Fire TV) operate on the same business model as the TV manufacturers subsidized hardware in exchange for user data and ad inventory. Apple is the only mainstream option where the hardware cost covers the experience, rather than your viewing habits subsidizing the device.
> 1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.
A sensible rule, indeed. Next level of dystopia: cellular modems becoming so cheap that every TV, fridge and washing machine comes with one that connects it to the Internet whether you like it or not. And then when we Faraday cage those, the device refuses to function.
Laws need to keep up and ban this shit outright. It sounds exactly like something that the EU could help with.
That's already a reality with cars in Europe.
Almost everything ever introduced with good intentions gets perverted into something else
Traffic cameras, facial recognition, phone GPS, social media - all can and are used against you in one way shape or form
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any of those things - I’m saying just open your eyes because e sims are no different
I'm afraid that we are crying wolf right now and are undermining our efforts to permanently shut down Chat Control and the likes when we complain about these efforts with a history of not being misused.
So if the car has a SIM it probably could be removed to neutralize it without interfering with the eCall. But eSIMs might be a different problem...
This makes it all very different from a gadget you use for entertainment in your own home.
Having two independent cellular modems in a car is obviously silly, so it only makes sense to use the same module both for the mandatory emergency calling and for the telemetry.
Because the emergency calling is mandatory, it'll of course be made impossible to disable the modem - and by extension the telemetry. Oh, you disabled the telemetry? I bet that'll be called "tampering with safety equipment", and your insurance is now void, and your car is no longer road legal.
If the law doesn't mandate that eCall has to be fully independent, it'll 100% be used to spy on you.
They should put mandating exactly that into the law.
I gave up on this. I turned off a lot of the smart features but couldn’t justify not being able to use the apps.
It’s pretty dystopian my TV spying on me for sure but they’ve already got my phone, my internet history and presumably some pretty good spy satellites
If a drone has my name on it I’m done for either way
I'm on the same boat, smart TV has never been online, all content is just cast from media server/phone/tablet straight to chromecast. It works, no fuss, glitch free, and of course they will kill it.
My biggest gripe with the Shield is the newest one has a remote that I really don’t like. Luckily it can be replaced with a third party remote!
But support for newer codecs like AV1 and general hardware refreshes to keep up with the underlying Android base would still seem like good ideas to me.
Reading the specs it seems that the Shield also would benefit from being able to detect frame rate to auto-switch via HDMI.
Higher network bandwidth to play UHD Blu-ray rips seems like something people want.
About half my watching is YouTube on a paid account, the other half via Kodi and the high seas. My SO uses the regular apps for Netflix, Amazon and HBO currently. Having support for hacker-friendly features as well as blessed apps with 4k support has been pretty great.
As another post mentioned, the remote (current and previous) have been less than stellar... I've been using the one linked below[1], which works pretty well, though uses a USB dongle. FWIW, can also pair a bluetooth headset if you want the big screen experience, but don't want to blow out the house with audio sometimes.
I get Nvidia (the company) has other priorities with higher revenue.
But they have a product, with proven product-market fit, that gives them a last mile connection with end users, in one of the highest utilization home spaces.
How has no one at Nvidia looked at that and said "I'm not saying we orient our entire focus around it, but shouldn't we at least fund it as a strategic priority?"
If datacenter revenue falls off, it's going to look awfully short-sighted not to have diversified customer base when they had the chance.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/roku-disables-tvs-and-stre...
Roku just directly sells it to anyone who wants it: https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/roku-unveils-da...
I disconnected our living room LG TV from the internet and got a Fire Stick 4K Max, but I hate it; 90% of the screen is advert, and you get a tiny sliver for the 5 apps it lets you see, and you have to go digging for the rest, not to mention the home-screen advertising isn't always appropriate for young children.
I hadn't considered Apple TV because I've never been an Apple user, but perhaps this is what I need.
Though I'm an Android user, all of the Android TV devices seem to be junk or ad-ridden junk.
Is Apple TV the way to go (asking other opinions).
It's connected to a samsung tv that's not allowed wifi access. Besides the bad and steadily worsening UX of streaming apps like Netflix, my setup itself never shows me any ads.
Also the apple tv remote has a very solid, premium feel, which i like
A quick search, suggests the latest is 3rd gen (2022), am I looking at the right device?
The only other one I'd seriously consider is the nVidia Shield (Pro?). But the risk with that is that it's decade old hardware with no updates in sight. It's more for the "My Plex/Jellyfin server has all the movies and TV shows ever" -crowd :)
Meanwhile my 1st gen 4k AppleTV (6-ish years old?) is chugging away perfectly and runs every single 3rd party streaming platform I need - even the local ones. As a market it's just too big to ignore.
And no ads anywhere on the front page. The top row apps get to show their stuff on the top part, but it's not "ads" in my book - unlike Google TV that just shoves full-screen crap of "YOU WANNA SEE THIS MARVEL MOVIE?!" at you no matter where you browse.
I lrecently bought the FireTV 4K in a last-ditched effort to find something I could at least have some control over; if I could replace the launcher with something that's just app icons and not all adverts it would have been perfect, but alas, Amazon has prevented that, so onto the next thing.
It's really sounding like Apple TV is the best option for something suitable for the whole family.
Can I ask; what is the purpose of the relatively large storage on an Apple TV, do they support "apps" of some kind?
I’d always assumed that was for rented media
There are "apps" too, but all of them are related to streaming video in some way, except for the games of course.
Also, you can swap the Android TV launcher relatively easily.
While my usage has increasingly shifted toward drawing from my personal library through first Plex, then Jellyfin, I've also used Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV+, and probably a couple of other content apps I'm forgetting on it. Aside from some issues with the UI of individual apps (which is, of course, on the developers), it all works great. Many of the apps can even show you a couple of tiles of "suggested content" right from the home screen (for instance, when I select the Netflix app, but before I launch it, it currently shows the next episodes from the most recent two shows I've been watching on it).
There are various ways in which an AppleTV can be better if you're already in the Apple ecosystem (which I am), but you absolutely do not need to be to make excellent use of it.
It can even join your Tailscale network and act as an exit node, giving you a quick & dirty VPN into your home network!
I've found no way to root it either so I just want rid of it, every time something appears almost-full-screen on the home page that's inappropriate for the kids with no regard for what time of day it is, my wife gets all the more annoyed by it; she never wanted it in the first place, so the poor experience is not helping my case).
It's not perfect, not if it suits your needs you won't have to buy another device.
I think it's related to the accessibility settings it wants enabled, I was never able to turn it on like it says because the setting just refuses to enable.
Even something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/127547167640
Would be a media powerhouse compared to almost any set top box you can buy.
Throw OpenElec or OSMC on it for simple media setup or Bazzite or Ubuntu for a normal linux desktop with downloadable applications for most streaming platforms.
I've been using NVidia Shield TV (pro) since the first gen, still have my OG device as well as the updated models. I'm also running a Beelink SER8 with Bazzite for some living-room gaming and classic emulation.
My wife and kids use the living room TV most, I barely use it, and only then if I'm watching with them, they use all of the streaming services so they want it to play in 4K and "just work", for which Linux is unfortunately not the solution.
But I understand that when you have to account for the other people you live with and their comfort.
I have no idea if that would in some way impact something like streaming quality because I don't have any streaming services; I live in australia where the streaming companies simply don't bother organising streaming rights for worthwhile media. I also like to own things I want to rewatch.
If I wanted to get fancy (and if I had a TV capable of connecting to the internet, which I don't) I might consider setting it up as a media server or look at NAS solutions, but my laptop is perfect for me as is.
It's done. The cultural significance of TV is toast. Our culture is too atomized, too personalized for shared experiences. Large TVs, centerpiece of the living room, are becoming an anachronism that date people as being from a previous era when television was still a shared cultural experience.
The first item in your list to others is subjective
I'm teasing you, I do acknowledged that there are great minds, past and present, who disagree with me. And I trust you can acknowledge the same, there is no shortage of great minds who believed and argued that objective truth, beauty and merit really do exist. The question I have for you or anybody who disagrees is this: can you acknowledge the existence of media you don't like one bit but nonetheless acknowledge as having merit which transcends your own personal opinions? I can easily, I can't stand Shakespeare's Othello, and I simultaneously acknowledge it as possessing a great deal of objective artistic merit. For me, there is no contradiction here because merit is not a function of personal opinion.
What you're saying, "There are shows on TV worth watching and the art form is still evolving, and one person not liking it doesn't mean that it is bad" would have come across much more cleanly if you had stated it plainly.
That's not even remotely what I'm saying!
I would instead say that media is only "evolving" insofar as it is being optimized by media corporations for reliable fiscal return. No risks allowed, everything needs to be cookie cutter, no risks, barely any new IPs even, the industry just wants to get committees of nepo hire "writers" to remix shit they can be reasonably confident will find reliable audiences, and that means pandering to viewers instead of challenging them. Every decision gets run through test audiences, opinion polls, and legions of executives and their consultants. Art cannot be created in such an industry environment. All they can make is base slop.
But of course, you mention "merit", which if my English is correct is "the amount of work / effort / skill involved". But I personally do not like the duct taped banana, and the work / effort / skill involved is minimal - and yet it's considered art, and people go out of their way to view it.
The Mona Lisa is "fine" (in my opinion), took skill to make, but it wasn't considered particularly exceptional in the works of Da Vinci - until it got stolen. It has objective "artistic merit", its beauty is subjective, but its financial and cultural value exploded through the roof due to its story.
For me, my rule is to get a Google TV, because I can change out the launcher to Flauncher. At least that way I don't see any ads. Google may well still be tracking me, but they do all over the web and I have an Android phone so they've already got plenty of data on me. I just avoid their ads so that it minimises the profitability of that data.
I just wish I could get something similar as a native iOS app. Although I can use Safari extensions, the Safari YouTube experience on iOS is terrible.
What are some of your favorite shared experiences to replace tv?
I refuse to connect any of my TV's to the internet but I have to wonder how long until a few different things happen:
- The TV's just connect to unsecure Wifi and collect the data anyways (I think there were reports of at least one manufacture already doing this at one point?). Or just make a deal with xfinity to use their mesh network that seems to be everywhere.
- The TV's don't work without being connected to the internet.
- The manufactures find out that the cost of adding in a cellular modem is justified by the increase in data they can collect.
I would love the idea of buying a modern TV without any of this crap shoved in, I happily use my Apple TV for everything that isnt video games.
It bothers me though when it seems like to fix an issue with HDR or something I need to update the firmware. I have wondered on occasion if this is intentional to "force" people to connect. If I have to do this I will run an ethernet cable to temporarily connect.
It's kind of funny, we bought these TVs because they were "smart" (when they first came out) but they were so clunky and unreliable we disconnected them and used either PS or Apple TV for other things. Now we wouldn't connect our TVs to the internet for anything, and only use PS5s for specific things. We mostly just use our Apple TV.
I have a Logitech K400 Plus portable keyboard and it works great for general use, but I end up using my Apple TV on the couch instead since I prefer using a TV remote / gamepad to navigate.
Modern equivalents are a lot cheaper. I think they might not have the backlight feature which is extremely useful, and I've dropped mine many times, even spilled coffee over it, and it still works flawlessly.
Imo you only need remote like hardware if you’re planning to scroll through Netflix style walls of content.
I'm beginning to think this AI stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be...
That's not even the endgoal they are aiming at. Suppose you have a data churning loop you want to run forever. First step is to send a copy everywhere (anywhere) and in whatever shape and form to feast. Otherwise it just sits there looking at the nuclear plant next door.
If not, there are some webOS exploits on this wiki page:
https://wiki.debian.org/Exploits
Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will mean the right to repair software comes to TVs more easily.
though it is a cat and mouse game
You make it sound like it's almost a crime not to.
> Major changes in Android 16
> Battery icons are changed to landscape, with the percentage shown inside the icon
I think it boils down to how much you trust the software vendor to operate in good faith. My PC runs on Fedora and those people don't have any QA, but at least they do their honest best. My gaming handheld is on Bazzite and it's a similar situation. But Google has a proven record of enshittification of Android. I turned off TV software updates long ago because I only use it as a dumb screen so I don't understand what is there to update. My headphones yell at me "there's firmware update available" but I don't want to discover what new problems were introduced, current firmware works correctly. I have a smart robot that's fully cloud-operated and they recently introduced a completely new app. I'll keep using the old app as long as I can because I don't want to be their beta-tester and the old app works. I have smart light system and there's no reason to update anything because the functionality "use remote control to choose the desired light setup" mostly works with small glitches that aren't too annoying.
They need to force induce AI demand to pump up the dashboards for shareholders. Thus they are converting every possible input line in the world into AI inputs. Do you think they redesigned Windows Run dialog[1] out of the blue just for fun?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1pe93r2/after_30...
Hooking up an Apple TV 4K to this thing was the best decision I ever made and the sheer performance of this thing puts every TV vendor to shame. I would recommend everyone to do the same if they're already in the Apple ecosystem.
But I got a newer LG model 2 years ago, I was still redirecting requests to LG's servers to a local web server (using DNS), but I guess due to https, the certificate checks failed and the attempts to call home failed. This meant that I never got asked to agree to the T&As.
But of course many apps don't work..
Also most tvs have usb ports so maybe either raw media or some third part dongle can service as well?
Also also, most tvs of this caliber have hdmi you can plug your computer to.
After that I blocked the MAC address at my router.
I know people want "dumb" displays, but the reality is that these OLED panels offer industry-leading image quality and benefit from economies of scale, where most users want some form of built-in OS. A signage board cannot compete on price or quality. As long as TV manufacturers let me run it offline without issue, I'm fine with that.
Also fwiw, you can use apps like Infuse on the Apple TV for playing your own media files over the network. No Need for USB drives, just connect direct to the shared folder.
I suspect that this won't be the case for much longer. Once you've stuffed the TV with all the ads and data harvesting you can, the logical next step is to ensure it doesn't work at all unless those ads are being watched and that data is being harvested.
They're great for sports though. Hard to beat an entire wall of screen.
I prefer OLED for TV and movies though.
Some threads:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1azy0s9/current_st...
- https://forums.plex.tv/t/does-the-plex-app-supports-hdr10/89...
Except in scenes with fire (like a campfire) or where some spots may have high brightness compared to the surroundings. The LG OLED TVs I’ve seen all go blank in such scenes. The TVs I’ve seen that have LCD panels don’t have this issue. It seems like the only way to disable it (after turning off power saving and a few other things) is to buy and use a service remote to turn off ASBL. From my online reading, it seems like doing this may void the warranty and probably have negative effects on the life of the panel.
It just looks great all the time. Especially on scenes like you describe with a dark scene with bright highlights. Campfire scenes look great, space scenes look great. That's what OLED is best at.
If you're talking about ABL, I've only noticed the dimming on ads or powerpoint lectures that have fully white backgrounds, and I've been thankful for it at those times because I find all-white backgrounds too bright to watch anyway.
Then it is Apple that is harvesting your data. They may or may not display ads (I don't have an AppleTV to check), but they are certainly logging your interactions and possibly selling that data with third parties. That is on top of all the data Apple already has on people using iPhones, and the reason why I will never use anything other than a free/libre ROM like Graphene or Lineage.
They quite literally have settings to disable that. There are no ads in the operating system.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/tv/atvb66239fa1/tvos
I'm sure some conspiratorial thinking would lead people to the conclusion that Apple are secretly tracking and selling data. There is no evidence to suggest this is happening.
It's probably the next best thing to setting up your own linux home theater PC. But that comes with trade-offs with UX and DRM blocking 4K streaming apps and lack of Dolby Vision playback.
Apple in their privacy policy reserves the right to use your data for ads. They aren't secretly tracking, they are telling you so.
But it's no different than Google, who also doesn't sell your data. Just mining it to target ads.
Nope. According to the privacy policy
> We provide some non-personal data to our advertisers and strategic partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, help Apple market to customers, and sell ads on Apple’s behalf to display on the App Store and Apple News and Stocks. For example, we may share non-personal data about your transactions, viewing activity, and region, as well as aggregated user demographics such as age group and gender (which may be inferred from information such as your name and salutation in your Apple Account), to Apple TV strategic partners, such as content owners, so that they can measure the performance of their creative work, meet royalty and accounting requirements, and improve their associated products and services.
It's the privacy policy of the Apple TV app, not the Apple TV device.
Those aren't the only two options. There are commerical TVs (eg in hotels) that are very close to standard TVs, but with a minimal interface.
You can find people who cover the content of these updates, such as Vincent from HDTVtest.
What I tend to do is leave my WiFi off and then occasionally turn it on and connect for firmware updates, then disable it afterward.
I've also found that on my LG OLED that a lot of the crapware doesn't even have an option to function if you just never accept the terms and conditions or un-accept them. The UI doesn't make it perfectly obvious that you can do this but you absolutely can.
This stuff is very much anti-consumer, but can generally be mitigated by vigilant settings-chasing and a willingness to ignore the TV interface and use a dedicated streaming box with essentially no ads like an Apple TV.
Sigh! These manufacturers have repeated this so many times that it is probably in their corporate subversion manual now. This is no consolation at all. They first introduce 'optional' features like this. Then they tighten the screw such that you get degraded performance if you don't use that feature. Finally they make it unavoidable. How are we missing it every time?
Haven't we seen how this evolved in the case of windows login using their 365 account? Haven't we seen how Android smartphone unlocking and custom ROM flashing got gradually more difficult over the years until we can't do that anymore?
If you rely on compromises or shortcuts out of this problem, you'll eventually find yourself without any. We need to nip this trend in the bud. Punish them with a tanked market.
Ah. So it's not "AI." It's an "opportunity to spy on every single thing you do."
It's not just LG! They keep trying to shove "a return channel" into the latest ATSC standards for DRM and "enhanced / more accurate ratings".
And most TVs these days have Bluetooth.
ATSC 3.0 also specifies a dedicated long-range return channel with a range of many kilometers.
What next, ultrasound? IR?
I'm pretty sure they're working on solving that problem.
Car manufacturers also do similar things (onboard 4G/5G modem), and one solution (other than driving an old car) is to disconnect the cellular modem. Of course the issue is that few people know there is one in their cars in the first place, so they are unknowingly snooped on.
For example, remember how a shadow organization funded by auto manufacturers tried to get people to vote no on opening up the vehicle diagnostics bus to the owners and 3rd party repair shops? They pushed the narrative that opening it up would make you an easy target for sex predators! They ran a bunch of very scary ads based on that plot. They were playing with the people's emotions and insecurities. I think it failed because a massive lobby of ordinary people including Louis Rossmann did a much better job of convincing the people of the truth. However, it was a tough job and they'll have to repeat it endlessly against the attempts by the much wealthier industrialists.
The fact is it's a losing game for us, simply because of the disparity in wealth between us and them. I wish we had more power on our side. I don't know what to do without it.
So, I disconnected the TV from the internet, uninstalled the app, and bought an Apple TV 3rd gen. LG TV quality is great but their software is unbearable.
Actually if it was "just" cheap and junky that would probably be fine with a lot of people here. Yes shrinkinflation is a problem but technology doesn't seem to have that problem, prices genuinely do keep coming down. The problem is what companies add on top of the cheap junk in order to obtain an extra revenue stream while also still selling cheap junk. In fact I think I would rather take cheap dumb junk than high-quality but spying on me.
Had to order large tv sets at work, got LG ones. Working mostly fine as dumb displays (for some connected device, delivering the pictures and using HDMI ARC to switch on both at once) but here and there, users are put to the home menu of the LG TV if something fails and need to click through some icons to get to the HDMI input and if you dare to connect them online you get that "Update" notification, when an update is available (even when you disabled auto update).
For how long? Eventually, it will end up like Windows login. It won't work without an online account. In the meanwhile, they will soft corece you into adopting it by using passive aggression. They will slow down the bootup to a crawl, unless you connect it online. Those times are already really bad - CRT monitors used to heat up faster.
The ultimate point is, if you have to make compromises to retain your rights, then you might as well have no rights at all. You're already well on your way there.
also: i think this sort of behaviour is exactly how you chill updates of any sort. it may take a while but when it is publicly salient that updates are sophies choice, and large pie slices of devices stay stock and unconnected, that will dry up that watering hole.
paranoia regarding un-updated devices will give way to paranoia regarding updates being used to screw you into something you would never consent to.
When you remove my ability to see if a Bluetooth device is connected with a security update, why would I willingly install any more of your updates?
https://www.reddit.com/r/samsunggalaxy/comments/1kjjeqo/how_...
Though I think the 3 received the buggiest updates of any phone ever.
telling your boss we are selling sugar, when its actually salt, is a good recipe for footgunning.
Right, but that's somebody elses problem a few quarters from now.
Yes, the only deli in town. Office, Server, Desktop, now your TV, pretty soon your car.
pretty much.
back in the before times, we broke up AT&T, but we don't do that anymore.
Idk what the answer is, but it is not 100% this. It’s too simple and satisfying of an answer to be true.
Make a metric a goal, work tirelessly towards that new metric.
Does it make the product better? Well, the product is already made- so it doesn’t make a difference.
It’s only software developers who think a product is never “done”- normal MBA thinking is “we have invested in R&D, now there is a product, how do we get as many users of our product as possible”.
That's all its been for the last few decades. Everyone is now "data driven" and "metrics oriented". That's a footgun - if people can game it, they will, and numbers don't say what people think they say.
this will however give them huge amounts of information... its a loss leader for them.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
The enshittification of our world is beyond words.
Ah, so exactly like Microsoft Windows operating systems behave.
1. go to Settings -> Account -> iCloud -> See All and verify all are Off.
2. go to Storage, for each listed select ’Delete Data from iCloud’Done.
Thanks for the tip. :)
The LG software is horrible on this TV. Great picture quality, but I would never recommend an LG TV just because of the software.
Really wish we'd get dumb displays with these great panels :(
I’m looking to see what I would get or lose with Apple TV or some Plex/JellyFin/other player with less baggage.
I'd love for someone to mention a single TV manufacturer who provides a good, not amazing, just good, smart TV experience.
I only wish my systems to defecate its corpse soon.
It sees you when you're sleeping.
It knows when you're awake.
It knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake.
Its masters sell that data to anyone who wants it.
Anyone will judge you.
Samsung is already preloading intelligence service software and "365 copilot" into their phones to trick old people into paying for a subscription to open a PDF (it sets itself as a default app).
At this point it's a war against the consumer.
And it's not just this, they are slowly phasing out consumer hardware (GPU price increase, RAM, non NVME SSDs, etc.) in an effort to make hardware ownership impossible thus creating a "Market" for the post bubble burst of AI where they will be renting out PC hardware (all these datacenters that they are building which will be useless).
This is US led and also conveniently both the US and South Korea are involved, as they shut down China (both GPUs and RAM manufacturers in China were blacklisted).
It's not a coincidence, I Imagine the threats of potential tariffs if they do not comply does not help with their "independent thinking".
I was always impressed with how unshittified it was, and knew that when I got another TV it would be a WebOS LG.
Now this :(
To the audience of this site, yeah. But "copilot" is Microsoft trying to brand "an agent/assistant". They use it across their entire product line; copilot is in office so you can ask for help with spreadsheet formulas and in outlook so you can ask for help with summary/triage... and it's in VSCode/GH.
Microsoft saw the way the USB people absolutely screwed up the marketing/branding around different generations and speeds and capabilities and said "I bet the same strategy will work spectacularly well for us" and thus _everything_ became copilot.
Back when IE was king, nobody even knew what the hell Internet Explorer was. They just clicked the blue E thing to get to Google.
Because wallstreet just needs to see that AI adoption number go up. No one really cares about if it's accidental clicks, or hell just mandatory running in the background. We just need that number to go up, and next quarter it has to go up even more.
Smart TVs, more like Spy TVs today.
All that I have available in typical stores are smart TVs. The rest is some display panels meant for commercial installations (like big ad screens, multiple, working as one), which are only available online at a premium price.
Ultimately, I'm planning for a world where the technological decline continues (ie, technology continues to be something which its users do not own or control) and things like adblock just don't work anymore. When that finally happens, I'm honestly going to be watching DVDs, VHS, reading books, etc. This is a game of cat and mouse and if I'm pushed far enough I'm just going to check out of the system completely. TV is not so valuable that I'm going to let some sleazy company push me around.
Sir, that's basically a no.
A TV is a specific device. It has many functions that TV monitor seldom has, or implements poorly. Like speakers. Or rich inputs and outputs, like multiple hdmi and antenna. Or a proper remote, a dvb-t tuner. Or play media on it's own when connected via USB. Or DLNA (I had devices far from modern smart-tv that could do that, in the past).
Monitor or panel can mimic some of this, with effort on your side, but not really.
I think closest are some Sharp models, and their screens are great. But that also requires hunting for commercial models mean for large displays.
I'm not saying you need a smart TV, but if you want to get the content you're actually paying for via Netflix, HBO etc in the highest quality they offer, you'll need to fork over money for a device with dedicated hardware
Even if that were unsupported I would it get an external Apple TV or chrome stick. There is still no reason to have a smart tv.
All TV software seems appears to be an absolute fucking scam.
I thought this is already common wisdom for people in tech for decades to NEVER connect your TV to the internet, not even once.
I work in automotive, the hoops you have to jump through in order to push a SW update are enormous. One of the first rules is: if the owner of the vehicle does not consent to an OTA update, you're out of luck.
The industry is obviously unable to self-regulate, so it is time for an external regulator, e.g. the EU, to jump in and mandate that SW updates cannot be applied without explicit consent and an explicit explanation of what is being changed. Of course, security updates must be maintained separately from feature updates like this.
As a consumer, I always want the latter, rarely do I want the former. My device, my choice.
I don't want this "predatory practice" to end, because that's how i get my dirt cheap massive screens.
And all you have to do is to stop connecting them darned things to the internet.
It's not that hard, i'm telling you!
Until you've had the experience of a large (>77" WOLED Panel). They are just great.
(Either Samsung dropped the ball on quality in the last 5-10 years, or I just started to pay attention, but the desire to throw this garbage in the bin is real.)
From what this article says it is an app (which fits with how it is displayed in the screenshot), which suggests you would need to choose to open it to actually have it do anything.
A modern TV has a lifetime of 15 - 20 years I think. E.g. my in-laws have a Sony TV, from around 2012 - 2013. It's not 4K obviously, but the picture is beautiful, the sound perfectly fills their small living room, it's a great TV. Even considering that Sony did skimp on the compute in that TV from the start, there's no way that they could have put in hardware that would future proof it until 2030 or beyond. Nor could they reasonably charge enough to cover software updates for that long. It makes much more sense to have a replaceable external unit.
Assume there is similar for other countries, though I can't see this being of any use whatsoever.
Any recommendations for a ≈42 inch dumb screen replacement for when that day arrives?
I'm getting sick of feeling so slimy and used.
A TV is the perfect place to introduce AI in terms of giving me content I should actually enjoy, and answering any questions I may have about what I'm watching. Kudos to LG for being the first.