The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV | Hacker News Reader

The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV

wired.com

17 pointsm46329 comments

This reads a lot like post CES submarine PR, having worked in this exact space.

To date the market for these things simply hasn't had traction, at all, despite it being a long term dream of many display manufacturers. They also cannot resist the urge to go all in on inevitable privacy invasion stupidity, because they believe all the others will do it and so undercut them.

Oddly the generative AI wave is exactly what the marketing people thought they were missing when I was involved, since they wanted you to be able to describe something and have it just appear. Now you actually could.

My 75" Samsung The Frame (2024) uses 70w in 'art mode'. It has a motion sensor and you can configure to fully switch off after some timeout.

I see a lot of blocked requests in my OPNsense firewall (not sure what exactly) but I see that with almost all 'smart' devices (which I like to keep local).

Wow, that really puts the 10W my laptop uses into perspective.

Not sure if it's the case now, but early Frame models had fans which could be quite audible.

The system I worked on never had fans in, but was rated to operate at 75C instead.

So they use power 24/7, do they also listen to what happen in the room? because those brands sure like to spy on what users are watching (even the HDMI in on some of them)

Don't forget the Amazon one has AI to "help you decide which artworks are the best fit for your room." So it 100% has a camera watching you.

Presumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR.

I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

> I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

You mean the media stopped talking about it - it has no relation to whether it happens or not.

I just want to hear about this audio codec that’s so efficient that nobody has seen a single bit being sent.

Amazon literally invented the class of products that sit in your house and listen to you

Yeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage

Yeah it's more likely done the way ACR is done! https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1izq2oj/how_to_dis...

But tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.

If a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage

I do not believe it ships direct audio recording. It is analysis of the audio it processes (at least that is how I read it). Just because it sends lossy compressed data home (analysis output) instead of direct recordings does not mean it isn't listening.

It just seems really far fetched that thousands of Amazon employees are conspiring to commit an insanely obvious and illegal breach of privacy for data that isn’t even all that useful (hard to analyse, computationally expensive, low signal to noise ratio). And that no one has ever noticed this even when security researchers test these devices

Come on, the Alexa devices are designed to do what? They wake up on a keyword, perform some local analysis of the following data, and phone home on an encrypted channel on a regular basis.

You quite literally can't tell by watching one what it is doing. You certainly cannot verify that all Alexas are not doing something.

I don’t think Amazon have a vast conspiracy (that no one has whistleblown on!) of secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising. It would be difficult, require huge amounts of processing, probably not help very much, and be incredibly illegal. It wouldn’t give them much value and would be incredibly risky

> secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising

This is a bizarrely specific thing to attempt to counter argument with.

Seems like a stretch to equivocate hearing aid telemetry with smartphones or TVs secretly eavesdropping?

How would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.'

Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.

I worked at a TV station that would use these for monitor walls (more for the anti-glare than anything else). I remember seeing paintings on set being a sign something went terribly wrong.

"It's true that many younger buyers just don't have the same taste or sense of style as folks from previous generations. But also, young city-dwelling professionals are less likely to have the room to place a large screen in a dedicated area in their home, a pain point compounded by the fact that TV screen sizes have ballooned over the past decade."

If you find yourself in this position regarding taste or space, I'd encourage you to use a projector.

There is no 50+" black void hanging on your wall, so you don't need to have a nice picture to display instead. Sure, it can be more difficult to watch things during the daylight hours, but that's actually been a positive for me that leads to more intentional consumption.

Replacing my TV with a projector and muting my microwave are two actions that have had an unexpectedly huge impact on my quality of life.

TVs make much better windows than canvases. I'd much rather have my TV display a real-time "million dollar view" of Central Park than a backlit Van Gogh.

I love the idea of a TV designed to look like a picture frame - I might even mod mine, to have it blend better into the room.

But as for actually using it as a picture frame - no way. I think it's the reflection of modern rent culture where landlord put these things in along with generic Ikea furniture, allowing tenants to 'customize' their living spaces without being allowed to drive in a single nail.

When I first heard about these I thought eink had gotten cheap and good enough for that to be part of the display. The fact that it's just a regular tv displaying a painting was so disappointing.

>the experience of using a Frame-style TV in an otherwise well-designed room is legitimately quite nice

Legitimately quite nice. Is there any higher praise than this?

These will always look bad displaying art because they crop everything to 16:9.

Everytime I see such TVs, theres a "No signal" popup on it. Why?!

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