Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatpatton | Hacker News Reader

It's simple: not buying them is the way. There is enough competition to just buy a screen that will not do that.

There is not a ton of competition in the OLED TV space

Who cares? Companies are using your need to have the latest and greatest against you. It's overt manipulation. I'd rather watch an old CRT or nothing at all than allow some company to forcefully show me ads.

> Companies are using your need to have the latest and greatest against you

This is a false dichotomy.

My love of cinema drives me to have certain features in my TV: 4k, OLED, HDR. My hatred of ads drives to me buy certain products to use my with TV: Apple TV.

You don't really get a lot of options anymore. When people around don't really care and just buy this junk because it's cheap, and they "need" a new TV ever three to four years, for some reason, then you get priced out of the market pretty quickly. Even if you look for TV, and yes I want a TV, not a monitor, without all this junk, there's not really any options available locally anymore. I believe my only option is the Thompson Easy TV, which is great, if I needed a 43" TV or lower.

Apparently I can attempt to import one from Romania, but that seems fairly complicated. Even sites that recommend dumb TVs just recommend SmartTVs that works well as a dumb TV.

fewer competitors every year...Sony gave up as well :/

It's ridiculous that going to a Target/Bestbuy/etc you cannot find any non-smart TVs generally. I have had several older models of non-smart tvs that suddenly stop working after a few years. It's disgusting

It's either because the non-ad-driven tvs cost more, resulting in too few sales to sustain (because no lifetime revenue from data sales) or the lifetime revenue from data sales is so profitable that companies take the risk on being undercut by a market entrant that will sell dumb tvs.

My guess is that the vast majority of people will trade data for a cheaper price point every time (my wife is certainly one of these people), so the market just can't support the volume of sales necessary to make the price point of dumb tvs competitive.

A smart TV just means one that can show you advertising and hoover up personal data. This is additional revenue. What company would sell you anything else?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com