Samsung's smart TVs are inserting unwanted ads into users' own movies
theverge.com
theverge.com
No user would opt-in to commercials, ever. I don't believe for a second this system was designed with opt-in in mind.
Whenever an ill conceived feature like this is brought to the light, it's always explained as a bug, glitch, or some screw up in engineering. Well, it's not a bug. It was specifically designed to do what it does. If anybody screwed up it's the people at the top that think smart TVs are a good idea.
It's good for TV manufacturers, because old TVs get older faster (outdated processor / software and so on).
For consumers however, having a separate box for the "smart" part of your TV is much better, because it makes it easier to upgrade.
Personally, I prefer the dumbest possible TV. Most of the time, I don't need a new panel, all I need is an upgrade of whatever smartbox I'm using at the moment. So far my Chromecast is carrying me quite well. The biggest upgrade of my TV I'll be doing in the near future will be an upgrade to 4K and/or maybe OLED down the line.
A display panel should last you more than a decade and probably costs many 100s or 1000s. The 'smart' bit is probably worth less than $200 and is probably going to be obsolete in a couple of years.
EDIT - another thing. I want the people that make my 'smart' box to be nimble, forward looking new media companies - not box shifters like Samsung, LG, Philips et al. Most Smart TVs have awful software (LG's purchase of WebOS might lead them to be an exception here)
I've been asked by non-tech friends and relatives about SmartTVs many times and my answer is always "don't touch them with a barge-pole" and a link to a Roku/Chromecast/AppleTV etc.
If you are looking for a top of the line TV it may be hard to find (but is the display really better than a budget Samsung, are we paying extra for Smart features?).
The largest one a normal person can afford is of course a different question.
>Is there a best TV with no apps (or 3D)?
>Not really. Nearly every TV worth considering is also a Smart TV. There used to be several great midrange “dumb” TVs, but they’re all pretty much gone. You don’t have to use them, and you’re probably still better off getting a media streamer (since they have more content sources). As far as 3D goes, we’re starting to see good TVs that lack 3D
I use one of those as a TV. Is wonderful. Will probably last 20 years. Prior to that I used a panasonic commercial plasma. Still running after 10 years.
Neither of them have any smarts whatsoever. They're not even that expensive, which makes sense because many installations use 8 or 12 of them at a time as screenwalls.
http://www.necdisplay.com/p/large--screen-displays/p462?type...
That said, simply not plugging a smart TV into the network will solve most of the problems with it.
Well, at least for now.
I will continue to use my plain old "Dumb" TVs and Roku devices.
I imagine the televisions you tend to see ads for or that are displayed most prominently in stores are those that they want to sell (no shit) and thus those tend to be the smart tvs.
So, photocopiers are a bad idea? Because that's what that is.
But, actually, scanning+printing photocopiers (rather than traditional photocopiers) suck too: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...?
With TVs you're not usually lugging the devices around, but the TV has to be turned on and have volume (and sometimes other settings) managed with a separate remote. Since they typically have multiple HDMI ports, while the set-top boxes you mention don't have HDMI passthrough, you're encouraged to multiplex devices from the TV too, which requires manually selecting between numbered inputs with only a dumb OSD to help coordinate things. (If you have external speakers you might use a receiver to multiplex instead, but now you have a third remote and another dumb UI, not to mention potential latency issues for gaming.) In practice, the result is that among regular users, nobody can use someone else's TV without first being coached on their particular idiosyncratic combination of remotes, let alone try to play their own content by plugging a device in or wireless streaming or something shocking like that. Supposedly HDMI CEC helps with this somewhat by letting the device control the TV; I haven't used a setup with it, but there's only so much a standard for connecting disparate devices can do.
I want one remote - with the option to use my phone or voice control if I lose the remote - and a single, good UI that controls everything. That's only going to happen with a smart TV, but maybe the right device has yet to be made.
(One potential solution to obsoletion is for a manufacturer to make the brains of the TV a separate detachable part that fits into the design, like a laptop battery. Another would be to standardize on one HDMI port per TV, with CEC support and no UI when something is plugged in, so that you're basically required to plug in a box that then takes over the experience. Yeah, like that's going to happen.)
There isn't a solution to devices becoming obsolete because manufacturers would sell less of a new product if the old one worked fine in perpetuity. Not only this but old iPhones, for example, run worse with new iOS versions because new versions are coded for new hardware. Hence the need to upgrade periodically. How many of us have a 486 that will run Dragon Age?
http://www.samsung.com/us/2013-smart-evolution/
It being Samsung, the hardware upgrade was apparently offered after a single year and completely redid the UI, but there's no reason the same principle can't be executed competently.
So from what I understand about the Evolution Kit, it attaches to TVs 2012 and later and provides them with a boost to put them almost on par with 2013/2014+ TVs? Doesn't this cannibalize sales of new Smart TVs?
Funny enough, I had a single remote setup for one brief shining moment in 2008 with the second generation Apple TV; the AppleTV would switch on and off my HDMI TV using some precursor to CEC - the same sleep/wake function that modern PC monitors use - and could also control the volume using the up/down buttons on the remote by modulating the sound going over the HDMI connection. Unfortunately, Apple ripped this audio control functionality out with a software update a few months after the product was released and I was forced to break out the second remote again and eventually replaced the AppleTV. But the point is it is possible to have only one remote with an HDMI connected set top box, but that feature isn't a priority in the world of cable boxes and audio receivers.
Anyway, my experience with smart TVs is that they're a waste of money and incredibly frustrating compared to set top boxes like Roku/Chromecast/FireTV/AppleTV. On top of that, my experience with TV remotes is that I don't want manufacturers like LG, Samsung or Sony making my primary remote control. They invariably feel cheap, slow and clunky whereas Amazon/Apple and even Roku do a very good job.
I think combined printers and scanners are a much better idea than Smart TVs because (1) you get more benefit (footprint savings) from the combination with all-in-one printer/scanners than with Smart TVs, and (2) IME, printer replacement is desired more often than scanner replacement, and the printer is also the more expensive part; so you lose less by tieing replacement schedules together compared to Smart TVs, where the "brain" is the more frequently replaced part when replaced separately, but the display is the more expensive part.
IF I consider buying a Samsung 'Smart' TV in the future, it better have clear abilities to disable this kind of adserving crap. In any case, I forsee some appropriate rules being added to the house firewall.
Additional thought:
Is there a Web site where you can list products or services you HAVEN'T purchased, giving the value lost to the supplier, and why you didn't buy? Might generate some interesting stats?!
Hmm...'whyididntbuy.com' is on sale for over $2K...where can I document my non-purchase of that!?
How do you make something so brutally garbage, anyway? Some of these TVs take so long to register a button press you have to wonder if they aren't using a 6502 inside to power the thing.
The only experience that's worse is those set-top boxes the cable companies provide you with. The Amiga had near flawless, real-time response and these things refresh at, maybe, a few frames per second.
I don't know about the American market. Over here (France), set-top boxen aren't so bad. And there are regular software upgrade; some of them even include games and apps.
If some of the credential checks are stored in a separate device (dongle, smartcard ), then it could take even longer.
A lot of places won't define performance requirements, as it's not their forethought to do so. They care about functional requirements, and if it meets those, then in their mind, their work is done. I've worked in several places (big names, too), that don't define non-functional stuff until after their beta is shipped and people start complaining.
Amusingly enough, my completely dumb pair of computer monitors (also made by Samsung, but before they started making things "smart") has a 6502-based SoC driving the OSD, and there is no perceptible lag at all.
These "smart" TVs seem to be based on ARM SoCs running at few hundred MHz to 1GHz+ and probably have more processing power than a high-end desktop PC in the mid 2000s.
I think it's all because of the software - tons of bloat.
I don't. For the same reason I don't want all-in-one desktop computers -- the display is both a substantial portion of the expense and the part that gets outdated the slowest. So, I'd rather replace the parts that provide the content to display separately from the display.
I'd rather replace my Chromecast for new functionality than replace my TV.
It is an amazing device for work. In 2 or tree years I will change my computer, but not my screen.
People are buying 4Ks screens today, with quantum dots LCDs and OLED you could display color for which no specification exist yet!!
In one or two years you will have devices that could use the color space.
There is very little content for 4K. No affordable computer is going to display google earth at 4Ks and 60 fps, but in the near future they will appear.
I don't have Netflix to watch on it. I don't share files on the network to stream from it. I don't watch Youttube on it, either through my phone or through the TV's app. I just plug my laptop into the HDMI port, my wife watches cable (most basic package with internet), I maybe play Xbox 360 twice a year. Most of the non-smart features are also useless for me. The standard settings are so good enough for me that I only switch input ports and change the volume.
I get to control how many, what type they are (only for new movies, etc), when. It's nice.
These are ads for other movies. But that I'm watching a movie sort of indicates I am interested in watching more movies in the future.
These TVs were supposedly pausing a movie in the middle and rolling a Pepsi commercial. I already know about Pepsi. I do not like it. But assume I did... assume I did like it, how would I ever want to watch a Pepsi commercial?
And this is true of everyone. No one who buys a $1000 Samsung television is ignorant of the existence of Pepsi. And if the ad isn't trying to inform the ignorant of a new product, what exactly are they hoping to accomplish? They're hoping to brainwash us.
That's always unacceptable. But for Samsung to tell people that they no longer own their televisions, that they're no longer allowed to control them, that's bizarre.
The occidental mindset is heavily geared against advertising. If you got free rebate coupons, gifts, etc. as rewards for opting in, would you still refuse it?
I'm trying to say that we don't necessarily see the whole picture, and the article doesn't give hints about the purpose of that "feature".
Yes
Absolutely. I've boxed my tee vee and put it in the garage for months at a time because of advertising.
As opposed to the oriental mindset? Speaking as one, I'll still take no ads, thanks. IMO it's a mistake to look at East Asian cities (and the assault of advertising it presents) as some kind of preference for advertising - in the same way you can't look at LA and come away with the conclusion "wow, people really love being stuck in traffic!".
I think that people from the west tend to see the negative aspect of advertising: people over here think "annoyance" (all the answers to my provocative post were like that — yeah, small sample, not significative), whereas in Asia it seems to me (but I may be wrong) that people see the positive side: the image I have is of people thinking "opportunity of bargain". Maybe I don't understand it. Websites filled with tiny ads, streets covered with neons and shop signs, they might very well pretend. And indeed, they don't have a choice, Like LA people stuck in traffic because there are no other ways, websites are just like that and consumers have to do with it.
Its getting hard to buy something sold as a consumer TV that isn't a "Smart TV", but then, very few people need a TV, per se, these days. If your content comes from electronic devices rather than an antenna, what you really need is a monitor with HDMI ports -- and big, quality monitors are available.
[0] And, even with an antenna, you can get an external tuner.
So instead of hiding costs in contracts, companies now simply takes control of the property they have sold. Same attack vector, same intent as before, and contract law is lagging behind as usually. It is extremely doubtful that this kind of TOS is legal, and without the TOS, Samsung is commercially invading peoples private property. They are not allowed to plant advertisement signs on land they don't own, and a TOS which no one reads or understand should not change that fact.
Built-in speakers? They sound awful and I have an amp. Get rid of them.
Oh, you cropped my 1080P HDTV signal? Well, I've plugged in a computer, so I need you to display the whole frame. Oh, less than half of TVs even let you turn that feature off? Well fuck!
TVs don't need to be anything more than monitors. They can have special features, like 3D, or built-in cameras, but make it something that I can plug into something else.
How Samsung thought they could record private conversations in people's homes and push ads into their private videos without consequence is unbelievable. I will NEVER buy a smart TV.
My TV, when I hit the power button on the remote, takes about 5 seconds to give me any indication that it heard me; I then get another 5 seconds of the LG logo before I get dumped onto whatever input I was last on.
In comparison, when I move my mouse on my computer, my Apple cinema display wakes up almost instantaneously (display), and my AppleTV goes from sleep mode to showing me the last menu I was on in less than a second (processing).
Thus, I expect an Apple television to be on and available to use within moments of my requesting it, and off as soon as I tell it I'm done.
The AppleTV 3rd Gen also maxes out at about 1W of power used[1], which means that there's no reason why the brains of a smart TV shouldn't be able to be on 100% of the time, ready at any moment to power on for incoming content, rather than having my television add 30s to the simple act of showing someone a YouTube video.
That said, Apple make their money by making high-quality, high-margin devices, and not by racing to the bottom of the price structure and selling out customers to make ends meet.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6834/apple-tv-2013-a1469-short...
Written under the deselected "I Agree" checkbox, with no "I disagree" option visible.
This has to be some kind of record. And on a TV that you paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars, not in some spooky shareware download.
agree = iAgree || !iDisagree;
Or Samsung and Yahoo just did not understand each other and this dialog is a collateral damage.
Could someone please touch on the advantages of a smart TV offerings over my setup?
Unfortunately TV manufactures do such a shitty job with the software. Both in terms of quality/performance/usability, and now with privacy issues and injected ads.
Though even then, I'm always going to have devices plugged into my TV. A combination of my PS3 and PC can access any of the content I might want to watch.
Then I got a Chrome cast. Plug and go, no remotes (you use your phone or tablet) the ugly wires are hidden behind the tv.
In practice. Very little.
I'm still waiting for someone to do smart TV right with good software (Hell, just pay a couple of the XBMC devs to port the latest version to your TV) and an open platform with support for third party and DIY software.
Netflix works perfectly, and I really can't complain about it. The interface is very user friendly and it is very responsive. I guess it's pretty much the same as you get on an Apple TV or Amazon whatever-its-called box, but it's nice to have it built in.
YouTube works pretty well. It's sometimes a bit slow to skip to the next video, but being able to use my phone or laptop as a remote to queue up content is pretty nice.
iPlayer is pretty hopeless. If I play a SD video it plays in the wrong aspect ratio, and HD video just keeps buffering (Netflix 720p is fine though...). The interface is nice though.
DLNA started off well, the browser is pretty basic but even over wifi I was able to stream 1080p which was impressive. Then some videos I tried just crashed the player randomly after 10 minutes, so I gave up on that.
I've now got a Raspberry Pi with XBMC/Kodi running. It's a bit slow (seems to be inefficiencies of the software, as even idle in the menu it uses 80% of the CPU), but 1080p movies play back fine even over wifi. I use that in place of the DLNA on my TV and use get_iplayer to fix that. They both support HDMI CEC which means I can use just the TV remote to control the Raspberry Pi without any addons.
There are a few other things I should mention too:
The whole interface of the TV is HTML and Javascript (it runs Opera 9 under the hood) and it isn't very optimised. This means even simple things such as pressing the 'Source' button to view the source list (you can't just press it to switch, you need to press this then select the new source from the menu) takes 30 seconds to load.
I specifically bought this TV and an amplifier (both Philips) that support HDMI ARC, this means that audio can be sent from the TV (or peripherals) to the amplifier via just the HDMI cable. When it works it works great, but most of the time for whatever reason it just doesn't. I ended up buying a $3 optical S/PDIF cable from eBay which works as expected (i.e. it just works) and achieves the same end goal. If I'd known it would have been this flakey, I would have just gone that route in the first place and I could have got a cheaper amplifier.
The TV also has Skype built in, and an optional camera for $100. I'm glad I didn't buy that at the same time as the TV...
So what's the purpose of a smart TV? I have no idea. I would prefer a 'dumb' TV, but it seems pretty much everything is a smart TV now.
Edit:
I also looked into building my own interface for it. The 'Smart TV' home screen has ads on it loaded over HTTP, so I setup my router to sent that traffic to my own server and served up a JavaScript redirect. It worked well, but I never got around to taking it further. According to the spec [0] the TV supports 1080p60 x264 at 25 Mbit/s.
[0] http://www.yourappontv.com/documentation/smart-tv-versions-s... (free signup required)
Is that an exaggeration? 30 seconds is far beyond what I would consider unusable, and a TV which takes that long to switch between sources would be quickly returned.
The next time I buy a TV, I'll try out the Source selection in a showroom first.
Making me wait when I didn't have to before isn't acceptable. I don't have to wait with my "dumb" TV. I don't have to wait with my non-infotainment car radio. Whatever benefits you think your new product has, introducing load times makes it instantly unacceptable to me.
But yeah, I'll never own a car with a TV screen in the dash. I'll stick to the used market if I have to. I've heard some manufacturers are sticking a small screen in the rear view mirror using some see-through mirror trick. That seems like a much better solution than what they did to the Miata.
Edit: Actually do you have some links to that criticism? Is it in the press? I'm super interested in the new Miata, but the screen really is a deal killer and I wonder if enough negative press would cause them to reconsider or change it for future years.
It's not really the idea of the infotainment system that's the problem, it's the implementation. As you said, the rear view mirror would have been better received by those who understand back up cameras will be mandated but still don't want a big "iPad" on the dash. As for Mazda's infotainment system - I believe it's the same system as used on the Mazda 3 and 6 so you can look reviews on those vehicles.
I see an opening for a 'TV Smartify' business selling customized Rasberry Pi's (or some equivalent) that you attach to your TV, plug in with HDMI/power/network, and go. Include a custom OS ready to go, a HDMI cable, wireless Keyboard/Mouse, customer case, and a power supply and sell it upmarked as a convenience (since the target market would be those who wouldn't even know what a Rasberry Pi was).
Because it's zero config beyond entering your account information. For a commercial product not intended for the HN crowd, that's a big deal.
I see an opening for a 'TV Smartify' business
So does Amazon, Roku, etc., etc.
https://github.com/blissland/blissflixx
You'll be able stream BBC iPlayer (as well as lots of other stuff) directly to your TV instead of having to download using get_iplayer. Nobody but me uses it yet so be prepared to find some bugs - but it should be fairly usable.
In many cases, you can get a similar display separately, branded as a "Monitor" or "Commercial Display" or something similar, with HDMI inputs, etc., but no TV tuner and no smart features.
If you are using locally-stored media, internet sources and/or a cable box as your content sources, you probably don't need a TV tuner built into your display any more than you need "Smart" features built into it.
Advertisements during your locally stored content, possibly for whatever the hell it is that they are smoking at Samsung.
[1] http://homonculus.net/2015/01/27/so_i_may_have_to_buy_a_new_...
And if more people start avoiding Smart TVs because of the unreliability, unwanted behavior, and privacy issues -- it won't make sense for manufacturers to keep pushing them.
They replaced the 32" with a Vizio which has a terrible wifi adapter causing all videos to continuously buffer. I got fed up and installed a Chromecast. The Chromecast of course works fine, but it's much more difficult for older, non-tech people to use than a large "Smart" button on the TV remote.
Smart TVs are awesome, we just need open source firmware for them in the same way that we have DDWRT/OpenWRT, XBMC and such.
Imagine the control scheme using a wiimote-style pointer, built-in webcam, quad core CPU and an API to give you access to your viewing habits, or interface with other smart devices around your home.
Right now, I turn on my ps4 and the channel doesn't change automatically and turn on game mode, why? I have a smart TV, it should know exactly what I want to do.
I do still think this is a bug, and not intended by Samsung. My tv doesn't seem to be affected by it.
In which case, we could have the same regular updates you get with a roku.
The navigation on your phone is probably better than the one in your car right now, but when Apple or Google take over the car system market you will have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in modern cars that have high quality software with fast update cycles. There is no reason why the same thing won't happen with TVs. In fact as mpeg, stated if you assume the firmware in your next Smart TV is open, it will be possible to run customer operating systems such as Android or XMBC giving you complete control without the external box or wires.
Edit: Though what you say about hardware refreshes is absolutely right.
The best compromise would be car-as-peripheral; have all the buttons map to a USB HID device connected to a flush-fit tablet dock. Just remember not to bridge the UI directly to the same CAN bus as the fly-by-wire throttle.
I have a 2300 pound, 2014 model year, gasoline powered bluetooth speaker, exactly as you suggest. In the showroom they had a "smart nav smart entertainment system" upgrade for only $1200 that was as much of a turd as the typical smart TV. Its hard to buy a dumb-stereo for a car that doesn't have BT pairing today.
Mostly I stream podcasts and audiobooks from my phone. Hit play on the phone, put the transmission in drive, thats my commute.
Yes, it does. When it comes bundled with another product, it'll be proprietary. Companies just don't bundle products to increase your freedom or their competitors power.
That said, the apps on my TV are surprisingly serviceable. I can even stream video files directly to it (though an Apple TV does this with better reliability and video quality).
The only unforgivable failure is that it doesn't have a Twitch app, but neither does the Apple TV, XBox One, PS4 (it doesn't count if I can only watch PS4 games being streamed), or Wii U.
In 2 years it will be several more orders of magnitude worse than whatever new peripheral I have attached to my tvs, and they will have stopped updating the software on your tv because the hardware can't handle their little tv OS.
I'm not a fan of TV/PC combos either. The PC side will be outdated before the screen.
(I put the PC in place after a series of set-top-box/PVRs from BT which came with the "BT Vision" service. That suffered from adverse updates that gradually made the interface infuriatingly slow.)
TVs really ought to pick up on HDMI activation/deactivation. I suspect the reason they don't is that it works 99% of the time but there are broken devices which would steal focus.
I strongly suspect many/most "smart" TVs are running linux. (My fairly ancient DVD+VCR player runs VxWorks.)
They are large, monolithic, proprietary, closed swiss-army knives. Hackers (by and large) like small, open, single purpose tools that they can combine however they like, in new ways not expected.
I emphatically disagree. "Smart TVs" are recognized as a bad idea, and as such are shunned. It would be disappointing _to me_ if this hacker community didn't think about whether or not new tech was appropriate, and just immediately accepted it as a great new shiny.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Mine does.
There's a really crappy HDMI protocol extension called HDMI-CEC (for Consumer Electronics Control). It allows for precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, because it was designed by committee, it's apparently not very good, and it's hard to actually get a setup that works with it properly. Notably, any kind of receiver in between your device and your TV usually causes it to not actually work, or for only parts of it to work (commonly, the receiver allows for power-on but blocks remote control).
In my case, I have my PS4 plugged directly onto a Panasonic TV. When I turn on my PS4, the TV turns on automatically and switches to the right input. And similarly, if I turn my TV on when it's on my PS4 input, or if I switch to the PS4 input after turning it on, the PS4 automatically turns on. Curiously, turning the PS4 off does not turn off the TV. Admittedly, this behavior can be annoying, because if I turn off my TV while it's set to the PS4 input (which is maybe 75% of the time), I can't turn it on again without the PS4 immediately booting up, even if I wanted to switch to another input. What I wish I could do is have the TV turn on automatically & switch inputs when turning on the PS4, but not the other way around. Another thing this feature does is let my TV remote control my PS4; for example, I can use the arrow buttons on my TV remote to navigate around the PS4 home screen. This is potentially useful for watching movies, although I haven't ever actually experimented with it.
Note that getting this to work requires turning on some settings that are ordinarily disabled. I didn't even know the PS4 had this capability until I started googling for what one of the disabled settings meant. Somewhere in PS4's settings there's an off-by-default setting called "Enable HDMI Device Link". Turn this on. Then check your TV settings for something similar. On my Panasonic there were two settings "VIERA Link" and "Power on Link" which needed to be on for this functionality. On Sony TV's it's probably called "Bravia Sync".
Here's a Polygon article with some more info: http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/21/5126628/ps4-remote-control...
A TV without the annoying apps, added commercials, and privacy issues is a smarter choice. Stop calling them dumb TVs. They're "Smarter TVs".
I suppose you could always buy the smart version and just don't enable/use it
Doesn't seem to really be hurting them at all, but it is certainly hurting consumers that linux is being used to abuse peoples rights.
If I buy a TV with a quad core processor in it, there is no reason I should not, if I so choose (and potentially void warranty) that I shouldn't be able to install whatever I want to on that. The only technical limitations to rooting a Samsung smart tv are artificially placed there by Samesung, and with recent updates they made it so trying to root can brick your TV!
I would love to buy a completely FOSS smart tv, but it infuriates me to know I have linux but can't do anything with it on mine.
Contrary to popular opinion, I'm increasingly convinced that RMS was just a man ahead of his time and the principles of the GPL are more important than ever to uphold.
For any curious this is the page that details what they need for such a report. I will be doing this sometime this week and sending all of it to them.
It puts the HDMI input on the screen or else it gets the hose again.
And that convenient opt out is only 5,000 clicks through a maze of twisty passages away.
I'd bet the pop-up confirmation box on the opt-out has a Pepsi ad on it.
They should only be between shows or when using the guide or menus, though.
I have disabled adblocker on facebook so that I can laugh at their stupid ads for bad products but the day a really good offer turns up I will totally be willing to click it. The reasons ads have gotten such a bad reputation is that most marketing agencies are more interested in having sex and playing golf than making better ads (told to me by actual marketing people) I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook would make at least twice their current revenue if they tried to optimize how companies targeted ads rather than chasing 0.1% conversion optimizing.
In-game advertising is already a ~$1bn/year thing, and this seems a logical extension of that. Imagine if your TV could insert ads depending on exactly what you were watching, based on your specific habits--it's an ad company's wet dream. Coca Cola wouldn't have to spend the time figuring out which programs to advertise to, they could target specific customers without having to go to a second-order of research (who do we want to advertise to, and where are they?). That second step is completely cut out.
I hate it, but I could definitely see a trend in this direction. Isn't this essentially exactly what Google Glass is about? If Google can figure out exactly what you're looking at, exactly where you are and draw conclusions from that data, they have extraordinarily valuable information for advertisers.
I would buy an Apple TV (a television screen, not the box) in a second - at least Apple (and Google) understand how to design an user interface. A simple remote like the second generation iPod touch wheel would be enough. Or a dumb TV, but they are already hard to find - and then you have to use at least two remotes with dozens buttons as well.
I prefer LCD over DLP because they degrade more gracefully.
http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.Projec... may help with lamp life if you end up with something pre-LED.
Do what I do: buy the TV for the nice screen and get a Roku 3. Your life will get easier.
Yes, though for many uses you may be better off with just getting a projector and an appropriate projection surface if you want 70in+ display.
Are the "smart" tee vee makers counting on a stream of ad revenue? Or having crapware/shovelware on it like mass market PCs?
For example - you don't like 16:9 monitor. Tough luck, you need to look at monitor produced for image professional to find something else ( well last time I looked for a monitor, which was some time ago ) Another one: in the middle of the camera pixel race, there were sweet spot models that just go replaced the year after and would end up on EBay for more than their original price.
So, all TV from cheap to expensive will become "smart". If you want a non-smart one will probably need to look at TV made for niche sectors, for a premium.
Second, what's the big deal? If it only takes 15-30 minutes for an ad to appear, simply return the TV the first time it displays one. I could understand the outrage if the TV waited until after the return period had expired before doing this, but this doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Return it and blog about your experience, naming and shaming the manufacturer, and share your experience with your friends and family as well so they can avoid the same mistake.
Shame on you Samsung for thinking it would ever be appropriate to insert advertisements into the consumer's own content.
Edit: As an afterthought, I wonder how the TV behaves if it can't access the Internet to download said Ads. Anyone with experience able to speak to this?
I'd say if someone is savvy enough to know they don't want a "smart" TV, they will know where to look for a good deal.
http://smile.amazon.com/Upstar-P55EWX-55-Inch-Definition-Wid...
That's at the budget end of the spectrum, but there are non-"smart" 4K TVs among the better brands as well. This site has reviews of several low to high-end 4K TVs:
http://www.whathifi.com/products/tvs/4k-tvs
Or, you could get a 4K computer monitor, and an HDMI splitter to port the sound over to your surround system. There are always options.
The salesperson conned my MiL into buying a smart TV, and/or it was the only one available. She doesn't have internet, she's just not into it.
I could imagine a TV refusing to operate until its connected to the internet to upload your viewing habits and download new ads... but the smart TVs from a year or two ago were not that aggressive.
I would never connect one to my LAN. How can I know its security holes and upgrades and issues, how do I unbrick it once it inevitably gets owned, how do I virus scan or otherwise clean it up, its just too difficult and complicated compared to my simpler system. As long as they still operate without ever having a wifi connection, I'll be OK.
Edited to add, "the tv asked for my wifi password so I told it, what could possibly go wrong?" is going to be the next decades "someone on the internet asked me for my bank account number so I told him, what could possibly go wrong?" Right up there with browser toolbar installers.
(Tangentially, does anyone else remember the awfulness of early 2000s WebTV? Mostly expressed through badly formatted usenet posts)
we need to go dumb-everything: phone, tv, computer, car..
And yet cable exists.
Pay $30+/month to watch 15 minutes of commercials an hour.