Smart TVs were created for all kinds of agendas but none were actually for us the consumers. All those agendas require an OS which takes time to boot. Making it worse, some of those TVs' CPU are crap and thus every operation takes much longer than those dumb ones. Lots of vendors also start to ship new remotes that removed all the essential buttons, especially the video source button, and I have to press 5 or more times than before just to switch to a different source.
So we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less. But it does not end there. Vendors put lots of Ads in them, some vendors even put boot-up Ads regardless it is connected to internet or not. The worst I guess was mentioned in a couple of day ago some rouge vendor even started to put customized Ads based programs we are watching on air.
I guess my replacement for a TV would be a big monitor.
It sounds like you are out of touch with the average consumer. They absolutely love smart TVs and would consider a TV without apps and streaming to be broken.
In fact, even the ideal HN approved setup is just a smart TV where the online bit is a removable stick on the back. The average consumer just doesn’t care about being able to swap it out.
Yeah, they love also facebook, which monetize all their private life or sugary food, which alter your diet balance or cigarettes who can literally kill you. Not to mention all of them are addictive.
The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing.
It does explain why smart TVs would be easy to buy and dumb TVs difficult to buy.
For example, I do not care if a TV is smart or dumb. All I care is how quickly it turns on because I am connecting it to an Apple TV anyway. Even as a person who would rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV, my actions continue to support smart TV manufacturers because I am not willing to spend the time and effort required to seek out dumb TVs, since I have already found an acceptable solution.
I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV.
Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive advantage in a razor thin profit margin business, which does not seem likely.
Would be interesting to know why consumers want smart TVs so much.
Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick.
So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this but don't understand why fiddling with two devices would be preferable to having one device where everything is built-in.
So far that's a reasonable stance, I believe - especially if you don't know all the tracking smart TV vendors already have done. This might change though if ads and other overtly user-hostile features are rolled out more widely.
Personally, I'm really into cable management and hate clutter. Having one less external device to plug in helps with that. It's not like a Roku or Apple TV or Fire Stick can't track you and show ads in all the same ways a Smart TV can, so it's hard for me to see the downside. Since you have to login to most of these services anyway, even if you're watching Netflix on a Linux laptop, they're still tracking you. I guess at least Samsung isn't tracking you on top of Netflix if you're just watching on a dumb monitor, but frankly, the way to handle that should be, if market-based, Smart TV providers that don't do content recognition and interest-based advertising, and if that doesn't work, legal regulation that bans abusive practices. We shouldn't be stuck with 80s technology forever because devices with integrated computers will inevitably be used for spying.
Consumers want to be able to just plug in their TV and press the Netflix button, nothing wrong with that.
Even after spending tens of thousands on home theatre equipment I struggle to understand why I should want to use some kind of stick to watch netflix from.
Why would you want a TV to be needlessly tied to an online service that can be turned off tomorrow? When Netflix stops providing its streaming service (or makes breaking changes to its API) a TV with Netflix support integrated now is wasting compute, menu space, physical buttons on remotes, etc. on a dead service. I would expect just about every TV to outlast Netflix unless it's treated poorly.
Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically,
sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they
had an option for dumb
This is one of those areas where consumerism/capitalism trips over itself and leads to sub-optimal outcomes.
The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for.
But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending choices) only leads to optimal outcomes when the "voters" are sufficently knowledgeable in terms of both general domain knowledge and the choices themselves.
For all but the simplest choices (say, a choice between a bucket with a hole in the bottom and a bucket without a hole in the bottom) this is difficult.
There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV.
I wonder what sort of reaction you have when a successful, legally approved medicine turns out to cause death or injury in the long run, or merely proves to be ineffective. Or when a specific model of car develops problems after a couple of years.
Do you say, "well... this is clearly what consumers voted for?"
> There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV.
Maybe, but it has been a decade since smart TVs became prevalent, and I would bet everything I have that if you put a dumb TV for sale next to a smart TV in Costco, no matter how shitty the software on the smart TV is, the smart TV will be chosen enough times that the dumb TV maker goes out of business.
This is not about what should the consumer do. This is about what the consumer will do. And they will choose to pay $30 less in exchange for giving all their viewing data to the TV manufacturer. Try to educate them otherwise, I doubt it will be successful.
There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever.
Right. Capitalism often leads to suboptimal outcomes (everybody owns a TV somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "downright terrible") because there's no reasonable way to know better, so consumers choose based on the one thing everybody understands: price.
There is also more data out there than ever
before in history about TVs, but I doubt most
people would ever care enough to read in depth
reviews on rtings or whatever.
You can read all of the reviews you like, but the conclusion is the same: you effectively cannot buy a non-smart TV now.
There's also the larger issue of whether it's reasonable for consumers to do so. Educated, informed consumers are always the goal, but at some point this is not reasonable.
1. Consumers can't be experts on everything. Cars, prescription eyeglasses, medicine, home repairs, computers, shoes - there are simply not enough hours in one's life to become a domain expert at everything.
2. A lot of people are, frankly, not the brightest. As the saying goes, half of the people in the world are below average. I don't mean this insultingly, in fact: quite the opposite. Human beings are human beings. We are all worthy of dignity and respect. But being an uber-savvy consumer is less practical for some.
Akerlof's paper shows how prices can determine the quality of goods traded on the market. Low prices drive away sellers of high-quality goods, leaving only lemons behind. In 2001, Akerlof, along with Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz, jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for their research on issues related to asymmetric information.
> There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV.
You read a few TV reviews, see that LG OLEDs have been the best choice for many years. Hard to get this wrong.
They do. But the thing is that they work for the TV vendors instead of consumers and also if all vendors are moving to the same direction, there is virtually no choice for consumers.
There is no choice because there is insufficient profit. In an industry with tiny profit margins, if there was margin to be had, surely someone would jump on it.
The free market doesn't always evolve to meet consumer demand, especially when the demand is low.
Back before the turn of the century, Micropose released Falcon 4.0, arguably one of the best military flight sims. It was complex, had good graphics for the day, had a vibrant community of users, a vibrant aftermarket equipment ecosystem (HOTAS, foot pedals etc). I love playing it, and couldn't wait until better and better computers came out that could make the graphics photorealistic. I also played EF2000 which let you fly the Eurofighter. Same game idea, a bit less accurate, and a bit more user friendly.
Fast forward two decades and the military flightsim field is basically dead. People will tell you to try MS Flight Sim, but that's definitely not the same.
Why did this happen? Might have been dotcom fallout; might have been just a small niche application field. Who knows? The market moved on and now it's a wasteland. Perhaps VR will revive it since it would add a great deal of situational awareness.
In the end, just because a small group wants something (like dumb TVs or Milsims) doesn't mean that companies will fill the niche.
- MostApple users want larger screens, which means larger phones; or
- Small Apple phones are not small enough, so there's no point.
About the second point, that's where I am. I've been looking forward to a USB-C iPhone Mini. That was until I actually tried to use a Mini. It's smaller than the regular size iPhone, but still very hard to use single-hand as I have small hands. I want something the size of the iPhone 5. The Mini is just not small enough to make the small screen worth it.
A good rule of thumb is that it hacker news claims there is a huge unserved market for some product, there is almost certainly no real demand for it outside of this website.
I’m not sure I have actually ever seen an iPhone mini in the wild. It seems to be almost evenly split between the pro and the pro max.
> But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not?
Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.
How much of a conclusion can we draw from that market period, though?
"Smart" sets tended to move from the top of the market downward. This meant that if I wanted a "non-smart" set in a given size, it was likely to be the lower-end product-- often with fewer inputs, a lower-grade panel, or from a firm with an inferior reputation for quality.
This makes it difficult to de-conflate if people were buying a smart TV because they wanted the smart features, or the panel/connectivity/brand reputation.
Smart TVs pretty much completely displaced dumb TVs in the consumer market long before it occurred to anyone to use them for ads or surveillance.
The correct explanation is probably that since modern TVs are inherently digital devices the most sensible way to implement them is as computers running TV software, and once you are building your TV that way the only difference between a dumb TV and a smart TV is the software.
If you let them get away with it, then you will never get a TV work as it should. My next TV would be a dumb one, if I cannot get it, then I'll go for a big monitor instead.
> The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing.
It does make it a good thing for them. Which begs the question: why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist.
> they love also facebook
Ah, yes. The old "facebook is as bad as cigarettes" trope. It feels a lot like the claims around TV in the 70s and 80s. "It's rotting people's brains!" But society kept on chugging. It is one thing to object to Facebook's business model. It is another entirely to deem it "Bad For You". Billions of people like using the product and it hasn't hurt their lives. In fact, it has improved them.
But something is seriously wrong with a society where it's impossible to avoid a thing that you consider harmful to yourself just because the larger market prefers it.
It used to be that one of the strengths of our economic system was that you could find something to meet your needs even if your needs weren't the same as the majority.
How is it impossible to avoid smart TVs? I don’t own a TV at all, I just use my desktop monitor. And then there are a bunch of examples in this thread about commercial displays.
It’s not impossible to not own a smart TV, it’s just the mass market caters to what the vast majority want. Outside of hacker news, no one considers smart TVs harmful.
I consider cars harmful and yet hacker news gets up in arms when I propose banning them from cities.
I don't know that this has ever really been the case. Particularly with mature product categories. And most especially for product categories with high barriers to entry in the form of large capital requirements. It was one thing to be able to go to the local candy shop for a chocolate bar if you didn't want a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but something else if you wanted a television set.
Are you thinking of an example where that once was true but has changed? I'm open to examples but can't myself think of any that are analogous.
This ignores that companies pour billions into advertising, fake research and lobbying to influence consumer behavior.
It also ignores network effects and lack of choice: if all your friends are in Facebook and there isn't a viable alternative to socialize, you don't have much of a choice, besides being left out (which may not be such a bad option but may also make you miss valuable socialization).
why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist.
Is that the same as bad? What is this zealotry against paternalism and elitism? Perhaps you could focus more on outcomes than some social engineering crusade you have, deciding that certain philosophies are automatically "bad".
> It does make it a good thing for them. Which begs the question: why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist.
I'm not clear on what your argument is here. Are you:
* denying that there is a fact of the matter about whether, for any item X, X is beneficial or harmful?
* asserting that something's being beneficial or harmful has no meaning apart from signifying present-day user preference?
* merely asserting that users fairly reliably tend to prefer what is good for them, and avoid what is bad for them?
> Billions of people like using the product and it hasn't hurt their lives. In fact, it has improved them.
It sounds like you are making a case here that Facebook is beneficial because it improves the lives of its users—am I understanding that correctly?
> I don't believe Facebook or TV are equivalent to cocaine.
Exactly. You were making a broad claim that it is "paternalistic and elitist" to decide what is "good for you" vs "bad for you". If it is paternalistic and elitist in some cases, but appropriate in others, then don't we need a way to figure out what side of that line various things fall on?
> In what way do your arguments not also apply to cocaine?
This is the comment to which I was responding. As I see it, there are two premises here which both have to be accepted (i.e. it is an "AND" not an "OR"):
1) Facebook/TV is analogous to cocaine
2) Cocaine is bad for you
If I reject that Facebook/TV is analogous to cocaine, I reject the entire thing. I was not making a broad claim about people's autonomy vs. paternalism. I was making a narrow claim in relation to two (at worst) benign things: smart TVs and Facebook.
Monetizing my private life is nowhere near in the same category as killing me, unless you believe in some philosophy where privacy is as important as life.
Making an algorithm to addict me is arguably pretty evil though.
I think many people just buy the biggest, cheapest thing they can. "Smart" is one of those scams that works because it doesn't enter into the calculus for most when making a product choice, so they get to slip it in. There was an article about the same thing recently with smart builder appliances in new homes.
My point is, I don't think many love them, I think they don't notice until it's too late and then they don't think about it too hard and just figure that's how the tv works.
(And I don't think what characterizes a smart tv is just the option of apps and streaming. This could be fine if done in an actual consumer friendly way. It's the other crap an upstream comment mentions)
Yep, most people have no idea the implications of Smart TV. I knew it but I had no many choices and actually I got totally disgusted by the practices of those vendors.
It really has not much to do with demand but rather than getting more money from the consumers other than selling the TV hardware alone.
Oh well, I'm not sure how do you define average consumer. I don't really watch TV but I do have to deal with TVs for other members in the family. Put all those Ads/tracking/slowness issues aside, the quality of the Smart TV OSes/Apps were/are just bad. We had a Sony, which was good in most of the aspects except the OS/Apps were terrible. Had to factory reset a couple of weeks or so or the apps would not launch at all and all of a sudden, apps would not function properly even after resetting. So we used it with a android TV box, which was actually much batter. Not long after switching to TV box, kids cracked the screen. So I got a Samsung hoping it would be better. Samsung's apps seem to be slightly better than Sony but the remote is a pain the neck. The first thing was the remote removed most the buttons, especially the video source button. So I have to press 5/6 times just to get to the sources. If I pressed buttons too quick, add another 2/3 presses to it. And after switching, the menu bar does not go away I have to press another button just to get it out of the screen. Since I have multiple HDMI devices connected to the TV, Samsung was trying to be smart by turning on one of the devices automatically. That was extremely dumb as most of the time I was just trying to get to the one after it and it turned on the device unexpectedly. Okay, I turned off the device unexpected turned on, you guess what, the TV is turned off as the current video source was now off. So I have to turn of the CEC over HDMI and then I'll have to use multiple remotes to control different devices. If it was dumb TV with a traditional full size remote, it can be much easier.
"The first thing was the remote removed most the buttons, especially the video source button"
This is not a defense of Samsung, but something you can try if you're stuck with it: While the Samsung remotes have slimmed down quite a bit, at least on my TV it still responds to the buttons the old more fully-sized remote controls had. If you get a universal remote and program it for Samsung TVs, you may find you get a lot of the functionality back that your remote is missing.
I can't speak for every year's TV; mine's a few years old now. But you may already have a universal remote just lying around, in which case this is really cheap to try.
But consumers would buy dumb TVs with dongles if that’s what they made. We used to buy digital set top boxes. Antennas. VCRs. DVD players.
Manufacturers definitely jumped on the chance to add software and an internet connection to TVs. Why sell a product once, when you can do that and then sell your customers to ad agencies?
In the days of VCRs, they sold tvs with those built in too! An obvious convenience until the VCR part broke, which anything with mechanical components will eventually.
They had TVs with built in DVD players too. But I don't recall those ever supplanting the separate devices. I can see why you might want to combined devices. You can reduce clutter and simplify cable management. TVs with built in digital TV receivers make sense. I like monitors with built in USB hubs so I can use different computers with the same monitor by just swapping the HDMI and USB cables.
But they saw the vertical integration possibilities and took advantage of it here. I'm not sure you are even getting a hardware discount to view those ads.
My mother bought a house in which the oven and the microwave were, for some inconceivable reason, one piece. We all hate and despise the microwave. But we can't get rid of it, because it's part of the oven.
I can't understand what anyone involved in the production of this monstrosity was thinking. It's a gigantic failure at the level of product design, product manufacturing, and house furnishing.
There is not even any "convenience" aspect to attaching your oven to a microwave.
No they wouldn’t because those would cost more. Connie Consumer is looking at two TVs and buying the less expensive one (that is the right size) most of the time.
> It sounds like you are out of touch with the average consumer. They absolutely love smart TVs and would consider a TV without apps and streaming to be broken.
The gp never said anything about what consumers want, it's talking about the motives behind development direction. Features are not added because consumers ask for them: demand comes later.
I hear this "oh but we're so smart, remember how many regular people there are!" thing often on HN. I'm reasonably sure the person you are imagining is not average, they are sometimes called the lowest common denominator. Even my old highschool friend who delivers pizzas hates smart TVs and can tell good UX from bad. My other one, and his wife, both non-technical computer haters in non-tech fields, have covered this topic and said they miss when things weren't so "smart", and would rather be in charge of buying a playstation/Roku/whatever to control their TV.
Big businesses chronically underestimate consumers, don't try to teach them anything, and don't give them options for fear of confusing them. They forget everyone who works for them and their partners or makes the things they consume are also the consumers they abuse.
The average consumer is no more a fan of privacy invading TVs than they are fans of ads which they watch a lot of nor the shopping channel which they always end up subscribing to.
You're mistaking TV producers' desire to capture more of the market pie and invade our privacy with actual consumer demand.
I don't think I'm an "average" customer at all(but then, maybe no one does), and I would hate to own a dumb TV. We have an LG CX with all the apps built in, it's super convenient to have everything just built in right into the TV, to be able to control all of it with just one remote, to be able to cast directly to the TV from pretty much all of my devices. The TV and the apps start up pretty much instantly too, I have no issues with the responsiveness of the entire system.
Yes I am aware some "smart" TVs are incredibly bad(I wouldn't buy a Samsung having read the reviews of many different models) but yeah, having a dumb TV+ extra devices just to stream to seems like a hassle.
> just a smart TV where the online bit is a removable stick on the back
You're absolutely right. And I've personally capitulate to this reality...
The way that I see it is that there is really no way around this problem except through disconnected-media, over-the-air or homebrew/hacker/open-source solutions. None of these completely satisfy my media cravings.
So however foolish it may be, I still go with the "stick on the back" approach despite their appetite for all my information, because I still trust Apple, Google, Amazon... WAY more than all of these mysterious IPs pointing back to somewhere in Shenzhen.
Yeah all of this could be solved as far as I'm concerned by just selling the TV with a bundled smart stick, a built in USB supply on the back for it, and a port angled so it would still be thin.
What would I do with a dumb TV without apps? Only watch broadcast TV? Drag my laptop in? Pay as much as the TV itself for a media center PC that probably won't be as reliable and snappy ad Android?
This is exactly what we did. Our ‘television’ was never hooked up to actually receive broadcast signal, we’ve always just used it as a big screen for the media/gaming PC set up in the lounge, and at some point I realised if I’m going to spend my evenings staring at Good Screen I might as well upgrade from this 40” 1080p TV with a dead pixel row.
So I looked around and eventually bought a Philips 559M1 55” monitor instead. The price difference compared to an actual TV is a little tough to swallow (~£1,200 vs £?00), but the size, the resolution, and the overall picture / sound quality upgrade is very nice. The HDR leaves a lot to be desired but that’s probably inevitable when getting an LCD panel instead of OLED (which was not considered because of the likelihood of burn-in).
Worth it? Eh… maybe. When compared against the available market for “TV-sized monitor” or upgrading from 1080p, absolutely. But if you’re coming over from an equivalent-sized OLED TV, you’ll be paying a hefty amount for a visual downgrade, just to escape the ‘smart’ features.
Monitors are now starting to go smart. Not just the Apple one.
And you no longer always have the option to prevent a net connection unless you live in a faraday cage.
The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.
I doubt that will happen. The people that even know or care at all are few, and even fewer of those vocal.
I recently watched a review for one of Samsung's new monitors and it turns out you don't even need to connect it to any source.
I don't just mean media sources like Netflix, Amazon, TV, etc... You can literally connect to MS Office and perform trivial desktop activities on it once you connect a mouse and keyboard.
All of this at a pretty compelling price even if you take all of this bloat out of the equation.
> The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.
And really, if one of the manufactures is doing this, they all have to... There will be no way to compete with those that are able to lower the cost of their product by subsidizing it through these agents. The average consumer isn't savvy enough to understand this difference and chose the "better" product.
Kicker is, I don't even necessarily mind that as far as it goes.
As time goes on it's just sort of inevitable that more and more functions get performed by little computers instead of hardcoded electronics.
There is some engineering argument against that. It makes systems more complex and thus less robust and generally less performant.
It's just that it also makes them more flexible and in some ways makes the hardware simpler even though a cpu is more complex than a few diodes. It's simpler once a cpu is taken as a black box unit where the complex magic is all hidden inside, and it's cost to design and produce is amortized to nothing by economy of scale. And it allows for potential better perfmance through tuning that isn't available in a fixed system.
So fundamentally as a general rule applied to just any random thing, you can't really say the cpuization of more and more ordinary devices and functions is necessarily a net negative.
What makes it all bad is only who controls all these cpus and what purposes they put them to.
If my freaking tv was open source, fully open including all the special modules for wifi and hdmi and booting etc, I would have no problem at all that my monitor now has a cpu and ram and net connection. Or at least a whole lot less problem.
It's only that "Who is this stuff working for?" that makes it bad.
I wish I could somehow poison the money I pay for the TV with my own agenda against the wishes of the manufacturer and retailer the way they have my tv. So that the money would somehow do my bidding after I gave it to them, just the way the tv does for them after they gave it to me.
This will make you feel better about that 1200 GBP: we're still rocking the 55" 1080p Sony Bravia we bought in 2010 for 2000 EUR.
I am also delighted to hear that a 55" 4K monitor can be had for well under 2000 EUR, and will gladly do that when the Bravia finally bites the dust, because that's the only way we are taking that thing off the wall over the piano!
TVs can show a "compressed or upscaled image", but that doesn't mean it can't show uncompressed full resolution images (ie. HDMI input). In that regard they aren't that different from monitors.
>TV's have much higher latency.
>And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.
This is more due to their firmware containing image processing logic (to improve image quality), than TVs being intrinsically lower quality than computer monitors.
Pretty much this. My TCL 4K HDR TV I bought two years ago for like 400 bucks has Roku in it and... I just ignore it. I use game mode on it and it's hooked up to my M1 Mac Mini all day long. I use Parsec when I'm lazy and use my desktop PC that way on it. Sometimes I'll Parsec the other way around from my PC to the Mac while it's displaying on the TV and there is absolutely zero latency that is perceivable when watching a video and the sound on in both places.
No ads ever bother me. No camera to scan me. It doesn't do anything. Even when I disabled my AD blocker on my router it didn't go ape.
I suspect this is false and the ads and tracking enabled by smart TVs are instrumental in getting the price down.
Price sensitivity on TVs I suspect is one of the main drivers of this.
Still, I think there’s a real niche for someone to make a tv focused on the HN market. Call the company “dumb electronics”. db even has a pleasing symmetry to it for a logo imo. Focus on speed to boot and switch inputs, optionally sell it as a package with an Apple TV, make it premium and OLED. Basically the tv apple would build if they decided too.
The current best option in the tv market is the LG OLED, but it’s smart and still leaves a lot to be desired.
> I suspect this is false and the ads and tracking enabled by smart TVs are instrumental in getting the price down.
They plainly are. They are a gigantic revenue stream for TV manufacturers. There’s a reason that TV prices cratered at the exact same time that they all became “smart”
>we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less
Pretty sure 10 years ago I couldn't buy a 55-inch 4K 120Hz TV for $300. So depends on what you mean "less" as hardware-wise it's certainly the opposite.
We are actually paying less, because all these sponsors and ads pay the manufacturer, which in turn lowers the purchase price. So if you don't use the smart features, it is actually a good deal, and if you do, well it is still a good deal. The one who pay for your discount are those who pay for the advertised services (ex: Netflix) without buying the TV. Probably the best thing to do is to buy a smart TV you can use dumbly (offline).
Big monitors tend to be much more expensive than similarly specced TVs. You may still want it for things like gaming-related features (g-sync, etc...).
If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream. There’s no upside for them to do so.
Even if they sell a third fewer models, the ad revenue way more than makes up for it, and it’s recurring revenue to boot.
> If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream.
Inflation-adjusted, on average, AAA games have slowly decreased in retail price over the years. At the same time, they have become much more expensive to produce. Technology have improved, HD graphics, storage and computing power is now cheap, but creative work is as expensive as ever, if not more. And someone has to make all these assets and feature-film level animation that newer hardware supports and that players now expect from AAA games.
That increase in production costs compared to a relative decrease in retail prices explain a lot of things regarding the AAA game industry: in-game purchases, a general lack of originality (originality is a gamble, and with $100M+ games, investors want guaranteed returns), few consoles exclusives (producers want the largest market possible), lower pay than in other industries,...
This argument gets trotted out every time, and it's not only old, it's clearly wrong.
Why is it wrong? Because AAA games are absurdly profitable, even before microtransactions are brought into play. AAA publishers and studios are making billions, with a 'B', of dollars of profit. That's not the sign of a struggling market that's weighed down by inflation and rising costs of production. That's a sign of an exceptionally healthy industry.
Remember, cost only sets the floor of a product's price. And with a near zero duplication cost, those up-front investments are quickly paid back with no practical upper limit to the sales potential.
For example, CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 cost around $316M (including marketing). It presold, as reported on wikipedia, 8m copies. That means they made their investment back before the game had even released, plus a minimum of $20 profit per each of those 8m pre-orders (remember, $60 is the lowest price paid in a pre-order). And every post-launch sale is pretty much pure profit, thanks to that nearly-free cost of making copies.
Now then, CP2077 had issues which probably ate into the company's profits post-launch... but that initial investment, the one you've pointed out? Paid for the day the game released.
I am not aware of a TV that requires internet access to show a picture, but I haven't looked in a long time. I don't think a TV will try to hack nearby networks, but it is possible that it strongly suggests you to connect to the internet, for example by showing nag screens, locking out essential features, or fixing breaking bugs that should never have been allowed to ship.
What I meant that you can buy a smart TV and take advantage of the lower prices but you should make sure that you can actually use the TV without a network connection (and yes, that it doesn't try to hack your wifi).
If you’re happy with a computer monitor as a tv good for you. I’m spoiled by super large screen 4K Qdot displays. If I really have to choose not to get a smart tv, the simple solution is actually to get a really good projector.
I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. My TCL Roku TV is great and I will be buying another soon. It does everything I want and none of the things I don’t. It’s easy to use for me and for my kids. Roku also has all the major streaming services that I want. And I haven’t seen a commercial in 10 years. What am I missing?
I also own a TCL Roku TV and the interface is easily twice as slow as my Roku Ultra. Right on the home screen is a giant ad(unless you have network adblocking). Over the years Roku and Google have been fighting about Youtube/Youtube TV on Roku, just like Disney/ESPN fought the cable companies.
I also own a Toshiba built FireTV that suffers from those same problems but far worse. Way more ads, much slower interface, and the hilarious part is a hidden power off button in the menus(it's fun trying to turn the TV off without the proper remote).
Don't use the interface? Use it as a dumb monitor right?
I'll go as far as to say that you can't complain about a slow interface of a cheap smart TV if you went out to buy it with the purpose of using it just as a monitor which is what you really should be doing. The smart isn't a value add except for being able to use a remote app on your phone especially if you're a HN frequenter. You gotta have computers lying around that can replace all the "smart".
1) I'm not the sole user of these TVs.
2) If I wanted a "dumb monitor" I would have bought one.
3) When I sit down to watch something, I put my phone away and in a different room so I am not distracted by it, that goes against using the "remote apps".
Granted I have never owned a Roku Ultra but the UI is plenty fast for me. And yes I pay for NextDNS so I don’t see giant ads. I think about it so little that I forget to mention it.
That's my experience with my TCL also. When I get up in the morning I just turn on the Roku TV app on my phone, Go to the remote, turn on the TV, hit right once, then hit okay. Then it's on HDMI 1 and it's displaying my Mac Mini all day. This is a dumb TV. Doesn't do anything except what I tell it to and it just shows what I want.
Obviously you were lucky. My experiences were based on Sony and Samsung, so TCL might be a different story and also different people have different needs.
For me, all I need is really just a instant on big screen with decent speakers, nothing more.
Sure. But as a practical matter, if your plan is to hook it up to a Roku, an Amazon Fire, or an Apple TV, then what does it matter if it’s built in or not.
Besides, buy commercial panels. You’ll pay a premium for your premium needs and get a much more robust device in the process.
It's good to keep in mind that just because a company puts ads in our faces, that does not necessarily imply they are doing it to offset costs. This is true for websites as well as smart TVs.
TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner.
You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway):
Vizio makes (or used to make) those as well. I have one of their 4k 70” without tuner (in the US). It does not suck any less.
Disclaimer: I received it as a “equal replacement” by squaretrade for broken Sharp 70”
Yes, the Rundfunkbeitrag is per household. There are ways to get a reduction, but only because of financial difficulties or a handicap. The devices you own have no effect on the TV tax. It has been so for many years.
Yes, you have to pay the Rundfunkgebühr also if you don't have a TV but your computer has access to the Internet because public broadcasters also have a presence on the Internet.
The functionality is fine. You can turn them on and off. And you probably want to use a soundbar, because of bad speakers. But the panels are just not great. Like all the other TVs in that price range.
Of course both the TV and media player need to be ethernet-over-HDMI enabled as well. And if you want to be able to take advantage of all the latest visual and audio advancements, you'll probably need to use one of the latest cables that comes with ethernet-over-HDMI.
Is it possible to get one of the latest HDMI cables without ethernet? Are there ways to cut ethernet-over-HDMI off at the media device?
I know that there might be things that can be done through the network or at the router (PiHole,etc), but I'm wondering specifically about this gaping hole through HDMI.
(as I type this, I now remember that my router/Orbi can physically block individual devices)
Of course the next big issue will be when the TVs come with their own internet connection. I recall this is already happening with some HiSense TVs that come with 5g. I guess at this point we'll be forced to open these things up and disconnect the antenna.
Generally I recommend factory reset, then hook up to a roku or similar and just use it as a dumb display. If it fails in that configuration return the TV immediately.
Looks like newer TVs only. My Sony X900F doesn't have this option. It's about 3-4 years old now? But I also never updated Android on it (still on Oreo) and I declined all agreements (like Samba).
I liked it, but hated how slow it was compared to my older dumb TV. Pressing a button and waiting for something to happen on the home screen was ridiculous.
After 2 years, I went nuclear and disabled as many apps and background services as I could. Lo and behold, I suddenly had a snappy TV with only the 3 streaming services I need on it.
This is what I continue to want. A TV that can do streaming without additional hardware, and without the insane level of tracking and ads that are so prevalent.
What's frightening is that I can see on my PiHole the huge spike of requests that happens when one of my TVs comes on. Just the standard graph in the front page is enough to see exactly when the kids have turned it on.
Most of the requests are rejected though, maybe someone can say whether that is enough to protect me from corporate surveillance.
That would be illegal. However people here sometimes report that they connect to any nearby open wifi network even if you don’t explicitly connect them to your own.
If they did it sounds like a great way for someone doing something nefarious to get off the hook. Some smart TVs are even able to act as wireless access points.
That sounds illegal and awaiting lawsuit to me, device connecting to unsecured network by itself without my knowledge doing there whoever knows.
Imagine my neighbor has unsecured WiFi network set for himself, I'm pretty sure he could call police on anyone connected to his network abusing his connection just because it's not locked.
By this logic you can steal unlocked car with key in engine or unlocked bike and that's what these TV would be doing.
You would be probably excused if TV done by itself, but it would land the brand lot of negative publicity and you could try to reimburse defense lawyer expenses on them. They would probably argue you agreed with terms of service when first launching TV, so don't do that if you want dumb TV.
> Blocking the MAC address from making connections outright seems like a more sensible way to prevent surveillance.
That won't protect against DNS data exfiltration. Extremely low-bandwidth, but works in a lot of cases - people have even written proxy servers to get slow but working Internet on public hotspots that normally require login.
Simple: most router firewalls only block traffic that has source:<IP of device> and destination:<anything in the Internet>, but traffic from source:<IP of device> to destination:<IP of router, IP range of home network> will be allowed.
That is enough for the device to emit a DNS query like "pbs.12345.metricservice.example.com" to notfiy some tracking service that the device with serial 12345 just switched to a channel labeled "PBS". The router will resolve that name record at the DNS server for metricservice.example.com, which gets the request and logs it away.
How many consumer routers go that length? For most of these, as long as they are on the network, they can communicate over DNS, using the router as "middleman".
I get that light-bulbs need to connect to receive control commands and get firmware updates, but I'm wondering what other things might there be to worry about here?
Collecting usage data, sure...
Amazon Sidewalk has been brought up a couple of times in this thread and it's got me thinking about how others could also bring up similar ambient/background networks that piggyback off your main network.
If this were to happen, then your TVs and other devices wouldn't even need permission to connect to your main network and instead go through one of the many ambient/background networks.
Perhaps there's good reason to only use zwave and zigbee smart devices instead of wifi ones.
It may be enough for that TV, but many devices have a custom-set DNS address and ignore the one given through DHCP, unless you set up a firewall where you block that address, then they fall back to using the one provided via DHCP. That's how Chromecast and Amazon devices are doing it.
This is why I had to set up a MITM to detect and drop DoH/DoT requests. Allowing devices and applications to evade my network management is crazy to me.
Dude, no joke. My TCL Roku TV is the nosiest device on my whole network, second to maybe my work laptop.
The difference though, is that TV is sitting in our bedroom mostly dormant, since my wife watches it maybe 1-4 times a week while she's getting ready for work.
I assume that these are as good as or better than most people have in their homes (esp. with Vizio), but probably not as good as what home theater enthusiasts might want.
That TV is still smart by my standards. It runs Tizen, features something called "Samsung Workplace" (which "supports wireless cloud service access"), and has WiFi (whether or not this WiFi connection can be used by Samsung to update the OS is not specified, but I would think it is likely).
This probably means it tries to do the “device detection” when you switch inputs or plug in a new device. Tbh this is the worst feature for me, it’s exceptionally hard to get rid of even with access to the factory menu. I can blackhole my TV all day on the network, but this problem is persistent.
Also as a note, it’s become increasingly difficult to root TVs. Even getting firmware can be a chore, and forget getting anything other than a bootlog over RS232.
I think the digital signage ones are overkill for what a consumer needs because they’re meant to be left on for long periods of time. Maybe that makes them more expensive?
Agreed. My TV went out 3 days before the Super Bowl. Within an hour of it going out I jumped on Amazon and easily ordered a dumb TV that was delivered before the Super Bowl.
Amazon had many options with varying levels of dumbness. I ordered a Sceptre.
It appears you made no attempt to understand the problem.
People want a decent TV. They want the alphabet soup 4K UHD OLED QLED etc. They want to be able to pick the size of the TV. And they don't want their TV to spy on them or show them additional advertisements.
My experience with digital sign TVs is they are much more expensive than the equivalent TV. They add on small business tools to display advertisements and in some cases still come with "smart" features. You generally can't get them in a big box store either.
When I bought my "dumb" TV I couldn't get all the features I wanted and I couldn't get one larger than 45".
The jist is that adding and cheap computer to the TV subsidizes it by allowing unlimited data mining and advertising opportunities for the manufacturer. There is little incentive for any company to cater to the crowd that doesn't appreciate this trade-off.
> It appears you made no attempt to understand the problem.
Did I?
The article says it’s “stupidly difficult” to find a dumb TV. I think I showed that it’s not.
Regarding all the other stuff you said:
- It seems like you want the TV makers to cater to you your needs and wants in terms of feature set and distribution channel for your dumb TV. Why would they choose to make it easy to buy a dumb tv when there is more money in selling you a smart tv?
- Regarding your dumb tv purchase, I don’t know where you’re located, but these limits for a dumb TV simply aren’t true in the US unless you want something very niche.
- Do you think your needs are representative of the market while also being equally or more profitable than what is currently available? At this point, most people who want a dumb tv are going to have to make a few compromises that, for most people, are minor. I think that’s a fair trade —- sad that it needs to work that way, but fair.
Let's agree to disagree that you proved the OP wrong. I think it is clear from my comment that I understand I am not representative of the market. I am still frustrated with the trade-offs that exist.
I am US based, and I wrote about my personal experience buying a "dumb" TV in the US.
I don’t know the answer but wonder if “digital signage” means it is more often viewed at a distance, and thus has lower quality control around say, dead pixels. Just a guess, but it seems like that could be true.
No, it means exactly the opposite - they're supposed to be sitting in a commercial setting and take more abuse; displaying the same content 24/7 in an unfriendly environment (hotter/colder than your usual living room). They also have features like RS232 connectivity for remote control of a whole fleet of TVs from a single point.
Yep, but if you want a tuner, you get a tuner. Most cable/satellite boxes handle everything for you. If you want a "dumb TV" digital signage is the way to go.
A TV tuner can be plugged in, if it's even needed - the same channels will be available via e.g. in the UK case, the Sky box (cable tv) or BBC app (running on Chromecast or similar).
I recently purchased a Samsung TV that I hooked up to the internet. When I turned on the TV I was prompted to agree to their TOS. When I tried to agree to the terms it just kept erroring. I went away for a bit assuming it was Samsung network issue. It took me another hour once I returned to realize that my network was blocking their tracking domains. I had to connect the TV to my phone to accept the terms and bypass my blockers. The point is, you couldn’t even use this smart tv without first connecting to the web and accepting their terms.
I also haven’t really loved the Samsung TV. The UI is not great and it often forces me into their undeletable live streaming TV app.
I also recently purchased an LG tv, and I love it. The UI is great, there’s no ads, or intrusive apps. I’ll likely only buy LG tvs moving forward.
Yeah LGs are great, no long loading times. Only issue I've found is that it doesn't like antenna signal being too strong (I've got an attenuator to make mine work)
“As a dumb TV fan who has bought several sets in the last decade, I’m usually told something akin to: “well, just don’t connect the TV to the Internet!” But that route locks you out of firmware updates, and some TV makers remove functionality if you refuse to participate in their online ecosystem. Many smart TV GUIs also need to load before you’re even allowed to switch laggy HDMI inputs.”
I don’t get that point. A dumb TV would not need firmware updates. And if you’re already shopping like a madman, you should be able to figure out which TV locks out functionality. And the loading UI for the TV; I guess that’s the only fair point.
But it’s clear there’s a hidden point in the argument; I don’t want functionality I won’t use. I don’t want the risk of connecting my TV. The temptation to see what it looks like.
Post processing, and other parts of rendering are still occurring. For example, if you game, have an Xbox, and a Sony TV, VRR is a feature that gets added to the TV after you buy it.
The TV doesn't need firmware updates as long as it's able to show me my sources, and "laggy" doesn't matter when the only input it ever has to deal with is whichever smart stick I choose to stick in HDMI 1.
I got a smart LG and let it go on the Internet to get a feel for the apps and webOS (as a Palm fanboy who was curious of how that story ended), and after trying it for a few weeks, it went back offline. Now the TV is turned on and off by the AppleTV connected to it.
I've got a cheap TCL Roku TV that definitely fits the description of a cheap TV being subsidized by Roku's software.
The UI is pretty snappy and fast to load up HDMI inputs, and once you figure out how to block the internet without triggering the flashing light, there's not really any loss. The whole POINT is that I'm not using online functionality, so I don't care if I lose it.
Why would I need a firmware update for my TV that I use as a big monitor? It has no network access, I switched it to "PC mode", it displays pixels, it makes sounds, I very occasionally switch inputs.
My new 65" Sony has never been connected to the internet. We can't get 4K resolution, presumably because it's never been updated. Sony tells me they don't have a USB update available "yet." Had I known this would happen I wouldn't have bought it - my old plasma is still working. I didn't wish to connect just for the update and then disconnect over concerns that they would use that connection to download ads onto the firmware at the same time.
That sucks. My Samsung did not have that issue (although it has other weird issues, such as having a button to turn it on without the remote, but not one to turn it off lol)
Sony TVs run near-stock Android TV and can have their firmware updated with a thumb drive. If you elect to use the smarts (I haven’t, I use an Apple TV), you can hook it up to ADB on a laptop and remove the singular bit of dodgy content tracking stuff.
They’re a bit more pricey than a Vizio or something like that, but the quality is great so I think the premium is worthwhile.
As long as I'm able to switch inputs and use HDMI-CEC, I don't care about firmware upgrades. I also don't care that the updates might cause the GUI to load a second or two faster when powering on.
Are there any TV models that are proven/documented to do this? I hear this claim all the time but I can't find a single demo of it happening. A previous HN thread [0] couldn't come up with any examples either.
Samsung TVs do show an interface called 'p2p0' along 'eth0' - I think this is visible in the Netflix diagnostic screen. Dunno really what it means or does.
Just wait until one of your neighbors gets a DSL or cable contract with a deal like "share your electricity with us to run a public hotspot and get free access to our nationwide hotspot network in turn". There have been complaints about smart TVs automatically connecting to open WiFi networks [1], it's not that far fetched to assume some manufacturer will sooner or later cut a deal with Comcast or other providers.
Or that your smart TV gets its own embedded DOCSIS modem - one would not even be able to spot that except by dissecting the firmware! - or LTE modems. All it takes is the smell of enough profits.
I'm skeptical about that report. Maybe the user's roommate set up wifi? Or maybe the TV was refurbished and happened to be configured to connect to a common network name like "AT&T WIFI". It's foolish to just accept one random report on the internet as truth.
Note that Visio is still making profit on the TVs itself, in addition to the ad revenue. Pretty standard operating procedure in most markets these days. Charge for the product, sell either additional features for the product (which used to come included in the price) or the metrics the product provides.
A serious, non-trolling question to all. I've not had a TV for decades and for me that's a good thing. I've watched TVs in pubs (I'm in the uk) and round my mates' houses so it's not become some strange alien thing, and I'm still happy to be without it (that is, on balance; there are good things about broadcast TV and some bad, and the latter outweighs the former for me).
In your opinion, is there actual overall value to still having a TV any more or is it just a habit? The number of ultra cheap space-filler productions (reality TV about police chases being one, but how many cookery programmes are there now?)seem to have diluted everything worth watching to almost zero.
From your message, it sounds like you think TVs are used only to watch live broadcast channels.
If that's the case, that's the part you missed, nowadays I think that we're at like 60-70% of usage that IS NOT live broadcast channels.
I do think there is a bit to be missed by not watching live broadcast channels, because it is an easy window to view how a large part of the population think, but yeah overall the content is pretty abysmal.
But, WRT having a physical TV, it's mostly comfort. I want to watch my entertainment (educative youtube video, dumb shut-your-brain-off TV shows, "complex" plot with pretty images TV shows) from the comfort of my sofa, with "happier" colors and brightness (I could say better "picture quality", but since it's mostly post-production changes, it's usually hardly representative of real-life, it's only representative of what the producer wants)
I haven't had cable for 15 years at this point and don't miss it, but I generally have had a TV in the living room with a Chromecast or Fire stick plugged into it.
It's nice to be able to throw a movie from the plex server on there with my SO and have a stay-in movie night with some popcorn. Especially during covid lockdown we did this almost weekly with movies, documentaries from youtube or netflix, and tv shows we watched together. A computer screen doesn't really provide the same experience.
On Black Friday I found a deal for a new TV and picked it up, but it was a Roku smart tv. I couldn't find a way to get it working without creating a Roku account so I made one with a dummy email address and then disconnected it from the wifi. Only use it with the Chromecast, which we can use for plex/youtube/netflix without trying to futz around with the UI on the TV.
Did they advertise the fact that an internet connection was required to initially turn the tv on? What happens when a TV like this is purchased for places without internet connections?
I purchased a HiSense TV with Roku from Costco. When I first turned it on, it asked to connect to Wi-Fi. I said no, and it hasn’t bothered me since. There were no terms of service or click-through licenses to agree to, or accounts to create. I imagine all that comes after you connect it to Wi-Fi.
But never having been connected to the internet, the HDMI ports and TV tuner all work fine.
I think we've gotten to the point where "watching TV" is not a thing people do anymore if they're under 70. But "having a TV" is something most people do - it just doesn't imply the same thing. I don't have a TV per se, or any black box hanging on a wall in my house, so the first thing most people mention when they visit is "you have no TV! I've been wanting to get rid of mine, or put it in the basement, but the kids....". But I do have a discreet projector for watching movies or shows (most of which I pirate). The projector itself, however, is a smart TV, although that's not something I noted when I bought it. It's full of apps that update themselves and all manner of shit I didn't ask for. My only use for it is having it play things off a USB card.
I'm actually not sure what the complaint is about "smart" TVs. Just don't give them your WiFi password, or else isolate them on a closed LAN. Plug in your own devices to play what you want to play on them. The cross-marketing is what makes them affordable... the special buttons for accidentally turning on Netflix, that Netflix paid to place in just that position on the remote control, are the reason a 60" TV is within your budget. So just control your network and take the free shit. As long as it has the ports you need. If it doesn't have ports, then obviously don't buy it.
A really big screen makes a huge difference. If you truly want to appreciate 4K content (be aware that most streaming 4K content is not good at all, surprisingly YouTube’s rentals have the best 4K fidelity of any streaming option I’ve seen) you need like a 70 inch screen at less than 10 feet away. I can assure you that with right content this can transport you into the movie in ways only a theater can match.
A great example I use is that in the Dark Knight, the thread the joker ties to the smoke grenade while getting into the school bus unwinds from his coat and is also purple. Like isn’t that insane to notice?
Absolutely. I watch a ton of movies & tv shows; all from the comfort of my personal library and I love the experience. Though, mine is only 55", my next upgrade would be much bigger.
For me, a TV is a large monitor that sits in the lounge that the family can watch a streamed movie or tv series on the couch. It’s not about broadcast/cable/satellite channels anymore, it’s about a nice medium to enjoy media on.
Laptop/tablet screens are ok when travelling but after a few weeks I do miss a large screen and no fluffing around with setting up the viewing area, sound, etc.
Do you watch them alone, or do you have a dedicated screen for that? Or what's your setup? Many people have a "TV" just for the screen, not the tuner, simply because you don't want the same kind (size) of screen at the same position to watch a movie and to do e.g. browse the internet.
Without a TV I'd miss the ability to "turn something on without being paralysed by choice". Usually mealtimes or when very tired, I just want to turn on the TV and flick through a handful of channels and just watch whatever there is on.
It's mainly a UX thing. There's just more friction with TV apps even if they do have a "watch live" option. Channel hopping is just much harder.
It isn't much different to open YouTube, pick whatever's recommended, and just let autoplay pick the next video to play. You get better tailored content.
YouTube is deep in my filter bubble whereas channel hopping TV channels is a moderately curated selection.
(and YouTube in private browsing is just a firehose of automated recommendations).
There's probably about 10 channels worth watching on UK Freeview and the hit rate is fairly high when my standards are low but I want something easy and engaging.
I think we need to distinguish a television as a hardware device, and what here we would call "cable channels".
If you have a family, tv is not a necessity per se but a convenient norm. It allows more than one person to watch the Disney or Netflix show or movie, or even a DVD if your inclinations are toward vintage antiques ;-)
I agree that I have not watched a cable channel in more than a decade.
Our TV is basically just a movie machine in our case. We could watch movies on a laptop on the couch, but it's not as nice as having a TV. For what it's worth, our TV is actually a big old tube TV. We have a small collection of DVDs and VHS, and also a Raspberry Pi 3 which is very capable of playing movie files, and can even stream from Amazon in a pinch.
I’m not the OP, but you’d be surprised just how good the image quality on a decent CRT is. They lack the resolution to display the sort of fine detail you get in HD video, but the brightness, contrast, dynamic range, and colour reproduction still holds up (assuming it was a decent unit at the time).
Importantly, they’re far more forgiving to lower definition content than modern displays, and while retro games are more of a driving force for still using a CRT today, I could totally see a VHS collection being a good reason to keep one around.
The main drawbacks are the size/weight, limited screen size by modern standards, obscene power draw, and the fact that they need maintenance to keep the geometry good.
It's a fun novelty. You can find VHS for free at yard sales and other places. It often costs less to get a VHS than rent a movie on Amazon or something else.
CRTs in general are honestly superior in a number of a ways. They effectively have built-in anti-aliasing, they tend to have better color depth, and usually have better speakers than a flatscreen TV. They're also better for most retro video game systems. Where I am, you can also still get a decent number of CRT TVs for free.
I've also never understood the obsession with higher resolutions. Particularly in the case of old movies, films were not shot with the expectation that you could see every detail. Even when we still had a flatscreen we'd rent from Amazon at 480p just to save a dollar or two. Higher resolution doesn't really inherently look better in many cases. But, I'll definitely admit some newer movies will flash some text on screen sometimes that is hard to make out on an old CRT.
I guess my primary argument is not really that CRTs are so amazing (although they're better than people remember) -- but only that flatscreens are not really that great either. A great movie is a wonderful experience on either. Once you get into the film, the story, music, and characters really prevent you from fixating on pixels. We're not missing anything, and we haven't spent any money to support this hobby. In the case of VHS and DVD, old movies generally look better on a CRT. In the case of new movies, there is some compromise, but it usually doesn't matter.
None taken -- I've got 20/20, or relatively close to it. It's not as if I can't see the difference, I just don't feel that sharper inherently equals better. At least in the case of watching movies or TV.
My intuitive sense is that people don't actually care about increased resolution, but simply know that they're using the "inferior" option, and claim not to like it. I'm not suggesting this is actually the case -- it's just that caring about a sharper picture is foreign enough to me that it's not my most natural conclusion. Logically, I can certainly understand people probably do care about image sharpness. I'm just not one of those people.
The visuals have always been a huge part of cinema. You can hardly compare the experience of watching Lawrence of Arabia projected from film and Lawrence of Arabia in 480 even on equally sized screens.
While there’s a plenty of content I enjoy watching even if it’s only available in 480, 4K DV content on the big screen offers a completely different level of immersion.
I really like DS9, but it clearly suffers from its format. Even basic things like the ability to make out facial expressions of the cast become more difficult or even impossible at lower resolutions.
Not really. Content that looks awful on LCDs can look good on CRTs, to the point that there are image processors for old hardware to emulate CRT look on LCD panels.
I've a hard time to find the exact hardware but check out this video for what I have in mind: https://youtu.be/ZsNKu4umHq4?t=218 - 'too accurate' is a very nice way of describing what LCDs do.
Are you single and living alone? Not trying to be insulting but in that case yea a tv doesn't have much value. But if you have roommates or a family yes TVs definitely have value beyond just a habit.
If you're single (watching alone), I'd say there's very little advantage over a laptop / tablet. If you're watching with others (family, significant other, sports with friends, etc.) it's more social to use a shared screen (TV). I personally never turn it on unless I've planned to watch something with the kids.
Typical recommendation I always give to anyone looking for a dumb tv, get a JVC videoprojector, it's dumb and you'll get the biggest price to size to quality ratio possible for watching movies (note: the actual price is far below msrp if you look).
Buying a B-stock JVC DLA-X790R for 2,300 usd was one of the best purchase I've ever made. Amazing image quality, looks great on the 120 inch screen that drops from my ceiling in the living room and not a iota of smartness included.
Only thing is that it does mean that watching movies during the day is not great without black out curtains. This creates intentionality behind our tv watching. Turning on the video projector, closing the black out curtains and opening the screen means that we don't start watching tv out of force of habit. There's a certain degree of conscious decision behind watching a movie or tv show and I think that's beneficial to us by reducing the amount of tv watching and forcing us to concentrate on higher quality content.
It's a bit similar to using records to listen to music (I don't personally but I can see how it could enhance the experience compared to just turning on spotify) or to making loose leafed tea with proper teaware.
I strongly agree with the sentiment in the article, but the comma in the title seems misplaced.
Edit: I think there's just a typo on the HN title. The original title showing on the website is "It's Still Stupidly, Ridiculously Difficult to Buy a 'Dumb' TV" which is perfectly grammatical.
There's a vestigial comma because an automated script removed the word "ridiculously", which is (probably) on HN's list of blacklisted clickbait words.
I'm on year 3 of not accepting the EULA on my 'smart' tv. It has never been connected to the internet. It is effectively a dumb tv that was slightly cheaper because it has dormant bloatware.
I have a TCL Roku TV that was much cheaper than the competition, but the tradeoff is that it requires connecting to the internet to setup. If you unplug it from the internet, the little light at the bottom blinks FOREVER.
The trick, though, is to connect it to the internet and then block it on your router. For some reason this doesn't trigger the light to blink.
There are a lot of stories that TVs still try to connect to open Wi-Fi networks while you didn't configure any. I wonder if those stories are really true.
Because personally I never ever would configure internet on my TV. I just use HDMI as input.
But this is also because I don't have cable TV. Imho dropping cable TV is one of the best ROIs you can make.
Me too, I strongly suspect it is just a rumour or urban legend. I can't find any reliable sources that could name a vendor or model number of TVs that do this. And it is not like it would be hard to prove/verify for tech-journalists, yet there has been no credible report of it.
I do, however, think that there are quite some TVs out there that will just refuse to work if you don't connect them/shut of the internet. But if you get one of those, just return it to the store.
This only works if you consider the panel a commodity that is interchangeable. TVs are so so different from model to model.
The quality of the picture is much lower than high end budget tvs like the Hisense 55U6G. If youre buying a TV primary for the panel, to watch video, being "dumb" isnt going to take preference for me over the better panel.
[0] indicates they earn some 10-20$/year for vizio and 40$/month ([sic], article probably meant year) for Roku from advertising. With a lifetime of a TV at about 5 years this puts you in 100-200$ extra territory.
TFA provides the evidence that they profit more from this that from what they get from the hardware itself. So more than $400 over the tv's lifetime these days ?
I've switched to buy computer monitors since I realised I don't watch TV anymore. Even if I did there are more than one way to watch TV on non-TV devices over here (some free, some paid, some both, e.g the quite awesome molotov.tv, which gives a TV experience quite better than any smart TV)
The other day I was reading the HDMI spec. I realised, in almost full horror, it’s stupidly streaming pixels instead of image deltas. When every TV has memory enough for several full frame images, this is just crazy.
Rethink that. If HDMI were delta-compressed, then what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row? To be reliable, it needs to have as much bandwidth allocated as is needed for bitmap streaming. And in that case, why not just stream the bitmaps...
> what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row?
There's no way deltas would exceed deltas that are just full frames. If you can't send a full frame over the wire, then you are trying to push too many pixels and need to downsample on any of the 3 dimensions you have to play with.
The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer and encoding hardware capable of delta pixel encoding is would drive costs up to the point where HDMI would not be an accepted industry standard.
If you see any of popular video standards (both connectivity and formats like H.264) they avoid framebuffer and memory requirements like the plague.
Having said that, DSC exists and has been adopted by both HDMI and DisplayPort standards. But only on the highest end of capability because it costs a lot to implement on both sides.
> The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer
A full-frame 8K image with 32 bits per pixel takes up 128MB of RAM. An FHD one is 16 times less, 8MB. This is not a lot of memory for an appliance in 2002, when HDMI was introduced.
I've recently came to despise HDMI too. When I realized how many OFFICIAL standard revisions are there and how many fakes are on the market...
With DisplayPort you have one cable serving you for a DECADE of HW revisions, supporting all framerates and resolutions. With HDMI you have to buy a new cable for each upgrade and when, for example, HDMI 2.0 says "Supports 4K" it only means 60Hz, and you have to buy a "8K" cable to connect a 4K gaming display. Not to mention varieties of "ethernet-enabled", "ARC-capable" and other bullshit out there on the market. And some rare proprietary HDMI cables too! Not to mention some 2.1 cables are actually optical...
For a late '90s/early '00s digital spec, that doesn't strike me as terribly surprising. Especially since it was a replacement for analog signals. Also means way fewer components and much simpler firmware.
Sounds clever but it’s pointless because you have to guarantee that you have enough bandwidth for the worst case, in your scheme when every pixel is changing every frame, anyway.
Sure, but if you are not on the worst case (as in a desktop or anything where you don’t need every pixel changing on every frame) you can get higher spatial and temporal resolutions than you’d get from the dumb pipe as designed.
Don’t know your exact specs or the premium you pay over consumer level but I buy/install commercial display panels and when I need a new TV or such, I just grab one of them. No extra stuff, fast input switching etc etc
Somewhat off topic... Has anyone started developing alternative firmware/OS for these things much like the alternate OS for cell phones GrapheneOS for pixels and related alternatives? There are a few dumb TV's remaining but options are very limited. Is it even feasible to just replace the firmware and OS on these things? Is there a JTAG or similar interface over USB or ethernet?
[Edit] Upon thinking about this a bit more, I am going to assume someone will figure out how to replace the firmware and OS on these. Probably a better question is, what can these devices be used for beyond watching television? How much graphics processing power do they have? Do they have any advanced instructions in their chipsets or any special purpose chips?
Taking the case off of your 65-inch TV and soldering to the JTAG points is less than ideal. A "softmod" would be awesome. Maybe a web browser buffer overflow, a la the Nintendo 3ds and wii?
Just search for the professional line of monitors every major brand sells. Those are made for ads, conventions, etc and most of the time lack any smart features but have the same displays as their „smart“ counterparts.
Only downside: You pay more (>$/€1000) to have less.
Do you really pay for less? Digital signage displays often run 24/7 in temper proof cases with relatively poor ventilation and heat dissipation. Thus you might actually get a display that lasts longer (which, AFAIK, mostly comes down to higher quality capacitors and capacitors placed where they do not overheat, e.g. not directly next to high current transistors and resistors, which is common planned obsolesce practice in consumer TVs).
After not having a TV for more than a decade I recently got a Sceptre 55'' 4k based on that thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24668015
and it is all I would ask for in a TV. It is only a TV with no bullshit and was very reasonably priced. The one I have also has absolutely no wireless and I can guarantee that it is air gapped.
cheap ... depends. If you want good quality, brightnes and lifetime ... they are at the same price or more expensive then tv's (4k hdr projector is quickly over 4000 euro)
I haven't bought a new TV in a while since I use a video projector in my home theater. Last year I got a vacation place and bought a new higher-end Samsung TV. The place is semi-off-grid and only has connectivity through a 4G mobile hotspot (c'mon Elon hurry up with my Starlink!).
However, the day I unboxed the TV there was no internet yet. I only got it out with the goal of testing the new receiver and 5.1 speakers that had just arrived. All I needed was to display the HDMI UI output of the receiver so I could select the proper speaker assignments and validate the speakers were working before mounting them. I could NOT figure out how to get this display to... you know, display! At least not without first providing it an internet connection and spending nearly half an hour configuring it.
The first barrier was accepting the license agreement. But before displaying the license agreement the TV insisted on checking a server to see if there was a newer version of the license agreement. I couldn't figure out any way around this and it's just unacceptable.
I wound want with: no operating system, no HDMI, no internet, no transmit, no OSD (a simple segmented display or lights could indicate mode/input selection, if needed). Input can be composite, component, VGA, Digi-RGB, etc. I should put my own computer, which can be used to provide such functions as captions, volume, picture setting, etc. I should want a remote control that has numbers on it (which can be used with the computer to control the TV-oriented functions).
Is there possibility to disassemble the TV set to get the display and then connect that to your own equipment, somehow, if you do not want all of the other functions?
One comment in the linked article says:
> A panel with a bunch of inputs should not need firmware updates. Personally, I’d go simpler: one input (HDMI or DisplayPort), no remote, automatically turns on and off depending on signal availability. Maybe with a knob for brightness.
That could work, but I don't like HDMI; other than that it looks like a good idea. (My idea is Digi-RGB, which I had written the specification; I think is much better than HDMI)
Apparently some(? many? most?) of them refuse to work at all until they've been "set up" over the internet. Don't know for sure though; I'm clinging to my old dumb TV like a life raft.
All the sony tvs that I have owned, I just connect HDMI inputs. The TV works as intended. If I use sony's remote and go to the home menu it is still waiting for a connection but it works just fine as a tv panel.
> I’m usually told something akin to: “well, just don’t connect the TV to the Internet!” But that route locks you out of firmware updates, and some TV makers remove functionality if you refuse to participate in their online ecosystem. Many smart TV GUIs also need to load before you’re even allowed to switch laggy HDMI inputs.
(although this is exactly what I did with the Samsung smart TV I picked up on a bargain, and I have zero complaints so far)
Lots of reasons. If you’re a gamer with a shiny new PS5 or Xbox then you’ll want the various updates for things like VRR and tweaks to the HDR performance. There are often other fixes and new features too that relate to image or audio quality.
I didn’t accept the various EULAs on my LG C1 TV. I’m able to update firmware but I don’t use any of its Apps. Instead I use an Apple TV for streaming and we don’t have a cable subscription. I haven’t checked how much data the LG is leaking (I really should turn off its Wi-Fi) and I trust Apple just enough to be less shady than LG.
TVs are more than just displays, and software has bugs. As an example, my last TV had numerous issues with CEC and HDCP [0]. this was _eventually_ resolved by a firmware update from Sony.
BBC iPlayer stopped supporting don't older TVs. I think it was a codec issue, they only now support more modern codecs? In which case a firmware update might have provided a fix.
I know several older people who changed TV because of it.
> But that route locks you out of firmware updates
Actually some people disconnect their TVs BECAUSE of malicious firmware updates. Last update for my TV was not fixing any bugs, no patching any vulnerabilities, not adding any functionality, not improving content, not providing connectivity... it was JUST adding encryption to the firmware image and closing every way to root it!
I think most of them could be updates through USB or by attaching a cable. you might need to dig a little through the interwebs to find a Howto for your model, but firmware updating over usb/cable is very common.
I don't understand it either, but it's also because I don't know how modern TVs (2015+) behave when not connected.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung and others would already be working on a solution where the TVs use your phone as a bridge to the internet. Or neighboring IoT devices (similar to Amazon Sidewalk).
I guess it's not easily done but if people were to send blatantly messed up data back to the servers that were listening to the creepy TVs it would undermine that value and maybe the manufacturers would reconsider.
I have a Panasonic 50" and I just never connected it to the internet. I do everything on my old MacBook plugged in via HDMI which I control via screen sharing on my current Mac.
There are still some dumb TVs manufacturers like SWEDX in the EU and Sceptre in the US. I don't have any of their products so I can't tell about their quality.
Also some Samsung models use Tizen as the OS, which hopefully could be more easier to jailbreak.
Another option are signage displays, which usually (not always, though) are big dumb unconnected monitors. They're also a lot more robust (and pricey) than consumer TVs.
50-inch Sceptre here. Good stuff, would recommend. Mine shows some very, very faint shadows when the screen shows pure white, but could just be my setup.
I haven't had a TV for 18 years. I used large monitors for a while, then when I moved 10 years ago I bought an 42" LG "digital signage" panel. They're the flat screens you'd see used for advertising, product display or notification in hotels, stores etc. They still sell them.
If I had to replace mine now, I'd probably get the 65UH5F-B, a 65" LED, 500 nits, 3840x2160, 60Hz, HDMI 3.0, DP, DVI, RS232, RJ45, IR.
Gross, 500nits willingly? Why wouldn't you just go for the standard 1000nits where HDR content is mastered for usually or 100nits where SDR is mastered for?
That's a hilarious opening question. I just watched an excellent Columbo episode from 1976 on a 10 year old LED screen, willingly, and I didn't even throw up.
I think it is common knowledge that much of the profit from Smart TVs comes from data collection. Last year I gave our beautiful Samsung Smart TV to a friend and bought a $199 dumb TV from Walmart, and just have an Apple TV box plugged into its HDMI port. I love this combination! My wife is not so happy with it, but went along with the change.
Everything about watching TV now just seems easy, no ads, no crap. Love it.
And now even if you do get a dumb tv and connect a new Chromecast (4k) to it you STILL get ads. You even get ads for services you already subscribe to, asking you to subscribe to a higher tier. And you also get the dark pattern of the down button on the remote navigating upwards the first time you press it... So it highlights the giant advertisement first.
Last year, the NVIDIA Shield TV, a $200 device if you get the Pro version, received an update to Android TV that forced a new UI for the homescreen that injects ads from a variety of premium streaming services [1]. There is no easy way to disable it as far as I know other than installing a custom launcher such as FLauncher [2]. The cancers of modern day advertising cannot be understated.
Good to know! I was looking into getting one to replace my Chromecast. If I have to babysit a device's software I might as well just build the hardware myself, too! Even more pain in doing that, of course, but at least it's self inflicted.
Aren't those called nowadays "computer displays"? But I guess it can be problem with larger size, 43-55 are way more expensive than TVs, like 3-4X more than same size smart TV with same resolution.
I mean if you worry about spying just don't connect smart TV to internet, but yeah, the interface will be usualyl slower than dumb TV.
If you are frustrated by outdated software nothing stops you from plugging whatever Android stick into HDMI port, that's what I did with my dumb "smart" TCL with extremely locked Android without app store, without side loading (no it's not possible unless you wanna disassemble the TV and hardwire it) and with Youtube regularly crashing.
But why would you want TV without speaker, that's what makes TV a TV, if you dont want even speaker then it can be hardly called a TV, that's like calling phone something which can't even make call.
Btw. there are always projectors, where it should be better situation and you are also not limited by size.
I mean, you can grab some dedicated speakers or a sound bar or something? In fact, some people do this instead of using the TV speakers anyways since it usually results in a better experience/higher audio quality.
Yes, but most of the people expect watching TV with sound without buying extra device. Nobody stops you from hooking it up, but speaker cost is such low it would be more expensive to make special small series without speaker than with speaker. Personally I also use speaker only for minority of time when kids watch TV, in evenings we watch TV with wife through headphones to enjoy experience without disturbing kids/anyone.
You can also always disconnect the speaker if your religious belief is against speaker in TV, though you might void your warranty and I would understand more, if you would have issue with built-in microphone than speaker.
Many people hook up their TV (or media box) to their home audio system which often has much better sound quality. The built-in speakers of TVs are a bit pointless in that context.
Sure, but they cost almost nothin and majority of people would have big problem with buying TV without speaker and it would cost more produce limited series without speaker than just produce all with speakers, nobody force you to use the built-in speaker, that's why there are ports to connect whatever you like. Me personally watch TV mostly through headphones, but I find TV without speaker idea absurd. What's next niche, TV without remote and infrared transmitter?
I'm a bit hazy on this and how a smart TV interacts with the rest of the devices in a home, but for example, I have a 55 inch 4K Samsung TV in my living room, which I barely use. Occasionally I stream a movie on it, use it for music when friends visit and sometimes hook it to my laptop as a large monitor through HDMI but that's it. About 80% of the time it sits unused. With all that in mind, I don't see how all of its internal spying and tracking software is even important. How much information could it possibly collect if what it gets is nothing more than sporadic generic movie/music viewing?
I don't see the problem with this particular technology if it's used lightly, unlike a smart phone, for example, which can pass enormous amounts of personal and location information on you even if you're not addicted to using it all day.
I'm currently in the "smart TV but don't connect it to the internet" crowd. I think there are three broad criticisms.
Violating your privacy in unsurprising ways that provide no value to you: obviously when and how you use it, possibly including screenshots and audio fragments to help HQ determine what you're watching
Degrading your experience: basically just ads in places you don't want them that didn't exist when you bought it.
Violating your privacy in "surprising" ways that provide no value to you, and circumventing your efforts to stop it: what other devices are present on your home network, where your home is, connecting to unsecured wifi (or soon mesh networks with your neighbor's TV) to do so.
IMO these are the things to defend against. If they're not happening to you then that's great. It's also fine if they don't bother you. For example, if 3 is happening to me I'm not going to go to the trouble of figuring it out how to stop it, though it will change my future purchasing decisions.
Are there any efforts to build alternative, open-source or just modified for privacy TV firmware? How hard is it actually to flash TV firmware with custom one? I understand, that there are too many TV models for unified solution, but at least some LG models were running modified version of webOS.
I sold an old 42" LCD on Craigslist this week. The person who bought it was getting it for her kid's apartment. She did not know much about televisions and had a lot of questions. One of the first questions she asked was, "Does it have apps for Netflix and stuff like that, or will I need a Roku or Fire stick?"
If you only use one or two hardware inputs and one's not an OTT box, it's a lot easier to just use the TV's apps. People don't want to have to buy extra gadgets just to have another TV for their kids or in another room.
I bought my previous TV right before they became "smart"; it had media playback features from a network, but no online services.
Currently have an LG TV; while in theory it's a fairly dumb TV that has services like youtube and netflix built in, it's only dumb because it still allows you use it without agreeing to certain terms and conditions; they have split it up in a number of categories for things like 'smart' advertising (I paid too much for this thing for it to have advertising), speech controls, etc. At the moment it will still nag me to agree to something if I try to open up Amazon Prime, but it can still be skipped.
Probably only a matter of time before it gets bricked if I don't agree to the T's and C's. Probably after three years so the warranty expires.
> There are options, but guides on this front will usually shovel you toward computer monitors (too pricey at large sizes)
I have the feeling that "smart" tvs are cheaper because (like the laptops with windows preinstalled) they are filled to the brim with adware and spyware.
I recently bought a TV and faced exactly this. Basically, I use my TV for two things: a RPi with Kodi (LibreELEC) from which I do all my 'watching' and a Nintendo Switch. Both of those devices are connected via wifi. There is no reason whatsoever to have my TV do anything else than 'be a screen' and connect to my soundbar - yet it was nearly impossible to get a dumb tv anywhere where I live (Belgium) without paying ridiculous extra costs.
Ended up buying a Samsung QLed (marketing bling) TV that I never connected to my network. Switching between input devices requires 6 buttons presses (!) because it keeps nagging to connect the TV to the internet.
Also on some Samsung tv: it needs to connect to download the Terms and Conditions, then it will prompt you to accept them and then it will work/remember last used input. The download happent overnight on very good net access, I guess because their servers are very busy.
I bought a 58 inch samsung tv in 2016 for around 250 euro. 1080p, barebone no smart features, two hdmi ports and two usb 2.0 ports. I wouldn't give it up even if someone payed me double today. It works as intended and that's all I care about. I use it daily. Yes, color vise it's a TN lcd panel so about as good as it can be expected but none of that matters because you simply get used to it.
I haven't checked but I think you could probably still find something bare-bone today it's just that people want the greatest shit and don't want to settle for less. Maybe try something that isn't OLED or 4K and you might be surprised...
Aside from the fact that image quality and motion handling are the two most important factors in a TV for me—and therefore I would never settle for less unless I couldn’t afford it—the barebones offerings today are likely to be even worse. Even super cheap TVs are smart now, except they have even worse CPUs and even less effort is put into making the software anything close to good.
Seriously, it is dumb to look for a "dumb TV", search for a "monitor" and you'll find what you need. I've got 9 large monitors from 25" to 50" - 6 on my computers and the other 3 on old computers, but displaying whatever - YouTube music playlists and Reddit EarthPorn. As a monitor, I've never paid much over $500 for one, as (stupid) people think they are no good; consumer electronics stores have such idiots as managers they'll have a 55" monitor on the floor for 6 weeks and mark it down to $400.
I would be interesting to see regulation that forces TV makers to allow users to physically remove the 'Smart' out of their devices.
Like some beamer constructors do with HDMI mini computers.
Things changes: in the past the TV was a means of mass communication with both trash and valuable contents, nowadays that's only trash, at least in my current (France) and home (Italy) countries, so the fact all TV are "smart" (or, their buyer are considered dumb by the "smart" device OEM) it's just part of a Darwinian evolutionary process: a small help to push certain cohort of users out of TVs for the sake of humanity...
Use a computer and an hdmi cord as your media source and you can’t go wrong. I just wish the pi was powerful enough to cleanly stream high res content. It’s so close.
Yeah, good luck with getting dolby vision and the likes to work.
You’ll also have to deal with substantially degraded experience from streaming services unless you’re willing to deal with the inconvenience of pirating everything.
These days it's the other way around. If you pirate everything it's all very easy, it's the guessing game and multiplying streaming services where you have to deal with inconvenience. It's all just a little bit of history repeating...
I know all about this, my Plex server is rapidly approaching 200TB of content.
Is it really convenient? Sure! As long as you ignore all the work that goes into setup and maintenance. I’d be deluding myself if I tried to pretend that this is anything but yet another part of a really expensive and time consuming home theater hobby.
Even at it’s best DIY piracy is still miles away from just being able to open up Netflix and start watching.
Of course you can pay for someone else to maintain the Plex server for you, which isn’t a horrible option.
I see this a lot. I've never understood my peers need for complex "plex server" (or related) setups. Why not just store the files on the hard drives of your normal computers? 200TB is why, I guess, but this is hardly typical nor does it require "plex". I do just fine with a handful of computers with ~30 TB between them and some network shares. No "maintainance" required.
Plex actually requires 0 maintenance, it’s the radarr/sonarr bit which deals with content acquisition that’s often a hassle. (Still infinitely better than having to manually choose and download torrents)
Even a network share would take more work to set up than Plex.
Why Plex? Easy set up, vastly better UI than a network share, works from outside the home. I travel often and frequently benefit from the transcoding feature when dealing with shitty hotel wifi. Friends love it too.
Playing directly from a regular computer isn’t a very good option due to shit format support.
How is playing directly from a computer not a good option? All of my computers on my network are sharing all of their drives all the time and I just go on to other computers drives to get things and I double click them and they play on every computer on my network from Linux to Mac to Windows from H264, 65, vp9, av1... Anything.
Working in this space and seeing the potential for true smart displays tied to lifestyles, curious what folks would want to see in TVs as a better medium than phones. What features do you want? What pain points do you have that huge immersive displays could help with?
Unfortunately the margins are so thin, need to be investigating new revenues streams or else the business fails under commoditization pressures. Agree that Adtech is not the answer.
In Europe/Sweden I have been purchasing dumb screens from Swedx.se [1]. Both dumb TVs and a video wall. They are clearly imported from China and not a big vendor, but I’d expect these type of companies selling digital signage to be available everywhere.
Perhaps I do not get it, but a big screen never appealed to me. I think of smart TVs as a big screen with a built-in computer, and a laptop as a computer which has a built-in screen. I always thought the laptop is a better bang for the buck.
Perhaps I am missing the point because I do not live in the western world. I have observed my people who moved to the west are into large screen TVs, but I never understood the lure.
I live in the western world, and I've never really seen the point either. But I know a few people who value a large TV, so I know they exist. It's just a matter of what floats your boat in the end.
The state of the TV market is why I haven't purchased a new TV in a decade or so. And the way things are going, I probably never will. When the one I have dies, I'll likely not replace it.
I was in the same boat when I was younger. After upgrading to a (dumb) projector for movies and gaming (ex shooters), I can’t go back, since the immersion and amount of details I see on a big screen for me is just an order of magnitude better.
The only "smart" thing I wanted in a TV is a SMB-capable media player. And nothing else, literally. I had to hack my tv to install CIFS module and a few dirty hacks to mount the NAS, but it was worth it. Because I hate to have an external computer (aka set-top-box) connected to computer inside tv to be able to connect to computer on a network to show some damn movies and photos.
>If it turns out that too many people are disconnecting their tv, the manufacturer would merely add in a sim card.
Or silently use your neighbor's tv (of the same brand or cross-brand network pact) as access point. Not for streaming video, but just for the tracking.
GDPR requires consent, and no feature is allowed to be removed to coerce you into consent. So at least in the EU, there must be an option to switch off data transmissions.
Wouldn't the free market simply provide modifications with the cell networking removed for an extra $50 or so? The "discount" you get from buying a smart TV verses a dumb TV (which is a niche product so it would cost hundreds more) would still be positive after subtracting the cost of modification.
How so? I can buy a modified Thinkpad (https://minifree.org/product/libre-t440p/ or http://www.cnmod.cn/x210/) because enough people demand it. If enough people demand dumb TVs but their niche prices far exceed smart TVs, then people will begin selling modified smart TVs without cell chips for mutually fair prices.
It's beyond that. Dumb TVs are virtually instant on, those so called Smart TVs take a while to boot. Also the design of the UI were changed a lot by removing or hiding frequently used functions/remote buttons etc.
My TCL 4K HDR Roku TV turns on in 2 seconds. I hit the power button on my Roku TV app on my phone in the remote section and I count to two and there is an image on the display and then I hit right once and then okay and then one second later I see my Mac desktop. Amazing!
My provider gives me a EON set-top-box which is just a smartphone with a ethernet and HDMI port. It's always connected as it's internet-based TV. This is the sad state of reality.
Every "smart tv" is or will be smart enough to connect to the internet via your friendly neighbor's "smart tv", and to do so silently for tracking purposes only.
I'd settle for a mechanism to update a "smart tv" to remove said "features" and prevent future updates. A rogue firmware update hack. Let's see them take users to court saying we're "not allowed to remove those advertisements... but not because we don't really own the device."
They're not cheap or large, but broadcast monitors can be an option. Very expensive unless used though. Lots of lesser known manufacturers in the space, and some great deals can be found. The largest size most manufacturers will do is around 32 inches.
i have found that an external broadcast television tuner with a regular hdmi display works well for my needs. the mediasonic HW220STB includes a PVR function to record broadcasts but the firmware is a bit old. Contemporary Research 232-ATSC is an older but fully capable tuner with rs-232 and ethernet remote control and can be had for around $100. there's a newer model called "232-ATSC 4K" which retails for around $1k and offers 4K output - the older one only goes up to 1080.
these are both ATSC tuners so they're fine for me in the US, but there is of course a different broadcast standard in non-US countries so this advice won't apply there.
My friend had a smart TV, and didn't use the smart features. It had a light on the front of the TV that pulsed on and off unless it was connected and set up. You couldn't even use it as a dumb TV unless you connected it to wifi...
My TCL has not had any problems not being connected to the internet except it flashes a light on the front to helpfully remind me. I keep telling myself I’m going to take a sharpie to it but it doesn’t bother me that much.
You can connect it to the network and have it download whatever latest updates might be there and if your router is an Asus you could install wrt Merlin and use skynet and diversion to pretty much block everything from Roku and the light never blinks and you could still use your phone as a remote for the TV.
We should have a law that says that any product sold at a large scale should first be approved by a consumer organization. Let's stop producing junk that works against the consumer's interest.
> any product sold at a large scale should first be approved by a consumer organization
You’ve created a government body gating market access. Surprise! Only the incumbents’ products get approved. Even if it doesn’t get corrupted, the wait times and specialist skills required to prepare the requisite documentation and answer questions properly will add a huge barrier to entry for new entrants.
I don't see the analogy. They can still publish the blueprints for the device, they just can't produce it at a mass scale.
The market creates a natural power imbalance, and the market has shown that it can't act responsibly here. A better analogy is the power imbalance in the relation company-versus-employees, where you create a union to break the imbalance. Except now it is a "union" of consumers.
Another analogy is democracy: let's not produce stuff that a few CEOs and shareholders want, but instead, let's produce stuff that the world wants. Also helps with resource/climate/environment problems.
I cringe anytime I go to a friends place and their TV is connected to their network. I can't believe people have gotten to comfortable with the privacy implications of these devices being connected all the time.
It wasn't that long ago that I think it was Samsung was caught with the mic always on or something? I don't remember.
I hate how TV's have gone. I don't really consider myself an audiophile (or the picture quality equilvent) but I am willing to spend money on good sound and picture. Not spend a ton but cleanly middle ground on sound and high ground on picture quality.
I have a 75" tv right now and eying an 85" when I upgrade this thing. I play a lot of video games, watch a lot of movies, so it is very worth it for me. I would happily pay a premium to not have all of this smart tv stuff thrown in that I will never use.
There are display or other dumb TV's but from what I can tell they lack many of the bells and whistles that the top of the line TV's coming out today have. Which is what I care about. For example, getting rid of the Halo effect around lights. Something that could ruin a dark video game or movie.
You could just say "don't connect it to wifi". Well the first obvious problem, I live in a city. There are a ton of unsecured Wifi networks nearby that it would be very easy for the TV to connect too. Even if not, if they entered an agreement with Xfinity and used their shared wifi network... I would wager they would be able to connect almost anywhere.
Problem 2. I have had a number of times that randomly I would have signal issues with devices that had been working just fine. The only possible solution I could find was to update the firmware on the TV. Requiring me to connect it to the internet (I keep an ethernet cable nearby just for this use case) so it could update and likely send all of the data it was collecting anyways.
I always connect an Apple TV to my tv for any streaming I want to do.
That being said, If Apple actually truly put out a Smart TV that just ran TVos and didn't invade my privacy... I would likely buy it and have no hesitation on connecting it too the internet.
I paid $75 for a Samsung LN46A650 (46" LCD) in 2019 to replace a Philips HD CRT. Since, I have bought two more ($50 and $20). So, I use two and have one as a backup or parts. All from Craigslist. I also have picked up three LN46A550 ($20 total) on CL with minor problems.
We pay money for a device and receive a device which does other people's bidding instead of our own.
Yet the money we paid does not have this property.
The money works 100% for the recipient and we retain no influence over it at all. We can't say what it get's spent on or poison it's performance so that it works for us instead of them somehow. We hand it over and it becomes 100% theirs and it works 100% normally, and does so forever, and with no strings.
There is no amount of rationalizing or explaining or excusing that resolves that simple fact.
I solved this problem by selling my TV and learning guitar and piano during lockdown.
I feel lazy and useless if I find myself in front of a TV.
Personal laptop, headless desktop for local file backup and music server, WiFi gear, phone, and job laptop, are the extent of my tech at home.
Feels great being decoupled from the consumer garbage churn. The made up frustration not finding what you want, the contrived reviews and story; all make for pretty banal and repetitive social life around you meat based tape recorders.
So we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less. But it does not end there. Vendors put lots of Ads in them, some vendors even put boot-up Ads regardless it is connected to internet or not. The worst I guess was mentioned in a couple of day ago some rouge vendor even started to put customized Ads based programs we are watching on air.
I guess my replacement for a TV would be a big monitor.