If you own an Internet-connected TV, you've been seeing these for 2 years or more. I submitted it 11 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427405) and it wasn't new then.
The ACR-based retargeting audiences (https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...) are probably the most offensive. For example: "Reach viewers who saw your competitor’s ads as quickly as 60 seconds after linear ad airing." Since they're capturing and analyzing screenshots from all TV inputs (even HDMI sources), they can target based on not just what you're watching, but which ads you've seen. Games, movies, apps, whatever - they're capturing the actual image you're seeing in realtime.
I maintain a list of deep links to opt-out of data collection and sharing, mostly just because it pisses me off: https://simpleoptout.com/ . My site includes all of the TV manufacturers and TV OSes, but Samsung is easily the worst. As I wrote: "distinctly less customer-friendly than its peer companies. If it can be retained and shared, it probably is."
> If you own an Internet-connected TV, you've been seeing these for 2 years or more
How to prevent all Samsung tracking and advertising:
1. Factory reset your Samsung TV.
2. When promoted to accept the Samsung EULA, select no/reject
3. Attach computer or streaming stick to Samsung HDMI port (Windows, mac, chromebook, appleTV, chromecast, Amazon Firestick, Roku stick). I use an ancient PC with Linux Mint installed. You can use KODI or Plex if you like that interface, but I don’t.
4. Select that HDMI input on the TV.
5. Enjoy streaming video with Samsung-free ads and Samsung-free tracking
Optional but recommended: Logitech wireless K400 keyboard/touchpad ($20)
The skinny, slippery, round cornered, black AppleTV remote seems to be designed to be as easily lost as possible. Weeks often go by without finding it, during which we use other streaming devices instead.
The Amazon FireTV remote is quite easy to lose, but I stocked up on spares when it was on sale for $15.
The TiVo remote is not only too big to lose, it has a remote-finder feature where you can induce it to play a tune. Genius.
There are dozens of apps on Android which can act as a remote for an AppleTV.
You can also use any bog standard universal remote control, if you have an old one of those kicking around somewhere. (I use a cheap old Logitech Harmony remote, for example)
> Not only does this improve your privacy, but it improves the UI and remote of your TV.
Two out of three anyhow... the Apple TV remote is pretty mediocre. Gets rid of a lot of junk I never use, and a bunch of stuff I really miss (the mute button for starters).
Using your phone as a remote is awesome. If your HDMI has CEC/ARC you can switch the TV in just by pulling down the remote widget and pressing the screen. And you can fill password and search fields. And anyone can use it once they’ve paired
Ugh are you telling me that these TVs are aggressively trying to find and connect to unsecured Wi-Fi to upload data I don’t want them to have over an unsecure connection I don’t control?
$20 says they already have a deal with Verizon/Spectrum/whatever to use those customer login protected open wifi APs as backhaul when an internet connection is not otherwise available. Considering how much they're leaning on customer PII to subsidize the cost of TVs, I wouldn't be surprised if they start putting 5G radios in them too.
Would it work to set up an ESP32 as a WiFi access point that doesn’t route traffic? I wonder if the Samsung would detect that it’s an unhelpful internet connection and keep looking, or lock onto the bad network the user supplied.
There is nothing difficult about this. Modern TVs can be opened from the back to be repaired and are very modular. You can disconnect wifi antennas if you need to.
_Can_ you reject Samsung's EULA? My Q90T prompts me to accept it every time it's turned on, but the only option appears to be to accept it. I can't find a "no/reject" option.
I do what you suggest in step (3), and never connect it the TV to a network, but it's still concerning.
You can absolutely ignore it, even without switching inputs; it appears above the menu/input bar at the bottom and isn't modal.
However, it reappears every time the TV is turned on. At some point, a houseguest (assuming those are a thing at some point in the future) is going to hit "okay", or I'm going to do so accidentally while fumbling with the remote, and that isn't the same thing as actual/deliberate consent from me, the owner of the device.
Are you saying it displays even when the input source is selected for your external device/computer? That does not happen for me. And when I turn off/on the TV, it remembers the last selected input source -- so the external device/computer displays right away.
Hello! I would like to recommend to everyone one of the few utilities I've found in the last few years which blew my socks off, called x2x [0]. It is a small console program you can use to link your X session with a remote session (over SSH), so that you can move your mouse off your current laptop (or whatever) desktop and onto the remote "TV computer" desktop, and type things into that desktop with your keyboard. I'd been dreaming about this for years before I randomly stumbled on it. You can run it and just forget about it since it isn't literally streaming a series of JPGs like VNC. I've been using it with ZERO problems now for a couple of years exactly for this purpose.
There's reports of some models connecting to any open wifi networks, which would include your neighbours. And it's only a matter of time until they come with built-in sim cards
Recent model toyota vehicles come with a "telematics" unit with a built-in SIM card that sends GPS data, driving data, video from the front camera, etc. to Toyota and the "agreement" in the manual says they can do ~whatever they want with it.
If you power down the telematics module (by removing the fuse), the carplay microphone doesn't work (because the microphone runs through the telematics module).
If you remove or cut the antenna on the module, you get a Check Engine light, which means you can't register your vehicle in many states.
You have to call toyota, ask them to turn off all the data collection, and hope they really do it.
It's really sad to see a historically very good car company fall so far.
Dunno about this unit, but a lot of satellite decoder boxes come with the smart card 'chip' soldered onto the board and the smart card slot remains empty until they need to change the security.
That so contradicts the GDPR, it's almost comical. I'm sure they don't plan on turning that on in the EU, but things could get interesting if such "features" end up in the area somehow ... how much is 5% of Toyota's revenue?
Tangent: what interface do you use instead of Kodi etc?
On my (Silverblue) laptop I've been using a simple video player (Celluloid), youtube_dl/get_iplayer/bashpodder, plus a bash script to select and play the “next” episode.
That works nicely for recorded/downloaded audio and video, but doesn't address live streams.
I don’t use anything special: VLC instead of Celluloid. Web browser for YouTube, Netflix,, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, bbc iplayer (I use FoxyProxy UK proxy since I’m not in the UK), ITV.
I also have an HDTV antenna and use the Samsung remote to switch inputs for it, but it is rarely used (broadcast TV content just sucks where I am), although there is also locast.org if you like that.
That’s a lot of content for me, but I still sometimes use Stream.io (also with FoxyProxy VPN) to stream films from Pirate Bay instead of downloading.
And if I want to watch download/save something or watch content I already stored, I have a synology NAS that’s mounted over SMB ( or NFS?) for that. There’s also a DVD player in the ancient PC but we don’t use it (however VLC plays dvds just fine).
Honestly this is much more quality content than me or my family could ever consume.
The family does not mind the keyboards/touchpad interface for the TV even though they don’t know Linux... UI is so simple it does not matter.
I did increase font size even though it’s a 65-inch screen.
I can't speak for people using actual modems, but my household cut the cord a while back and just uses a really big computer monitor attached directly to a dedicated cheap computer for pulling up Netflix, Hulu, etc. or watching local movies. There's a tiny portable keyboard/touchpad combo for it as the "remote".
No TV allowed in our house (it's unrelated to ads: they didn't exist on TVs back when we decided to outlaw TVs at home).
I'm using something which is arguably both cheaper, bigger and gives more of a "cinema" feeling: a 1080p projector.
4K projector can be pricey, but there are a huge lot of very reasonably priced 1080p projectors. Just make sure to find one which is compatible with the size of your room (mine is in a big living room, so the smaller models weren't fit).
It's hooked to the system ceiling. If you don't like that look you can put them in a trap that comes down or use one of the newer, fancier, "short throw" ones.
The diagonal I have (for a few hundred bucks: 400 EUR IIRC) is something silly like about 350cm/138inches. Movies, sports, video streaming (Youtube or similar), ...
In my case it's the best solution: I love the theater feeling a projector gives and I definitely and positively hate the sharp and crisp pictures all these new TVs do give. Every time I see one at a friend I simply cannot stand the experience. And inversely: when friends come at home they're always impressed by how good the picture is from my cheap 1080p projector. I didn't even bother with the wall: I just project the picture on a regular blank wall. I didn't even make the wall perfectly flat: I just painted it white myself (and not even with a projector-specific paint: I had no idea these existed when I painted the wall).
It's getting used everyday since two years (had a 720p before that) and lamp use ain't even a concern.
As a bonus it's still trivial to find projectors without microphone listening to you 24/7 and which aren't sniffing on the HDMI ports.
Now I don't doubt that in the future we'll be graced with no other choice but "smart AI projectors", but that day hasn't arrived yet.
I did something similar and it works great. If you're worried about wanting to watch something during the day, get one of the laser projectors like Epson's. They're relatively cheap and work perfectly even without closing the curtains.
We just use a 43" LG 4k monitor. It has built-in speakers and no smarts at all. In combination with a Chromecast or similar, it works great as a "TV". I think the current model is 43UN700-B, which retails for ~$650. This screen also makes for a killer computer monitor, by the way :)
They are not that expensive, particularly when you consider you can have a 100" screen without needing to dedicate a whole lot of space - a pull-down screen can be rolled up when not in use.
So if I’m using a Samsung TV as a monitor and working on sensitive or classified material the damn thing is taking screenshots and uploading them? Yikes
It's funny, but I bought a dell monitor and I downloaded the manuals.
One of them was an unexpected white paper, which contained
this statement:
Statement of Volatility – Dell U3219Q Monitor
The purpose of this document is to certify that the Dell
U3219Q monitor will not save, retain, or reproduce a signal
to any internal or external component after power has been
removed and reapplied to the unit.
The Dell U3219Q monitor contains both volatile and
non-volatile (NV) memory ICs. Volatile memory(s) lose their
data immediately upon removal of power. Non-volatile memory
ICs continue to retain their data even after the power has
been removed. However, no input video data is written into
these memory ICs during operation.
List below contains volatile and non volatile memory ICs
used in the Dell U3219Q monitor."
Then it had a table for each storage chip within the monitor
with its purpose and characteristics including:
- system eeprom
- hdmi edid eeprom
- system flash rom
- usb hub eeprom
- pd controller flash rom
"How to desolder power from your built in 5G network adapter"
I give it 20 years before we have to root our TV's to disable tracking while keeping it functional - and that might be optimistic - the industry could get there in under 10 if they tried hard.
Hypothetically because I’d be using it as a monitor part time and using the built in shit the other part of the time? In actuality I do as you suggest and don’t ever connect the thing to the internet. Operation Weeping Angel was enough to convince me of that.
You'll see highly targeted ads on all Roku devices -- like based on what you search for and which show/movie listings you view. However, AFAIK ACR is only on when Roku the TV OS. AFAIK, for ACR, it's on when Roku is the TV OS but off when Roku is a standalone device. They don't make that totally clear, though, so you should check the device.
> We receive information about your interactions with the Roku Services, such as your browsing history, search history, search results, audio information when you use voice-enabled features, channels you access (including usage statistics such as what channels you access, the time you access them, and how long you spend viewing them), interactions with content and ads, and settings and preferences.
Like Samsung, TVs running Roku's OS use ACR and target ads based on that data:
> When you use a Roku TV with the Smart TV experience enabled, we use Automatic Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology to receive information about what live television content you watch via the Roku TV’s antenna, and what you watch via devices connected to your Roku TV, including cable and satellite set top boxes. For example, we receive TV viewing information such as the programs, commercials, and channels you view, the date, time and duration of the viewing, and how you use the on-screen TV guide. We receive TV viewing information both when you access live TV directly through your Smart TV’s interface and when you access live TV from within a Third-Party Channel. If the Smart TV experience is enabled on your Roku TV, we will use this information to personalize your TV viewing experience and ads.
I worked on that.
It sends audio and/or video fingerprints (not frames, for privacy and bandwidth reasons), which are matched against a fingerprint database. Whatever people see on TV is usually 10 to 60 seconds behind the real live stream at the broadcaster (which is where the reference fingerprinting happens). GeoIP data can be used to roughly deduce where the TV is located, in order to better filter out false positives out of multiple matches (e.g. in the US where lots of programming on east/west side is just shifted by ~3 hours due to time difference)."
For those that aren't running Pi-hole, you can use NextDNS instead on all your devices and router ... and it has a Samsung blocklist that you can enable easily.
NO! Beware! It has been demonstrated by multiple research groups [0] that Pi-hole DOES NOT stop this tracking by your televisions. I hated having to type that sentence. The future is stupid.
Before I disconnected my Samsung TV from the internet, it was responsible for the majority of DNS queries blocked by Pi-hole on my home network. I'm not sure if it blocked everything though.
Soon it won't be enough with DNS over HTTPS becoming more popular. It's probably still ok to use pihole, but if you want to be safer, you'll have to block https to 1.1.1.1 (and other providers) as well.
It seems to be. I had to white list one or two domains to make it all work again. In retrospect, that may have been for a free service they since broke so maybe I should rip those out too.
I had one of those TVs. The ads show up in the menu bar. I called them and told them I paid over a thousand dollars for this TV and do not want ads. They said they'd be happy to help me disable my internet connection. I was so dumbfounded at the petty response that I simply hung up.
Lost a customer for life. I will never again buy a Samsung product.
Last TV I bought the salesperson wanted to push a Samsung TV on me, despite my very clear telling of "I dislike samsung". Guy insisted over and over and over. Ended up in the store opposite the mall, where Good Salesman approaches as I walk in:
-I want a new TV.
-I have this great Samsung model.
-I hate Samsung.
-I have this great LG model!
Funny thing, the that TV came with webOS, which after being bought and sold over a few times, ended up at LG. It works pretty well, never had an issue with it.
LG makes great TVs, they were one of the last manufacturers to stop doing plasma. My 2015 50" (50PN5300) 1080p plasma screen is only rivaled by new OLEDs, doubles as a space heater in winter time :) This one still has their old Netcast OS.
The newer webOs models with magic remote that you can use as a pointer are super nice too, but admittedly my 43UJ701V sometimes does reboot it self, the old Netcast plasma is rock solid.
I landed on LG because my requirements were "no Android" and "I hate Samsung", LG are the only ones left pretty much.
Cant share my enthusiasm for LG TVs.
We have one not yet smart model from around 2015.
Over few software updates it got itself to state where the TV is totally unresponsive to any remote input for up to 1 minute after starting, including volume buttons. If you happen to turn the TV off with high volume from a quiet film, you gonna stand there listening to loud ads next time you run it, and hate every second of it.
The EPG button starts a process that takes about 10 secons everytime to get to actual EPG (screen black and sound stops, epg loading pic, loading finished animation, epg core lines, epg loading data, epg filling up the data, epg resumes playback in a small window inside the epg). Every single time. It shows you 6 channels, and if you keep pressing down you get stuck on a down arrow. Pressing down on a down arrow wont show you next 6 channels, you gotta press down button on remote to get to down arrow in menu, and then press center to actuate the down arrow in the menu. Horrendous.
The only sane way to sort channels is to make a backup of settings on USB, edit the textfile on your PC, and load it back. This I only found out by chance and desperation, even LG support denied any other option than to manually press "move up/down" button on a each channel you want to move for 30+ times to get it where you want.
Factory reset doesnt help, support doesnt help, nothing helps. I will never buy LG TV again.
I'll admit my usecase is probably not the most common: I don't have cable, and I just use the device for watching online videos. Which, as karolist said:
> I landed on LG because my requirements were "no Android" and "I hate Samsung", LG are the only ones left pretty much.
I bought a Samsung smart TV in 2014. I then went abroad for a few years, and came back in 2016.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, the whole smart hub stopped working. The answer was the update the smart hub. Unfortunately, you have to update the smart hub through the smart hub which doesn’t work.
Samsung support was useless. I now have a “dumb” TV with a separate Apple TV and it’s much, much better.
Depending on the TV, you can update them via USB. Can stick them in dev mode and sideload apps too. On my last Samsung it was the only way to use twitch/plex on the thing.
I do the same except I use a small fanless NUC running Linux Mint which I control with the top of the line Logitech blue tooth "thumb ball" mouse. Aggravations vanquished.
Do you have any suggestions for a good mouse for it? I currently use a Logitech combination keyboard/track pad, but it has been connecting worse over the past few years, and I am looking for a replacement.
Yes, I recommend the Logitech MX Ergo Plus trackball mouse. It's expensive but sometimes on sale. I like it because it doesn't have to "move around" like a regular mouse, so it can just sit on the arm of the sofa (or whatever). It takes about 2-3 hours to get used to if you haven't had a "thumball" before but after that you'll totally forget what kind of mouse you're using.
How do you handle streaming when all of the services refuse to stream 4K on any computer? I think Netflix does HD bit Hulu and HBO are like 720p. It's like watching a torrent from 2005.
720 to 4K is not the same as 480p to 720. The latter is far more noticeable. Most of the world hasn’t moved to 4K, I don’t see a huge amount of value in it personally.
When I first started seeing those ads on my wife's TV, I thought I'd block the telemetry servers with my router. She happens to be using a free AT&T router, turns out it does not have an option to block hosts like a regular router.
Samsung really needs to just flush their entire software division. It's all garbage. Their android software is a frustrating joke. Tizen is a hot mess. Every issue I've ever had with a samsung product was with their software, and it's why I've sworn off the brand as a whole.
I had been getting frustrated with my Oneplus and upgrade to an S10, and every once in awhile I wish that I hadn't. It's death by a thousand cuts, from engineers and management who have no respect for the user. Off the top of my head, within the past week, I've had:
* The wifi slows down to <1mbps every morning. Restarting wifi fixes this.
* The entire bixby button. It can finally be remapped, but occasional double taps (like using volume in the dark) will still open it.
* The weather 'Current temperature' widget updates every two days. Current temperature. Current. Two days.
* Random notifications to sign up for Samsung services that I don't want. You cannot swipe them away. You have to open the app and decline their EULA to get rid of it.
* Disappearing notifications
* Needing to reboot every week, or getting slowdowns
* Only two years of updates (an entire android problem)
Obviously all of these problems can be fixed, and many aren't exclusive to samsung, but dealing with all of them continuously is just grating. I had been planning to buy a Samsung Frame TV before I heard all this stuff about their ads.
Do you have a link or list for services to disable? I went through this list[0] for my S9 and at least I got rid of the Bixby button, the Samsung Share shortcuts, and a few other crapwares. Some Samsung junk still left though, and names are cryptic enough that I'm not sure what would or wouldn't break (for me, obviously depends on what you use).
Don't forget all those bundled spyware and bloatware services/apps of which most can be disabled through arduous labour but then magically get re-enabled every time you update the OS.
The management maybe. I have a hard time believing that the rank and file engineers get to call the shots on this garbage. I have no special insight into how Samsung works internally though.
I've talked with coworkers who visited the Samsung mobile division headquarters. They all reported that it was a horrorshow, top-to-bottom.
Things like: They hired a contractor to modify a website used for thousands of staff to log in, but they had him modify the production system live because they were too cheap to build a dev system. Several days of everyone sitting on their hands in the morning ensued. Several.
Another fun one was that instead of using Access Control Lists and unique accounts for Active Directory security, like rest of the world does it, everyone is an admin, there's no security, but your IP address is logged. You are your network address, it's assigned to you like a user name. If anything 'bad' is logged from it, you are blamed and/or fired. So, it's basically network security through punishment instead of... you know... actual security.
> I have no special insight into how Samsung works internally though.
The typical culture at one of these conglomerates is highly paternalistic in nature. Much of the environment is defined by the chairman who acts as a "fatherly-figure" to his subordinates.
At one point...not that many years ago....samsung was using excel spreadsheets for bug tracking in house....and that's the beginning of the rabbit home. Let them sink in.
I replaced my Pixel 2 with a Samsung S20 and I haven't had any problems with the software. In fact I like it. Perhaps I have poor taste in phones but it seems it isn't just me given their sales relative to Google phones.
Samsung's current OneUI is actually pretty good and adds a lot of useful features to stock Android. I also like the way they've integrated the s pen on the Note recently. Older versions of TouchWiz had a deservedly bad reputation but I'm pretty happy with the software on my Note 20 and the hardware is fantastic.
They make amazing phones, but yes, their software overlay is trash, IMO. I have a Samsung TV too and don't have it connected to the network so I don't have to deal with the smart TV crap.
Samsung's site selling Ads to those who buy them states clearly that TV's, Phones and Tablets are all monitored and viable options for delivery of ads, and the accurate determination of those who use them.
Their privacy policy is terrifying. They can access anything on a Samsung device.
Some highlights:
When you purchase a Samsung product, create a Samsung Account or register for or use a Service, you may provide us with personal information such as:
-information you store on your device, such as photos, contacts, text logs, touch interactions, settings and calendar information
-recordings of your voice when you use voice commands to control a Service or contact our Customer Service team
-location data, including (1) the precise geolocation of your device if you consent to the collection of this data and (2) information about nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers that may be transmitted to us when you use certain Services.
Hardware is nice but the software is a minefield of dark UI patterns. I think my S8+ had 10 or more prompts I had to reject to not have my data absolutely scooped up. Still found it syncin photos to some cloud service
I keep seeing people who argue that TVs would be notably "more expensive" if they didn't come with ads.
Let's say that the average Samsung TV costs $1,000, ad revenue per person is around $30 a year, and the average lifespan of a TV is 10 years. I own a Samsung TV since 2016. I think they may have pushed 5 firmware updates since then.
There is no way I can be convinced that Samsung needs to increase the price of TVs by 20%. Also, if that's the difference, why can't I just pay more and opt out? And why are other users in other countries not being shown ads?
Because they one day realised they can make you pay more and show you ads to get both of the moneys
Honestly this is why I fully back adblockers of all kinds. Companies associated with ad tech would do much worse if they thought they could get away with it
That is exactly what happened with cable TV. Their main selling point was no commercials because you were paying for it. Now just sitting down and watching something on cable is a chore. I gave up and built my own library of things to watch. Was visiting some family and was watching a marathon of some show. It was the same 10 commercials over and over. Each break was usually 3-5 mins long. It was a good reminder of why I buy my own media.
People who could afford to opt-out have more money than people who can't, and are thus more attractive to advertisers. They want/need you in the consumer pool.
I keep seeing people who argue that TVs would be notably "more expensive" if they didn't come with ads.
Yeah, ad revenue couldn't possibly be just "found revenue" to layer on top of existing profits. Why folks are so willing to carry water for corporations, by making unsubstantiated excuses for them, mystifies me.
> Why folks are so willing to carry water for corporations, by making unsubstantiated excuses for them, mystifies me.
Because if you don't keep making excuses for them, you're left with the alternative: doing a bunch more work yourself, which many people don't find remotely enjoyable.
Which reminds me, I need to go and try installing Axolotl on my PinePhone again :)
> Because if you don't keep making excuses for them, you're left with the alternative
Well, except for the alternative of not watching content with excessive ads at all. If companies feel like they need intrusive ads I guess I they can do that, but they are dead to me and my life is better for it.
You do know how much tracking goes on right? It's far from just a matter of paying for ad free content. Hence I'm trying to migrate to PinePhone and get the hell off Android.
> I keep seeing people who argue that TVs would be notably "more expensive" if they didn't come with ads.
In a competitive market, you can certainly imagine a situation where this would be true. Competition should drive prices as low as they can go, and if manufacturers make money from ads, they can afford to not make a profit off hardware (and maybe even sell it at a loss).
In which case, the questions are:
1) Is this a trade-off we're okay with? (Advertisements and privacy violations in exchange for cheaper televisions.)
2) How can we support a business environment that leads to this outcome?
We ought to focus on #2 anyway, for all sorts of reasons.
For #1, I think it's fairly easy to say "no, everyone should have a guaranteed right to privacy", but as a fairly well-off person, I'm not sure I'm comfortable making that decision for everyone else.
> I keep seeing people who argue that TVs would be notably "more expensive" if they didn't come with ads.
Even if that were true, it ignores a very important question - where does that ad money come from?
Companies buy ads (to get you to spend money on something you don't need, or due to an arms race with their competitors, fighting over a limited market) with money the get from consumers, that pay more for their products.
All ads "contribute" to society is change in consumer behavior, that is ultimately paid by those same consumers. Even ignoring that behavior change, consumers are, on the whole, financially hurt, not helped, by ads.
I hate (and block) ads everywhere I can, but if we take your numbers as a starting point, doesn't that $30/yr translate to an extra $300 for Samsung in those 10 years, a 30% boost in their income on the sale of your TV? My naive assumption is that they make more money on ads in the short run, which is why they're doing it. But they may (should!) lose money in the long run if competitors can sell ad-free alternatives at a decent price...
I think one thing to watch out for is revenue vs profits. So while it might be more revenue, the ad system needs infrastructure, developers, troubleshooting, sales department, etc, etc.
So I'd be really curious how this equates to the profit on the TV, and how much those costs can be amortized between the install base vs actual revenue per user.
At previous company (wireless telco), while not the same thing, we had the intercepting DNS that everyone hates, for typo'd queries redirect to our own search page. I asked one time how much we make in the ad revenue on that, and the basic napkin math was that we were probably losing money. Just the amount of time, complaints, maintenance, keeping it running, etc burned hundreds of hours a year. But it was buried in other budgets so the company thought they were making money.
Even then I don't know how they justified it, it was peanuts compared to mainline revenue.
Absolutely - it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's a money-losing proposition for Samsung, you'd hope that someone, somewhere in their Accounting dept. might notice that as well...
To be fair, I never thought about that: my current TV is 1080p 32 inches and I'm looking at it from a couple of meters. I wouldn't know where to place something twice as wide as that. Anyway, it's still OK and I hope I don't need a new one soon but I'll check the prices. Thanks.
You can't get a monitor that is good at being a TV, as TVs are. You also can't get a TV that is as good at being a monitor, as a monitor is. At competitive prices of course. They are designed for different things.
>Also, if that's the difference, why can't I just pay more and opt out?
Because people who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are even more valuable to advertisers. If the average lifetime revenue per user is $300, the average revenue per user who wants to pay to get rid of ads might be $500. If that's the case the manufacturer would need to charge you $500 just to be even.
The ad revenue is all profit, though. I have no idea what the bill-of-materials is on a Samsung TV, but hardware generally doesn't have as good profit margins as software for obvious reasons. If they are doubling their profits, I mean, I don't like it but I see why they're doing it.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to think that they are trying to exploit this particular ad market, without lowering the markup on their hardware?
Samsung TVs are not cheaper than the competition. In fact, their mid and high tiers are expensive, compared to LG. On the low tier, other brands like TLC or Vizio are still cheaper.
I spent around $1,200 on my 4K HDR Samsung TV a few years ago. It was great, but lately has been unbearably slow and frustrating to the point where we'd stop watching TV in the living room all together. Not a great experience.
To try to remedy the issue (knowing it was slowed down by the disgusting ad platform), I installed a Pi Hole in the house to see if that would alleviate the problem. The TV felt a bit less clunky but Pi Hole seemed to have some issues with some of the installed apps - primarily Hulu, so I needed another solution. The Pi Hole statistics were terrifying at around 12,000 blocked Samsung requests per day (around 6-7 hours of shared TV usage).
I researched Amazon FireSticks, Roku's, etc. I needed something easy for my family and kids to use (they are not as techy) and I wanted an interface that was buttery smooth. While I am very much not an Apple fan, last night I picked up the 4K Apple TV to test and so far it seems to be decent. There are some things I would change with the platform for sure, but it is overall pretty intuitive so my family can just pick up the remote and go.
I factory reset my Samsung TV and completely removed the network from it. It was sad to see how responsive the TV was again after the reset. You can be sure I will not be buying another Samsung TV!
> The Pi Hole statistics were terrifying at around 12,000 blocked Samsung requests per day (around 6-7 hours of shared TV usage)
The stats can be misleading. It's just trying over and over again when it has a failure. If the first attempt was successful, you would have a lot less requests.
Typically I would suggest not connecting your TV to any sort of internet connection - firmware updates don't typically tend to add or fix much on these devices. If you really have an issue, update the firmware, factory reset and then disable wifi / unplug ethernet.
Someone in a previous thread mentioned Sceptre TVs. They are dumb. Incredibly low priced but quality models available (55" 4k HDR HDMI 2.0 for $300) [1]. They have 30yrs experience. Seems a good company. Have high-end models too.
They advertise the display as HDR but the specs say its brightness is a quite poor 280cd/m^2. A proper HDR TV should have quite a bit higher brightness.
I consider HDR to be a far greater improvement in visuals compared to 4k, and something which made my jaw drop the first time I saw it at home watching The Reverend on my Samsung top-end model.
You cant even get qualified as HDR below 400, and 400 is already ... a bit meaningless. Hollywood and TV authors content for 1000, and theres a mighty disconnect between these first few generations and what the content requires.
To make this worse, my several year old U2414Hs can reach 280 at 100%. Those are inexpensive, standard, 1080p IPS office monitors, that have rather good color consistency for being low $2xx each... and also like 5 years old.
I reckon contrast is more important than peak brightness. The eye is good at adjusting to brightness, and 1000 nits just seems overkill. You might need that much if the TV is surrounded by a white wall directly lit by the sun, but in normal indoor lighting conditions it just seems excessive.
It might be noticeable, but as someone who has trouble dialling down the brightness far enough to make them comfortable to look at, I'm not sure if I'd want it to be that bright. That might just be a personal preference though, obviously.
I used to have one, it lasted ~5 years before the display stopped working due to some sort of internal electronics failure. IIRC, the reason they're cheap is because they're off-brand Samsung TVs that failed QA testing.
I had one ~eight years ago. It worked fine. Not a cinophile though, so can't really comment on anything there. Am a gamer; no noticeable smearing and no detectable input lag greater than any other TV. We ended up getting rid of it after a move caused it to get damaged. Only thing really of note I can remember was it was fairly heavy, but I never compared it against other TVs being sold around that time so can't say it was due to the brand.
I do. 75" version. Was budget price, decent picture. Only gripe is that it's slow to turn on versus my other TVs. Is otherwise solid, though isn't used often, but have had it for ~2-3 years now I believe and no major complaints.
I've got one - an older 1080, though. Got it for $50 when my roommate at the time had to return to China on short notice and had to get rid of most of his stuff.
It's fine. Takes a while to turn on but otherwise just works. I'm not super-discriminating about display quality, but nothing about the display has ever bothered me.
The panels, I understand, are inferior to name-brand TVs. Poorer viewing angle, poorer color reproduction, and I thought I heard they have some funky pixel arrangement (not pentile, but similar) which means that 3840x2160 isn't really 3840x2160.
I have one of these as my main tv's. yeah brightness is kinda low. but now complains it works great for watching tv, playing xbox here and there. and it was cheap af.
I’d rather have no telly at all than buying some crap Samsung tv for €2.000 only to see their programmatic advertising. Whoever at Samsung decided this must be drunk! But hey, I guess there still are enough people around who don’t care.
I bought a TCL Roku TV and thankfully the only ads are on the home screen where you select the input or app.[a] I can’t imagine watching video from an input and the TV deciding I want an ad on top of my movie.
[a] I don’t delude myself into thinking this won’t change, but so far, I can just tune out (no pun intended) the ad on the side. Not to mention that the ads are of shows and movies, not products (which would be worse).
I have 2 TLC Roku TVs. One I use as a large monitor for my desktop. I’m very happy with them. I mostly watch Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime video and have never noticed the ads on the navigation screen (since they are just tv shows).
I’m planning to get YouTube premium to remove ads there and vote with my money for an ad-free Internet.
I never imagined that they would be spying on the actual video output, but I would consider that not only a major violation of privacy but corporate espionage (because I use it for work).
I don’t believe that is the case, but I’ll be researching if that is being done.
There are specs for in-stream video advertising [0], as in, the provider injects a 'commercial break' into whatever you're streaming. These cannot be ad-blocked.
They can still be mitigated. At the very least you can blank the video/audio while the ads are on. Personally I'd just get the pirated version, which has the ads cut out for me. If you already paid for the service I don't see anything morally wrong with that.
"ACR is a technology that (with device-owner permission) reads pixels on a smart, internet-connected device screen as it delivers content to a . . . consumer—on a second by second basis. A recent Forbes article explains that the data is then shared with the manufacturer’s tracking software, matching them to a database that keeps track of local broadcasts and other [TV or video] content sources."
I used to work in advertising, and it's remarkable how clueless and out the industry is about consumer feedback on this. There's constant back patting without realizing the actual ire shoppers have after spending $2k on a TV and still being sold as a product.
It's wilfull. They havecto live ib denial, or they don't have a job.
I know someone who started a job at a tobacco company. He went from 'of course they cause cancer, you're an idiot if you smoke' to 'everybody dies from something, it's not that bad, the media are against us, it's inconclusive'.
I would rather not work for a company that contracts to the government, but here I am paying my student loans with their money because that's the job that was available.
So we can help you find and reach the missing millions - the cord-cutters, cord-shavers, cord-nevers and everyone in between
We will find you and we will spam you. You can't hide from us. Were watching, were tracking.
I really can't imagine myself ever buying a samsung tv. I mean they're quite blunt about their intentions, nothing to be surprised about when they're shouting about advising to cord cutters on their website.
This really is the only viable option right now, and specifically only the Apple TV. The Shield and Chromecast are slight improvements, but of the mainstream TV choices, Apple TV is literally the only product that puts your privacy first.
Is a there a good collection of Idevice apps somewhere that we can take and compile and use for this purpose? I am starting to go down the path of making my own simple versions of popular apps like Twitter or pulling the backend apis of other apps for stores all in an effort to remove as much tracking as I can while still keeping functionality.
For example, there is a popular convenience store app that gives discounts on items such as coffee but in addition to the standard tracking, I also discovered code that indicates they are using bluetooth beacons to do in store tracking. Instead I am pulling their api to fetch the deals so I can ditch the app. Would be great if there is an existing collection so I can ditch more official apps more easily.
Ah yes I remember AltStore when it came out. Left it on my phone for a while but all that was ever published was his emulator(which kept crashing btw). I wonder if the store has improved since.
This is a temporary measure. Soon enough, they will have 5G or 6G modems inside, a special arrangement with carriers (a la Amazon’s whispernet), and You would have to wrap it in tinfoil to stop it from reporting on your viewing habits and showing you ads.
IIRC don't Samsung TVs already connect to any open access point they can find in an attempt to upload analytics, or was that Vizio? I definitely remember someone was doing that, meaning not connecting to the network only worked if there were no open APs around.
I'm sure soon enough the TVs will refuse to boot unless connected to the internet.
I recently turned on my Vizio to see it had updated its firmware and I was forced to accept terms of use and privacy policies from both Vizio and Google before I could do anything else on the TV. It was essentially bricked unless I accepted. I accepted, then immediately unplugged the TV from the network, removed the WiFi information and manually entered bad DNS settings. I rebooted the TV and it reconnected to WiFi automatically! Not happy. Forget network, re-enter bad settings, check router logs... it’s no longer connected in any way that I’m aware of, through my network anyway. Very negative experience.
Don't these guys just do deals with the wifi hotspots from comcast for backhaul? My understanding is the move for hotspots is to have a "guest" spot show up automatically that other comcast users and third parties comcast sells access to can use.
Samsung pays a bit to get access to this and voila - they can skip the internet setup steps (so more consumer friendly) and block you from blocking their ads / ACR (consumer not friendly).
They would also need to to root the TV as well, as it will refuse to work without said modem being functional. This is a losing game, and it seems like the only recourse is regulatory.
Samsung M series phones from India are essentially subsidized for Ads, they have all major International data hoarder apps, Indian equivalents and their Samsung equivalents.
Apps from Samsung's app store masquerades like security updates and constantly prompts to install.
I made the mistake of buying them for my parents, even though they use their phone just for WhatsApp like most Indian parents, each of their phones generates ~2000 DNS requests/week which I'm dutifully sinking into PiHole.
There could be, but as I mentioned WhatsApp is important for them and AFAIK WhatsApp updates are finicky with 3rd party ROMs as they explicitly detect them and ofcourse Playstore itself is not straightforward.
Besides, Suprisingly Samsung pushes almost regular monthly android security updates for these devices.
LOS updates are usually monthly as well (as long as there's a maintainer around). Play Store can be gotten very easily by flashing one of the OpenGAPPS packages after the OS install.
Not sure what problem you would have with WhatsApp, as it works fine for me and I arguably have an even more unusual setup than you would have with LOS and Gapps. (Using LOS, but with microG instead of Google Services)
I have purposefully not set up the smartTV features for any of my TVs, and on one of them I actually opened it up and removed the WiFi card.
It's not exactly rocket science to plug in an NVidia Shield TV or an Amazon Fire Stick, so I don't really mind using those, but I don't like having any kind of implicit spying being done to me by my TV...I kind of feel like TVs should remain a "neutral" platform.
I'm still rocking a 65" Panasonic plasma connected to a laptop from the late 00's running an ancient build of ubuntu. That said, the TV still works flawlessly, even after everything around it died to 2 different lightning strikes. The old linux install still runs Hulu, Netflix, VLC, etc without difficulties, so I don't bother screwing with it.
It sounds like if I have to replace my TV, I am going to have to look into more expensive commercial offerings which aren't subsidized by Orwellian monitoring solutions.
Basic TVs are a power supply, a video board, a LCD screen, and a t-con board that can drive it. The power supply will also need to drive the LED backlight.
Anyone could order the parts and put their own TV together, it really isn't as crazy as people think.
Made a mental note to buy only the dumb tv. If I want streaming options I would rather setup my own. Or for non-tech I would recommend dumb tv + apple tv or Chromecast
It’s getting harder and harder to. I ended up buying a projector and a screen, large TVs are pretty much all infected with this kind of “smart os” and I don’t want a tv constantly asking to be connected to the internet so it can download adware.
The term you're looking for is "Commercial Signage" or "Large-Format Displays" [1]
This is of course US based but there are other vendors for North America, and I'm sure for EuroAsia and beyond.
You're paying more for the fact that some models are built to last longer, and the fact there's no wireless or smart junk.
> You're paying more for the fact that some models are built to last longer
Not just built to last longer, but built to last in a lot of different environments (heat, cold, humidity, vandalism, vibrations) whereas consumer TVs are optimized to run at 20-25 °C in a home where they will be rarely moved. The QA on the panels is much more rigorous, too (it's the same thing as with Intel CPUs, the yield on panels hitting the standards for commercial signage is lower than your average consumer TV).
Also, you'll be getting spare parts for these in a decade if you need it (or, at the very least, can purchase a new device with identical specs in that time), there will be support from the manufacturer over that time, and more often than not you'll be able to find decent documentation about how to integrate them into whatever you're building.
And: some of these carry amazing features. Some two years ago when I was doing videography stuff for an event, there were four 60 inch full-HD monitors in a 2x2 grid - supplied with one DVI cable for the signal that was passed between them using in daisy chain mode, they were configurable to run in grids of up to 4x4 I believe, and the monitors simply took the incoming signal, cropped their section out of it, and displayed it scaled. Was a hell of a lot of fun playing with them.
Instead of a dumb TV you can get a public/info/business display and add an external tuner or video source if needed. Finding one that supports HDR can get a bit tricky though since that's not their major selling point, but they do exist.
Ironically I'll link a Samsung [1] but there are options.
Home theater enthusiasts (ugh) will of course berate you because "YOu'RE PaYING MORE For LESS FeAATURES!!", which is true. I haven't yet found a commercial display offering Dolby Vision.
This is getting slightly more difficult to do lately, depending on where you live. In northern Sweden where there aren't very many different stores nearby, options were quite limited when we bought a TV several months ago. Every unit over a certain size, like maybe 32"(?), was a smart TV.
When I was looking at monitor options I saw Dell offering conference-room monitors that were the size of a conventional TV and price wasn't that much expensive so maybe this is the solution.
Just price usually, since they tend to marketed towards enthusiasts/professionals vs general consumer markup of big tvs in my experience. But this is what I would do if I couldn’t setup a projector.
Absolutely. If forced (as in there are no dumb tv options that are viable), I'd reluctantly buy a smart TV, but I'd never let it actually connect it up.
This has worked for us so far. We don't watch broadcast TV, nor do we have cable/satellite. We hooked an internet-connected pi w/ kodi, and it's been going fine.
This should just straight out be forbidden and regulation is the only way out of it.
Voting with money is not going to stop this as all major players with high-end devices are pushing this. On top of it, this information is usually a nice surprise after you already bought and setup the device.
To even further push the boundaries, they are adding (more) advertising to devices that have been purchased years ago!
I think Apple needs to make a TV set. Only then will the marketing message for TV privacy gets pushed through.
But from another angle, I think majority of population would not mind targeted advertising if that means their TV are much cheaper. If we think about it, it is kind of ridiculously cheap you can get a 4K 40" LCD TV delivered to you for under $300.
I don’t think it would matter if Apple made a TV. It has made little difference for phones and computers. No one else cares and Apple just get blamed for reserving privacy for the wealthy.
Well, first I dont think anyone is blaming Apple for resaving privacy for wealthy.
Second being iPhone users continues to grow. Although at a much slower pace. So there must be some kind of reason people are still jumping from Android to iPhone.
I just don't believe that TVs really get cheaper because of this. My 65'' $2000 model is also affected by this with advertising getting more annoying with post-buy updates. Like unsolicited automatically playing movie teasers when I turn the TV on.
I thought about this before writing that paragraph. The issue is much more similar to having advertisment on the home screen of your smartphone than using a service.
It would be more similar to your ISP injecting advertisement in your traffic and displaying it on top of the websites you visit rather than advertisement in the website.
The issue is deeper than advertisement itself. It's that it is unsolicited pushed into devices that are meant to consume other content.
I bought the top-end 65" model from Samsung a few years ago. Judging by this my next TV won't be a Samsung.
One thing is how annoying most ads are. Ad networks has proven themselves time and time again to be excellent attack vectors for all kinds of nasty. I don't want that on a device I paid thousands of dollars for!
I have ~5 years old Samsung smart tv.
I've disconnected it from the network almost a year ago.
I have cheap Android tv box for all my "smart" needs, I will probably replace it with a mini pc once it die.
Those moves only makes me want more control over my setup.
I propose a different solution to this problem. If I find an add on my tv, I don't buy the product. I tell the company that I don't buy it because of that. It's not perfect, but it does get some companies attention.
It started out with a few innocuous ads, then it got worse and worse until at one point it started displaying adult ads on a device that was on prominent display in people's homes. There was quite a backlash.
I bought one of these, partly because the in-store advertising/info panel said it was capable of fax.
I returned it the next day after unboxing it and discovering that the fax capability was actually just the ability to connect to an Amstrad-operated gateway, that used a premium-rate number, costing something like 50p/minute.
Lone voice here I guess - I have a mid/high range Samsung TV and love it. Picture quality is brilliant and it looks good on the wall.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advert on it from Samsung - where are they appearing exactly? I just switch between terrestrial TV and various apps like Netflix and Amazon on the bottom navigation bar and don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Might be wrong though!
Like you I also had a mid/high range Samsung TV. The ads were not as obtrusive being only on the bottom left of the menu bar, but its the ACR that I needed to get away from.
> Samsung Smart TVs have built-in Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology that can understand viewing behavior and usage including programs, movies, ads, gaming content and OTT apps in real-time.[0]
Literally every second or two, Samsung was performing some screen reading data collection and sending it off to their servers. My Pi Hole was capturing 12,000 blocked requests from this per day (6-7 hours of shared family viewing). This resulted in a poor user experience where I would feel the actually latency when trying to navigate around or open the menu. After factory resetting my TV it was so snappy again. Plugged in an AppleTV and haven't looked back. This form of advertising is incredibly invasive and disgusting to me, with constant spying/screenshotting of the content I am viewing.
Samsung's hardware capabilities are impressive - quantum dot active matrix displays (for example) present a technology that is fundamentally superior to anything they compete with.
However, they seem to be rampantly anti-consumer - not only selling user data, but overcharging on everything they sell.
They also hobble their hardware with software designed by a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys.
They're also perfectly happy to engage in whatever legally dubious practices that they can get away with.
I wonder if there is a market for dumb TVs. They basically don't exist today. Closest thing I could get was a Dell conference room monitor, which is $1200 for a 55 inch, and $4500 for a 75 inch. A far cry from the $700 I spent on my current 75 inch TV, but I'm strongly considering it.
A smart TV can be a dumb TV if you never connect it to the internet and just plug in whatever you want to it via HDMI. I have a 'smart' TV myself and the only buttons I use on the remote are power and input select. It's never seen the internet since I've had it.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before these TVs require 'activation' and frequent 'reactivation' before you can use them though. Alternatively they may perhaps start connecting to cellular networks, which would be a lot harder to evade.
> Alternatively they may perhaps start connecting to cellular networks, which would be a lot harder to evade.
Just wait until 5G is ubiquitous and new TVs come with embedded cellular modems in them. They they won't need to piggy-back on your standard internet connection anymore.
The always-online video game is already a thing. Single player campaigns that require an internet connection. I would not be surprised if we someday see TVs that won't work at all without a network connection.
I'd imagine any one of cell networks, mesh connections to nearby tvs, partnering with xfinity for wifi (or similar in China), jumping onto your neighbor's unsecured wifi, etc.
My nonintenernet connected tv takes probably 5ish seconds to boot. Which for a tv is crazy long but it's a low end westinghouse tv that I've never connected to my network. I use chromecast with it, so google can spy on me instead I suppose.
What exactly is the point of intentionally misinterpreting what someone said just to make a semantic and pedantic argument that adds nothing because everyone already knew what the person said?
I've got 3 dumb TVs in my house from the mini-stock up I did a few years ago when it looked like they were going away. They're all Samsungs, oddly enough. A 50", a 55", and a 60". My only hope is that they last long enough to come out the other side of the only-Smart-TVs tunnel.
Yeah, they're "only" 1080p, but then again, my movie collection is mostly standard definition anyway. I realized that I don't need higher than that if I'm enjoying a movie/TV show: I stop noticing the picture quality once the story quality surpasses it.
There are brands - such as Loewe and Bang&Olufsen - who respect the end-user, and make fantastic TVs.
But people generally don’t want to pay the premium amount that they cost.
I believe both of those brands can only be bought/received in their relevant stores of which there are few (my local Bang & Olufsen is permanently closed and I'm lucky to have had a local one) or none (in the case of Loewe which is only in Europe).
You can find 30-60" 1080P "dumb" TVs for >$400 relatively easily, but 4K/8K/bigger panels are almost always "smart". These big modern panels are a commodity and the manufacturers snap them up to use in the fastest selling models.
Hopefully in the next 2-10 years we will see a renaissance of high quality affordable dumb TVs as people continue to learn about data collection/ads/etc
Copy pasting my comment from above:
Someone in a previous thread mentioned Sceptre TVs. They are dumb. Incredibly low priced but quality models available (55" 4k HDR HDMI 2.0 for $300) [1]. They have 30yrs experience. Seems a good company. Have high-end models too.
I am on an old Samsung must be at least a decade old and has zero internet connectivity. I really like my tv but lately the newer screens really just pop out the 1080 just doesn't cut it for me any more.
There's probably a market, but the question is how big? TV's have gotten so cheap because of the ads and data mining, so a TV that doesn't have that would be considerably more expensive.
People on HN might spend more for some privacy, but most average consumers definitely wouldn't.
I almost would like to see Apple release a television that has tvOS built in.
But isn’t that just the lie they tell us to justify it? Ads don’t bring in much money on a per individual basis. But if you sell the Tv with ads and tell people it’s the only way it is affordable, then you can double dip. Two revenue streams is always better than one. It also explains why no manufactures give you the option to buy a version without ads or to pay a onetime fee to disable the ads part of the software.
Thats unlikely to be true. Computer screens if comparable sizes (the ones that exist) have dipped in price in the same way, despite having no ads or apps or anything.
The prices are down because of process improvements and competition. Ads can make a $10-30 difference in final price.
I don't off hand, that's what I remember from past reading. However, for comparison, Facebook - one of the two undisputed masters (and essentially only players) of online advertising makes < $30/person/year [0], so to assume that Samsung is (a) making $30 on ads over three years (standard depreciation period), and (b) giving all of that back in the TV cost to the buyer seems like a generous overestimate. (Yes, you can insert whatever fudge factor you want, but I think the order is right, and I remember reading it in some article).
It's possible ACR is worth more to them than ads -- becoming a new Nielsen; but I would be very surprised.
This is the problem. We're so used to giving up privacy now that, slowly, they're chipping away at the small amount we have remaining. And it affects everyone.
I've bought a few non-smart TVs from Wal-mart: Sceptre brand. They were cheap and functional. I use them with Fire TV sticks, XBox, and this NUC that I've got sitting around.
We know that Samsung TVs aggressively try to connect from the internet and that they capture fingerprints from content played on them to show you ads. I, like a good number of other people, run an Apple TV, which has some ads, but nearly like Samsung (usually ads for content).
Does Samsung perform content fingerprinting on streams not played via the Samsung software (i.e. Apple TV content coming over HDMI)? Does the fingerprinting continue to work if you run your audio through a receiver and send no audio signal the TV?
I’m looking for ways to allow me to use my non-commercial Samsung TV (a nicer QLED TV from 2017) without having it spy on me. It’s on a VLAN that doesn’t allow outbound connections on my home network, but, honestly, I don’t trust Samsung.
Sadly, all major brands seem to do this, even with their highest class TVs. Sony was the last bastion but recently Google pushed an Android TV update and now it also has ads on the home screen.
Everyone realizes this is Roku’s entire business model as well, right? Their devices are sold basically at cost so they can serve you proprietary ads when you use their platform...
Someone needs to create a localized faraday field with adjustable size for shit like this.
But then the battle continues and they brick the device if it cant phone home with an endless reboot cycle or something. Why is this blatantly anti-consumer behavior not illegal? Companies continue to show us nothing is beneath them except for us.
I swore off Samsung products after my they updated the built in music player application on my ~3 year old S5. All of a sudden I was getting ads for Spotify trying to play mp3s from my SDCard.
Now: I will only get chinese phones running stock android.
Everybody's talking about TVs in comments, but Samsung also mentioned mobile, any idea of the form it can take ? And I guess the next step is cars, as they are also more and more connected...
I love the term "cord cutter" as if the Internet connection that plays their new media is somehow a different cord than the cord that their cable TV came in through.
I suspected HTTPS would become an antiprivacy tool as soon as Google started to push it so hard. It is funny how things turn out. Feel the need to evesdrop your own TV to ensure it doesn't rat on you ...
I am waiting for some manufacturer to add a camera disguised for remote work or something similar and then use it to pause ads when you are not looking. Spotify already does this.
Wanted to comment on this. I see this very differently than the Samsung situation. Spotify provides music for ads, unless you pat the subscription. I am not offended that Spotify would do this for their “free”/ad-supported users.
I pay for Spotify, I get no ads. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
> I pay for Spotify, I get no ads. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
And how long do you think this will last before they decide insert ads into paid subscriptions? Cable TV did it. "Full-price" games are doing it. TVs are doing it. It would be extremely naive to assume that spotify won't do it at some point.
Besides, my admittedly poorly-expressed objection is not to the ads themself but to the way people are being forced to listen to them by the company. There is no way in hell I'm supporting companies that engage in crap like this.
It already happened so many times for so many media formats that it /will/ happen with Spotify. Unfortunately for both of us, downvoting some random post online won't change this outcome.
Thinking about your MacBook show off ads while you are using it, and about Apple Ads. NO! Apple never does that. That's why I never use Samsung devices.
People should know that regardless of how they consume TV, , their viewing habits are logged, tracked and ultimately sold. Cable, satellite, IPTV, web, mobile etc. Its all being gathered and parsed by dozens, if not hundreds of entities. The only exception is over the air...
So getting upset at Samsung and plugging in a Chromecast or AppleTV or ROKU or whatever, is silly. They're all tracking you everywhere.
But there isnt a lot of demand from a lot sources. So the ads are not nearly as tailored as digital. But they can be. And eventually they'll be as creepy as the banners you are served after browsing thingamajigs. For now, you'll likely just get served Direct Response scatter and the same branded ad over and over...
I wonder what that stupid Rakuten TV button on my remote for "my" Samsung TV cost Rakuten to put there. I don't want a hardcoded quickbutton.
I haven't seen any dashboard ads on it yet but that is probably becouse there is no regional service yet where I live. I wonder if this is worth it for Samsung in the long term to piss their customers off and get the image of a cheap rippoff brand.
> I wonder what that stupid Rakuten TV button on my remote for "my" Samsung TV cost Rakuten to put there. I don't want a hardcoded quickbutton.
It's basically mandatory for Netflix at this point. Unless you're a very major provider they really want Netflix will not certify a device unless there's a Netflix button on it.
Appropriate? That's the wrong question.
Everything in the market is negotiable.
The question to ask is why Apple has more leverage.
(I think you will see the answer is "many, many reasons.")
It seems most people's concerns are around obtrusive ads on the home screen. Which I agree with, as those are very annoying and takes up way too much sense.
However, there is another component to Samsung Ads - the video ads on their Samsung Plus Channel. For those that don't know, this channel consists of free content (usually B-level movies, old TV series, etc).
Why does anyone have a problem if Samsung puts ads on this content? After all, it does cost them money to license most of this content, and if you don't want to watch those ads, you simply don't watch that content. Not to mention Youtube and everyone else has the same business model.
No one has a problem with Samsung putting ads on a channel with free content that you can choose not to watch. But to take screenshots of what you’re watching on your tv every 60 seconds, upload it to their servers, and use it to build a profile of you so that the ads on that channel can be more targeted should land some Samsung executives in prison.
Furthermore, pushing an automated software update to put ads inside the user interface of the TV where they previously didn’t exist should be illegal as well.
I'll take a shot. People are just done with ads. My samsung S20 ultra costs me ~1300, and has ads on the phone, as in the native Samsung apps for everything. And since none can be installed I now have worthless bloatware I had to replace with ad free working alternatives.
Samsung tvs are hilariously bad with ads all over.
On neither item is it possible to flash this crap away or disable it. People love to tout things being free for our data, but this is paying over $1k to still have some of the most intrusive ads ever.
You must own one of their products to watch their ads with shows thrown in (Samsung channel) and this means you have paid for access to that channel and are still being served disgustingly intrusive ads(as others pointed out they screen grab and send home images of everything you watch on any input)
The ACR-based retargeting audiences (https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...) are probably the most offensive. For example: "Reach viewers who saw your competitor’s ads as quickly as 60 seconds after linear ad airing." Since they're capturing and analyzing screenshots from all TV inputs (even HDMI sources), they can target based on not just what you're watching, but which ads you've seen. Games, movies, apps, whatever - they're capturing the actual image you're seeing in realtime.
I maintain a list of deep links to opt-out of data collection and sharing, mostly just because it pisses me off: https://simpleoptout.com/ . My site includes all of the TV manufacturers and TV OSes, but Samsung is easily the worst. As I wrote: "distinctly less customer-friendly than its peer companies. If it can be retained and shared, it probably is."