It's crazy that me jailbreaking a device voids its warranty, but companies can make these kinds of updates without any real consequence.
Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic, but if companies can turn what should be a basic device into an amorphous system that starts serving ads without the end-users consent after purchase, that should constitute a material change to the end product that was not appropriately advertised.
This is the exact kind of thing that consumer protection laws should be able to cover.
I comment this under any similar threads in the past and will continue to for any Australians who don’t know, but this would be a valid reason for a return/refund under Australian law. A company can’t remove or “functionally change” features after you’ve bought a product, or if they do, you’re allowed to return it for a refund.
I’ve done this in the past with a few different pieces of tech already, such as Bose speakers and a Samsung TV.
Bose changed (some of?) their home speakers to "require" you to use their app to set them up or use Spotify/etc, where you use to be able to just cast directly to them. It effectively turned smart speakers into dumb bluetooth speakers unless you did it all from inside their app. I don't want to use their app, and I didn't need to before, and while it was outside warranty the store had no problems refunding me.
I was also one of the people who bought a Samsung TV that didn't have ads, then suddenly had ads. That also got me an instant refund with no questions.
In both cases I printed out a copy of the product website where they published the changed features (eg the changelog or PR release or whatever I could find) and I also printed off a couple forums/media-articles talking about the changes. The stores didn't question it or have any issues with refunding me, I guess they just then file with the manufacturer for their own refund.
How did you get the TV to the store? I assume you didnt still have the original box lying around? Seems pretty dangerous for the TV’s panel to move it without the box.
I find it kind of comical anyone would be worrying about this. Maybe because I've moved TVs quite a few times - upright, screen side down, screen side up - from across town to thousands of miles away in the back of a uhaul. It's not a big deal
It may not be anymore, but it used to be. I bought a 65" Samsung back in 2012, and had to sign to receive it. From the truck through signature, the delivery agent held it like a giant iPad in portrait mode, pinching the long edges of the box. It had a clear "this end up" arrows... pointing sideways.
When I turned it on, there was a big dim spot on the top edge of the panel. It had to be exchanged.
Does the law seem to discourage these types of updates? Are there any know products that didn’t get an update like this just in Australia because of the law?
In both NZ and Australia all returns/refunds and most warranty claims can be done through the retailer who sold you the product. Part of doing business in these markets is being the middle man between the manufacturer and the end customer.
I had a MacBook die just outside of warranty. It was purchased in Australia. I was overseas and spoke with support who said have to pay to fix. Flew to Australia and had it replaced under consumer protection law.
Smart phones are ~annually getting major updates that change the functionality of the device. You typically can't revert back either. Some people might not like how the new method of doing something is different than the old.
However, you are not forced to apply the update. So that's a bit different.
It works for all technology, including phones, home appliances, everything. If it has a feature advertised/included on launch, and then they remove or change that feature enough that it no longer works "as advertised", you get an instant refund, even if outside the warranty.
We also get longer warranties than most other countries. Even if a brand says you only get a 1 year warranty, our consumer protection laws say a warranty has to apply for "as long as seems reasonable", so for most technology that's 2 years.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has this to say:
Warranties are separate from your automatic consumer guarantees. The consumer guarantees which apply regardless of any warranties suppliers sell or give to you, apply for a reasonable time depending on the nature of the goods or services. This means consumer guarantees may continue to apply after the time period for the warranty has expired.*
You can ask for a replacement or refund if the problem with the product is major.
What is a major problem?
A product or good has a major problem when:
it has a problem that would have stopped someone from buying it if they’d known about it
it has multiple minor problems that, when taken as a whole, would have stopped someone from buying it if they’d known about them
it is significantly different from the sample or description
it is substantially unfit for its common purpose and can’t easily be fixed within a reasonable time
it doesn’t do what you asked for and can’t easily be fixed within a reasonable time; or
it is unsafe.
There is no specific time when the consumer guarantees no longer apply to products. They may apply even after the manufacturer's warranty period has past. The length of the consumer guarantee period depends on a number of factors including:
how much time has passed since the consumer bought the product
the type of product
how a consumer is likely to use the product
the length of time for which it is reasonable for the product to be used
the amount of use it could reasonably be expected to tolerate before the failure becomes noticeable.
In the United States there's the Magnuson-Moss warranty act which (among other things) places the burden on the manufacturer to prove that your miscare caused the failure; they can't simply say "you jailbroke the firmware, no warranty for you!", nor can they say "you broke that seal, no warranty!", nor can they say "you didn't install a Dodgerific oil filter in your Grand Caravan, so no, we're not going to warranty your spun main bearing" (however, nothing stops them from saying "that oil filter you installed does not have an anti-drainback valve like our oil filter does, thus your engine did not receive lubrication as quickly as it should each time it was started, so that's why your engine is damaged, and we're not going to warranty that."
From Wikipedia:
> The federal minimum standards for full warranties are waived if the warrantor can show that the problem associated with a warranted consumer product was caused by damage while in the possession of the consumer, or by unreasonable use, including a failure to provide reasonable and necessary maintenance.
The MM act also provides for awarding attorney's fees in a lawsuit against a manufacturer for violations of the act. Pretty sweet.
Separately, there are implied warranties of merchantability and fitness under the uniform commercial code.
US customers are almost completely ignorant of this. It really steams my cabbage when I see people heap praise on a company for warrantying an item that failed horribly, just outside the warranty period, and was an item that is usually quite durable and long-lasting.
Does any of this cover the scenario of a customer applying an irreversible manufacturer's update that leads to the product no longer performing every aspect of what was originally advertised? The notion of "damage while in the possession of the consumer" gets a bit murky... I'd try to argue that the consumer temporarily placed the device into the manufacturer's possession during the update process, but I'm not sure if that would hold up.
And yet it's still commonplace for electronics to come with stickers saying "Warranty void if seal broken" despite what the law actually states. Magnuson-Moss was passed in 1975. It has been 47 years and still corporations flout the law with impunity. Does it really matter what the law is if the government refuses to enforce it?
That press release in no way relates to jailbreaking, but to requirements to use branded parts...
However, yes, Magnuson-Moss also specifies that manufacturers must honor a warranty unless they can prove the failure happened due to damage or misuse caused by the customer. That (I believe) is why jailbreaking alone can't invalidate a warranty by itself.
I don't want to return my TV, I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
> I don't want to return my TV, I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
So you want to file a lawsuit for damages that would be limited to the value of your TV (possibly reduced by the value of the substitute), instead of getting a refund of the purchase price of your TV?
Other than enriching a lawyer, what benefit would that provide you?
Vendors that have a large amount of returns are often penalized by the store. Returning the product (if possible) would have a much bigger impact than you getting a $10 merchandise credit to cover the value of the “change in functionality”. You’d also have more money to buy a different TV…
But having to return something is an impact on me, and they know that statistically most of I will probably not bother.
There should be some sort of penalty for inflicting the damage after the sale besides merely nulling the sale.
Now I have to find another tv, and until I finish the return and shop and install process, I have either a defective tv or no tv, which screwed up any plans I made involving it.
Meanwhile, I did not get to mess with the money I paid for the tv after I paid it. It went into the manufacturers posession and I never got to touch it again, take some back, change the interest rate it's earning, change what stocks or equipment it was spent on...
Being able to return for refund is great, but it doesn't actually make you whole, and the damage done to your property and your use of your property was deliberate and unnecessary. (not an accident or honest failure or act of god, but a knowing choice to damage property owned by someone else.)
Getting the money back and no more is like getting punched in the face, and all you get for that is you get to make them stop punching you in the face.
And the damage may or may not be a mere trivial annoyance.
This is a contrived example, but ALL examples are contrived and yet countless real examples exist and happen all the time, so the contrived nature is irrelevant:
What if for example the tv were used as part of a recording process monitoring a long-running experiment that was either very expensive to set up, or whose results are important, not just money important but Important, and can't be replicated except by starting over which may require time no one has like years, and the banner ad obscured a critical part of the image and blew the whole process?
You can't just say "you shouldn't construct something so important with consumer parts". It's true but it doesn't get the property damager off the hook, since it's still a fact that the damage didn't happen by itself as a natural proprerty of the fact that a device was sourced from BestBuy, the damage happened because the manufacturer chose to actively cause the damage.
Maybe. I think it brings about more schadenfreude to just see their sales tank when they realize that maybe people don't want their tv owner to show pop ups on what should simply be a means of presenting content from other services.
Their sales won't tank, because this will start to get rolled out across the industry. They might take a hit for being the first mover, but once this is normalized they will ride the same gravy train as everyone else.
This is classic industrial organization economics. These companies know that they are all in tacit collusion agreements with each other. It's not hard to set up "repeated prisoner's dilemma"-type games where collusion is the dominant strategy.
Basically, as long as companies know that it's in their long-term best interest to all do the same thing, then they will all do the same thing, even if it might yield some extra profit in the short term to deviate.
The only way to stop this garbage is to make it so bad for companies to engage in this behavior that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the above situation, where the supply of alternative goods is likely to dry up, the only other forms of recourse are punitive court damages or prohibitive policy/law from a suitably powerful government.
that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's an inevitability. For example, Samsung tried the exact same thing in the mobile space, despite holding a much more dominant position in the market than Vizio in TV's. But the rest of the competition didn't follow suit. Even amongst billion dollar coporations, a prisoner dilemma still has that allure to suddenly have one "defector" (or more) turn around and suddenly proclaim "hey we aren't doing X bad thing!". Technical details may go over consumer's heads more of the time, but ads is a near universal experience in a first world country. Marketing something as "we don't have ads" would be understood quickly.
But maybe it's just my cynicism of the modern court system that makes the suing solution sound like a waste of an individual's time and money, only to end up with nil in terms of industry impact. If that user is a very outspoken millionaire ready to fight, I welcome it. But I'm unsure if that sort of user is around these parts making comments dreaming of such opportunities.
Class action normally means you get even a smaller nothing than you would get in a direct action, but, if you win, your lawyers, despite the reduced per-plaintiff recovery, get many times more than they would in a direct action. (It also means that, for N plaintiffs, the defendant, if they lose pays an amount x where 1 << x << N times the amount they would pay with one plaintiff.)
Actually, what you probably want is a mass direct action, not endless individual lawsuits, but, first, you want a legal rule of recovery far better than you would get even for actually taking back the TV under current law.
Not in small claims court. At least not in my jurisdiction. You can seek monetary damages in (presumably) any jurisdiction but not necessarily return of property.
A class action which may cost the manufacturer 10s of millions of dollars. Yeah, you only get a small check. Yeah, the lawyers get a lot. But what other remedy does the average consumer have against this type of subtle but abusive behavior.
If I buy a Google Home from JB Hifi I am not Google's customer, I am JB Hifi's customer. If they don't want to deal with a huge load of refund claims for Google products they are free not to sell them.
If the retailer is the only available target, they're a fair target. Make it clear that these products will cost them money if they try to sell them, and they'll stop selling them.
>I want to sue them for the theft of my functional TV and replacement with a superficially similar but vastly inferior alternative.
You're free to sue them, but I suspect the lawsuit is going to get tossed almost immediately. Do you really think a multi-billion dollar company is going to expose themselves to a theft lawsuit?
Jailbreaking a device doesn’t void its warranty in many/most places; consumer protection laws override those illegal warranty lines that say otherwise. If you ever have real trouble getting something fixed on your device just reset it to a non-jailbroken stare and they won’t know the software was ever modified.
I think they provide the tools to jailbreak. With a kernel exploit to trigger it may be possible to bypass, but then it becomes a cat and mouse game, which would presumably be easier for the vendor to win (detect any program running as root, any root kits, etc, all which can be added in surprise patches). Plus, if you provide an official jailbreak, that removes some incentive for security researchers to discover new jailbreaks.
people underappreciate how much big-box stores are willing to take returns. if you bought a TV at wal-mart and years later it started showing ads, you can take it back.
smaller retailers might not have the same terms with their vendors, but for the big ones they can and will pass that through to the original vendor, and that stuff is all tracked. return rates are a big metric that vendors use to measure customer satisfaction and figure out what they can get away with.
> people underappreciate how much big-box stores are willing to take returns. if you bought a TV at wal-mart and years later it started showing ads, you can take it back.
source? walmart's return policy explicitly says the return period is 90 days.
source is working at various big-box stores, as well as returning things to them. the official return policy has little bearing on what the employees are empowered to do.
policy is the least they can do. if you're being a jerk and the want to get rid of you, they can quote policy. if they want to help, they can.
> the official return policy has little bearing on what the employees are empowered to do.
Employees may be empowered but that doesn't mean they'll help. It's a lot of trouble to take your TV off the wall, get all the accessories together, and cart it in to the store. If the employee on duty doesn't feel like helping, you're out of luck.
And naturally, if they are offended or upset at the product too (ads?! after you bought it?!), they may become your advocate... and go well beyond just being nice and helpful.
Alternatively Walmart just could threaten Vizio that they’ll stop stocking Vizio TVs if they don’t stop doing shit like this. Cheap TVs are a commodity it’s not like Walmart couldn’t easily replace them with some other supplier. And it’s not like Walmart directly benefits from these ads.
yeah, this is why it works. wal-mart has more power than you do. when you return a TV to wal-mart, they aren't taking the hit. they're turning around and requesting credit from vizio.
and then when they make their next round of stocking decisions, they're looking at vizio return rates and negotiating accordingly - either ordering less product, or requesting lower prices.
I know someone who kept “updating” their TV every year by taking advantage of Costco’s generous return policy. After the 4th time, they let him know they won’t be doing it anymore — I don’t know if that was a whole-store change or it applied specifically to him.
Costco was saying they wouldn't do it for that person any more. It's still very much their policy to take back returns for products you don't like or that broke.
You just can't abuse the policy. It may take them years to detect that abuse, but they'll stop you when they do.
Similarly, my Sony TV updated and now freezes when I try to watch Netflix (I have to unplug it from mains). I hate that I can't return it because it's not in warranty, but this isn't the TV breaking, it's Sony deliberately ruining it.
The warranty is irrelevant. If Sony (or whoever it was) sent an employee to your house to break your TV, you would sue them. The fact that they broke your TV via the internet doesn’t change that. The size of the loss would probably be the price of a new TV, so you would qualify for small–claims court rather than the normal civil court.
Well, seems Sony TVs have lots of issue related with Apps. Mine had tones of problems with YouTube. Didn't know that we could actually try to return it then. Was thinking of get a new one and kids cracked the screen. So we got a Samsung. In general we are happy with it but there is one thing drove me nuts: there is no dedicated button to switch video sources.
As long as it can show images and play sound correctly, those are really non-issues as I'm using Android TV boxes anyway. So disconnect the TV from internet and use a TV box instead, all issue resolved.
> Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic
That's not nearly drastic enough. Customers should have the right to know what potential updates to the product do in advance, to refuse any particular update to the product, and to roll it back if they don't like it, as well as making any other update to the product they want. That's how products have worked for thousands of years, it's how computer products work when they're running free software, and it's an absolute bare minimum to preserve basic liberal rights like freedom of speech and freedom of association. A future world where X Æ A-Xii Musk can have your Tesla car reprogrammed to scan what you say in the car for possible anti-Tesla sentiment is not a free world.*
The fact that even getting your money back after manufacturers vandalize your product after purchase to spy on you sounds "drastic" to many of us is an indication of how far we've fallen into a dystopian future even Stallman wasn't pessimistic enough to imagine 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, I don't know how we can get these rights in practice without requiring all software in consumer products to be open source/free software, and the software industry is currently organized in a way that is extremely hostile to that course of action. To a significant extent it wouldn't require positive action by regulators; merely refusing to enforce copyright on software would get us most of the way there. Someone would still have to figure out how to update the Vizio Flash chip and reverse-engineer the Vizio drivers, while a successfully enforced GPLv3 would require Vizio to help them, but at least without software copyright they could do it without any fear of legal repercussions. And Linux isn't under GPLv3, iOS isn't under any GPL, and enforcement of even the weaker GPLv2 against Vizio has so far been unsuccessful.
So, at least for the next couple of decades, we are sort of doomed to endure this sort of thing. Maybe a new free software movement founded today could change these things for the better starting 20 or 30 years from now.
______
* Maybe X Æ A-Xii is such a good person that he would never do such a thing, but historically speaking, structural guarantees of individual liberty have been much more effective at promoting the public welfare than ceding unlimited power to either rulers (who we hope are benevolent) or to "the will of the people", as amply demonstrated by the blood-drenched history of human dictatorships. Some rulers really are benevolent, but nobody remains in power forever. There's no guarantee X Æ A-Xii's heir will be so benevolent.
This is the precise sentiment that I've had each time I've found PlayStation wants to update itself. With each update, I found the device I purchased to be worth less. If silicon could be depressed, I'd call it Sony.
I wonder if someone can take this to small claims court over this. At best the company will take the TV back, at worst you can approach the local TV station to publicize this issue.
how will the local news station feel when they discover that the TV can show ads during the local news? Possibly overwriting the local ads?* And the local news doesn't get a cut?
* most of local news is just "native advertising" anyway, like that piece on the latest kitchen shelves or the upcoming "fleet week" or the local basketball team's star.
Odious as I think this feature is, I would hope that the local tv channels would not have a leg to stand on (same reason I can run an ad blocker — the sender doesn’t have the right to control how I watch). But they can whip up local opinion.
Jailbreaking, repairing, or even modifying a device does not void the warranty in the US. It hasn’t since the 70’s. That people still think that it does is pretty sad.
I’m usually against any legislation for government interfering in a free marketplace but this I can get behind. It won’t be a loss for the vendor since they get their TV back, just teaches them a lesson to not fuck with my stuff.
One question though, “liking” something is subjective and ripe for abuse. Use the TV for 5 years and then return it back because consumer wants to take unfair advantage of the law.
I’m curious, why are you usually against government interference given that you’ve apparently managed to identify at least one instance in which it is a benefit to the consumer?
My own view on regulation of markets is that it is just an incorporation of externalities into the market (better reflecting the actual “costs”)
Because it usually leads to terrible implementation. Lawmakers have very little clue about technology, have you see our Congressmen (assuming you're American)?
No one thinks about externalities or loopholes. The entire house-of-cards is built for better polling and public approval, not about actually improving anything.
Ultimately public loses, politicians gain polling points, and corporations exploit loopholes that are designed into the system.
But HN usually never fails to have a kneejerk reaction to any discomfort with "let's legislate it".
Worth noting that a lot of HN lives in Europe which seems to manage to legislate these things a lot better. My own view is that the US failings in this area are in large part the fault of the “small government, no regulations” crowd hamstringing legislation and giving lobbying groups a chance to influence proceedings. If government jobs were considered higher status (a cultural issue) then there likely wouldn’t be nearly as much corruption.
Not to be that person, but the free marketplace doesn't exist. All markets are legislated, and government picks winners and losers all the time, and that's not inherently bad.
I am fine with legislation that improves competition. Usually safety as well but that is misused (California cancer warnings) and ulterior motives hides behind "It's for the children".
We should question anyone that wants to implement legistation without proper debate and vigilence. Instead, we are frothing for legislation at every opportunity, but I don't see solid public debate about it. Revolving door in DC is spinning faster by the day, but no one seems to care.
Unregulated markets are very rarely ‘free’. Without government interference we ussually end up with a monopoly/oligoply who do whatever they and basically start acting like the government.
Back in the early 70s (the Vietnam War was still on) my father was working for a glass company that made TV tubes (among other products).
He told me that TV manufacturers knew how to make TV screens so thin and light you could hang them on the wall like a picture. He said they weren't bringing them to market because they were making plenty of money selling cathode-ray tubes.
The first LCD laptops rolled along into shops about 1990, but it was at least 2000 before flat-panel TVs appeared.
TV manufacturers have been in cartel-mode for at least 50 years.
Laptop screens can get away with poor range of viewing angle because they typically aim directly at the viewer. The same isn't true for TV screens. I'm not saying there wasn't a conspiracy, but there also weren't good viewing angles in those 90s laptops.
I agree that this is distasteful, however one could argue that capitalism is working in this case (it just doesn’t usually work as fast as people would like). Who’s going to buy a Visio TV anymore? Or a Samsung? Those companies are on every techie’s shitlist, and from there the word gets out (through reviews and word of mouth), that eventually normal people stop buying them.
> "Jump Ads represent yet another step in VIZIO’s ongoing mission to unify the smart TV experience with features that benefit viewers, content providers and advertisers," said Adam Bergman, VP of sales, Vizio Ads.
What kind of soulless automaton can write corp-speak garbage like this?
I wonder what Adam Bergman would think if his dentist took a piss in his mouth and then charged him for “industry-leading oral antiseptics”.
> What kind of soulless automaton can write corp-speak garbage like this?
The kind of automaton that made a business plan thinking they can sell user data but is realizing that they can’t do that effectively.
I heard from a bird that heard from a bird that Netflix barred these companies from collecting and selling movie watching statistics Or they’ll yank the app from their tvs. I’d not be surprised if this is becoming more prevalent with Disney plus and other apps becoming far more walled up and putting in similar clauses (and more more and more people spend their time in these apps instead of cable ). Thus they’re desperately trying to find crappier revenue streams now that they have established tvs to be as cheap as they are now. Vizio isn’t some dumb corporate, im sure they know what such a move will do to their brand image.
What's sad is I actually found it refreshingly honest that he listed "advertisers" as one of the parties who benefits rather than claiming this is purely done to improve the experience of viewers
There’s a very profound wisdom from the Bible: a man is always right in his own eyes.
We have an amazing ability to justify things that benefit us. I often wonder how many people in advertising and marketing can justify what they do for a living, whereas I view much of that industry as a blight on society.
Everyone is talking about facebook but TV manufactures have slowly introduced the perfect Ad machine, that you paid for. It lives in your house, it hears and sees everything and they provide 0 transparency.
Why do people think that if you buy a smart TV, you MUST connect it to the internet?
If you need a large screen, you can still buy a smart TV but simply never connect it to the internet. Or better yet, take it apart and rip out the wifi antenna so it won't connect to your neighbor's open network on its own.
With Facebook, it's not that simple. You're either on there, or missing out and inconveniencing others.
My parents recently bought a Roku TV which indeed had to be connected to the internet. They didn’t care about any smart features they just wanted a cheap TV to watch the local news on. Trying to watch plain OTA TV stations was unbearable as the local channels were mixed in with the “free” internet channels and you couldn’t just skip to the channel you wanted- you had to cycle through. Thankfully they returned it. I told them to buy a dumb tv even if they have to pay more.
I don't think I have seen any TV review trashing a model for displaying ads (or even mentioning it in the review), but that's a major decision factor for me.
Sadly it's a logical and inevitable consequence of giving up control over our technology.
I think the answer has to be, simply never buy a TV that you wouldn't be completely satisfied with as a dumb HDMI display. Cos even if it's not abuse like this, eventually the built in functionality will break, or become too insecure to keep active on your network.
In fact it goes for just about any appliance these days: whether it's your fridge, microwave, dryer, doorbell or anything else, if it doesn't have a "dumb" offline mode where you are still completely happy with what it does, don't buy it.
This is what infuriates me the most. I keep thinking about replacing my cheap-ass no-name TV that I've been using for the last 8 years, but the only quality options are all smart TVs and I hate it.
I just loathe the idea of having a TV that (1) is going to have a smartphone-class SoC built-in that I won't even use for anything and (2) is going to be yet another computing device I don't control.
I begrudgingly tolerate the fact that my PS4 and my phone are computers I don't control, because at least they offer functionality that's useful to me, but I draw the line at smart TVs because they aren't even useful in the first place. I'm just going to use my PS4 for everything on it anyway, but then I'll have have another device where I have to worry about software updates and shitty anti-consumer practices.
I was looking at monitors the other day and wondering who buys the large format gaming monitors. Gigabyte has a 48" OLED right now that looks pretty good for about $1100. Philips has a 55" VA panel for $1600. Both are 4k/120Hz and support an HDR standard, and afaict these are just monitors, no smarts.
I'm not sure what you give up with these other than the OS.
> Gigabyte has a 48" OLED right now that looks pretty good for about $1100.
I'd recommend against that one. While it's the same panel as the LG OLED, the software is much worse, with an aggressive backlight limiter that can't be turned off and progressively dims the screen, and a panel refresh cycle that demands turning the monitor off every few hours (and doesn't happen automatically when the panel is turned off by the computer going to sleep).
I'd love to find a high-quality 4k+ OLED (or ideally QD-OLED) panel with no associated "smarts".
My suggestion here is to use either a game console or set top box (Roku, Shield, AppleTV) as the primary interface. My TV likes to show ads and all, but I never see them because as soon as I boot the TV i immediately go to my Xbox and do everything else from there.
Pretty soon though I feel like even this "loophole" will be closed and TV manufacturers will start placing ads even on HDMI outputs.
Modern smart TVs will aggressively connect to the internet themselves without you needing to do it for them. If your neighbor has an open wifi hotspot, or of a local cable monopoly has all the routers acting as hotspots under their control, that's enough. Also, simply including a mobile connection is a possibility - cars do it, TVs can as well if the manufacturer considers the price is worth it.
I've heard people say this quite a bit but at least with my LG C1 (which I use as a monitor) that doesn't seem to be the case. I connected it to the wifi once to download a firmware update, then deleted the password. It's never complained or attempted to connect, or shown me any kind of advertising.
I also have a TCL tv (didn't buy this one, it was provided by my landlord). It is connected to wifi - it was already connected when I moved in. I use it once a week or so to play Netflix through my laptop. I've never seen adverts on it so I haven't disconnected it.
I have seen people mention that it might depend on the region. But I'm in Vietnam where I don't think there's any amazing level of consumer protection around advertising.
I had a Samsung TV for work related testing that never got connected to the network and it would hang for annoyingly long times whenever you connected an input source because it didn't have a fresh database of signatures to spy on you with.
Nobody’s gotten there, but I remain convinced this is the future for networks like Tile and Apple’s AirTags. Not the tags themselves, obviously. The idea of having a huge phone/app network that can relay messages for simple embedded devices that don’t themselves have a working Internet connection. Imagine having a $.50 BT chip in your device and any mobile phone that walks near it acts as a messaging relay to the Internet.
How can you tell if this is happening? If it's not showing ads, should I even care? It can't tell who I am if I've not logged into it or logged it into my wifi.
It's surely bad for TVs to do this. But I'm not quite sure what the issue is if it has no idea who I am.
> Modern smart TVs will aggressively connect to the internet themselves without you needing to do it for them.
Mine went a step further where you couldn't use it before downloading the app and setting it up with the app. I put up with it because I just go straight into my console as soon as I boot up but man was that the most infuriating experience.
This will work great up until oh about the mid 2010's when vehicles started getting cellular connections "for free." This will be the next thing that happens with TV's, and you won't be able to turn it off.
That's what I do. It works, but there are a couple downsides worth mentioning:
- Firmware updates are more annoying to do. LG has added some new features via firmware updates, like Dolby Vision at 120 Hz, but since I've never updated my firmware I'm behind. I believe I could update via USB but like I said, the downside is it's more annoying to do.
- The TV still wants to be smart. Every time I turn on my LG CX I get a bar of apps that pop up along the bottom of the screen. Half the time this auto-dismisses in a few seconds, but the other half of the time it persists and I have to manually dismiss it. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's one of those annoying reminders that my "dumb" TV isn't dumb enough.
But overall, I'd highly recommend others doing something similar. Though I've heard of some TVs auto-connecting to networks like Amazon Sidewalk, so perhaps this approach won't always work.
I did update the firmware on my lg then immediately deleted the wifi password. Have not seen any negative effects.
Also I bought a service remote for something like $4. With that you can change some hidden settings and make it start faster (I never see the app bar when connecting to my PC, for example).
It does exist in the US, and they do sell them at Wal-Mart, although not the full line and (at least in my area) not in-store. The Sceptre website shows everything 'ReStock Soon', so maybe the latter is temporary.
There aren't many reviews of the sets - Consumer Reports doesn't even track a single one right now - and what you can find is mostly mediocre to negative.
For a datapoint on Sceptre quality, I've got two 24" Sceptre monitors in front of me that are incredibly annoying because Sceptre cheaped out and doesn't bother to program the monitor serial number into the EDID and instead just use a static placeholder value. This means every time I reconnect my work machine there's a 50/50 chance the display layout will be backwards because MacOS can't seem to use the interface path to differentiate monitors like Linux does.
My experience has been mostly fine, although I also had some EDID challenges for awhile which I chalked up to my complicated setup. However I also don't mind things like backlight bleed.
You mean just like websites need to ask for consent for nonessential data processing and about a hundred and fifty different ad networks are forced enabled as legitimate interest in the consent screen?
Seems to me that GDPR wasn't strong enough to actually beat adtech
> Sadly it's a logical and inevitable consequence of giving up control over our technology.
Personally i dont think it's 100% certain that all consumerized technical products start abusing their customers.
Personally it feels really early in on this one. The free hand in this product segment is just exploring what it can do what it can get away with. Markets are conversations. I expect this one is not, like you podit, at an end, but rather just beginning. Perhaps this move survives but seems like it'll be hard to keep going, to defend.
I used to like Visio as they were a pretty straightforward company selling TVs at better prices than Samsung and Sony. They were simple and cheap and disrupted established players.
This is ridiculous and is so anti-user. I hope a new upstart company comes along to just sell simple TVs.
Bullshit is correct, and the other side of it is that for every extra shiny feature, cost needs to be cut to maintain profit margin, so something else gets shittier.
My fridge has a digital display, always on, so I can calibrate the temperature of the fridge and freezer. This replaced a simpler and more reliable analog knob in older fridges.
They cut corners by building the freezer shelves out of as little plastic as possible. Bits of plastic chip off over time, and the drawer itself is held together with tiny plastic clips that invariably break.
> This replaced a simpler and more reliable analog knob in older fridges.
The mechanical thermostats in refrigerators are inaccurate and failure prone (after a number of years). A digital thermostat increases life/reliability of the unit, even if it (very slightly) increases power consumption.
Most of these don't have good display characteristics, as far as I can tell.
I wanted 4k120 444 10bit w/a decent contrast ratio and couldn't find any hotel TVs approaching that, but plenty of consumer """smart""" stuff.
I ended up getting a flagship sony TV, which looks pretty good... when it's not busy crashing or glitching out due to its embarrassingly terrible software. Of course I don't give it Internet access; that seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm getting very disappointed in Sony stuff recently. Amazing hardware company, damn awful software company. My mx4 headphones are amazing, the app is pure pain and there's no way to adjust settings without the app. Oh, and it's mobile only so there's no way to adjust settings from my laptop at all.
"Recently", would be ~10 years. There was a time when the particular customers I work with consistently had Sony at the top of their lists (especially tvs).
Nowadays?...any cheap crap will do.
If at least there was a company selling 'modular' TVs. Want a better processor? Here, switch this component and you're good to go, no need to buy a whole new TV. Want more HDMI inputs? Here are the modules you'll need. Want a LCD screen instead of an OLED one? We got you covered.
Things like this new ad "trend" makes you think the "smart" in "smart TV" was just a reference to their marketing ploy.
I think Toshiba tried to do this with replaceable processor modules. It really has limited consumer value and only lets them simplify production for different markets and upgrades with module swaps. All at the expense of more packaging costs to have extra connectors and housings or access panels.
Even higher end brands like Samsung are pulling stuff like this.
Market forces demand constant growth, and in a saturated market this means some business unit manager will keep adding more invasive advertising as long as people keep buying the TVs.
I've had good luck with TVs from Sony, which would probably be considered higher end based on price bracket. They ship with near-stock Android TV, don't make a fuss about not being connected to the internet, and allow firmware updates via thumb drive. Have had a couple now that I use with an Apple TV, which is a pairing that works very well.
I wonder if Sony are releasing the Linux source code they run Android on and I wonder if their firmware updates are signed. If they do release source and updates are signed, you could probably install a regular Linux distro with Kodi.
Likewise, but the problem now with the built-in software is that Android TV is getting increasingly user-hostile as well. The major UI update they made which added an uneditable promotional section to the top of the home screen eg.
These cheaper components are perfectly fine for a lot of people's needs. For example many companies buy display panels that failed to meet quality controls at Samsung or LG and package and sell them under their own brands at very steep discounts. Far from being unusable, they usually have minor quality differences like a worse bezel/stand, 5 allowable dead pixels instead of 3, or slightly more backlight bleed. If you can live with that, they are pretty great options to consider. Adding nonsense like advertising and sale of personal data completely kills that upside though.
I was impressed with the thinking about value-per-dollar that went into a Vizio TV that we got from a friend. For instance instead of having six HDMI ports you don't need (or wouldn't need if they didn't burn out so quickly) like you'd have on a Sony or a Samsung there are just two HDMI ports.
I appreciate thin TVs that mount on the wall but the Vizio is a bit thicker and has room for a quality set of speakers that, in my opinion, outperform a Denon soundbar we have kicking around the house.
My take is that from one end to another end somebody thought carefully about what features to put in that would make the TV valuable to users.
Originally Vizio was buying the same components but selling for less because they didn’t have the brand name. The quality/price ratio was great when I bought my first 40 inch Vizio like 10-15 years ago.
3.3% for LG last quarter, that 2018 number is better than anything they've seen in the last 2 years. Samsung is losing money manufacturing panels, but their reports are a mess.
For comparison, Apple is at 31%, Walmart is at 4.5%.
Not sure why this is downvoted. publicly traded companies are legally required to go for maximum profit for their shareholders. Without some Announcement like “we’re going to be making privacy friendly TVs, but customers will be paying more to make up for the lost ad revenue”, it would be pretty bad mismanagement for a company to not show ads somewhere in their consumer TVs when every one of their competitors is doing just that.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
> Not sure why this is downvoted. publicly traded companies are legally required to go for maximum profit for their shareholders.
This stupid meme needs to die. The management of companies has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of shareholders. That does not imply any legal requirement to maximize profit.
Perhaps it is exaggerated but ‘no ads’ means higher prices (due to lower revenue on the backend), and thus lower sales since people only really purchase TVs based on the shelf price. If the higher price doesn’t make up for lost overall sales revenue, that means lower actual revenue. There’s also the (maybe fictional) concept of selling the most TVs leading to more ad viewers, thus increasing the value your ad platform can provide compared to your competition.
Reputation only matters if it leads to a loss of sales. I’m sure ads don’t have enough impact to drastically lose more money than the ads otherwise make.
As long as they can make a reasonable argument, they’re good.
A legal requirement to maximize profits would be insane. Amazon couldn’t have spent a decade forgoing profits to build up R&D. Chipotle wouLd have to use cheaper chicken. Companies couldn’t donate to causes. It simply doesn’t work that way. (As someone else has pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the Supreme Court agrees.)
It's not exaggerated it's fake. You are obligated not to screw the shareholders not to service any fantasy that could hypothetically enrich them irrespective of long term effects.
No they really aren’t, this is a common but silly misconception. Managers have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders but there’s a huge amount of latitude in what that means with the only real bright line rules being things like “don’t improperly enrich yourself with company assets”.
If managers want to sell tvs without ads, they absolutely can. If the board (which represents the shareholders) disagrees with that decision, they can fire the managers, but there’s no “law” requiring them to chase profits. That really lets normal greedy bullshit off the hook too easily - laws don’t cause anti consumer behavior, garden variety assholes do because it makes them more money.
It’s downvoted because it’s wrong; It’s a myth. There is no “legal fiduciary duty” to maximize profits. There is a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, but only in the sense of not wanting to be voted off the board and possibly sued if you mislead them. If the whole board agrees on your plan to bank the company on a possible suicide move, you’re fine.
right so the dollar store is obligated to charge $100 for everything because of your 'legally required' meme? That's not the way things work. You can sell things for less profit margin and companies do all the time.
I mean if they must show ads to make money, legally, maybe they need to actually force you to swipe a credit card every time you want to watch? That's more money, they're legally obligated.
Maybe instead of a video stream, you turn on the TV and it just steals your identity and steals your wallet - that's profit, right?
Just because everyone else jumps off a bridge does not make you legally obligated to do the same.
Not sure if the 2022 models have changed but I have the flagship 20/21 Vizio and it works 100% fine with no internet connection. I haven't ever accepted the EULA so even with a network connection it displays no ads or obnoxious bloatware.
It's dumb but the best option ATM is to buy the best TV for the money and just use it with an Nvidia Shield. When TVs start locking down basic functions behind EULAs and/or use built-in cellular connections then we'll have a huge issue.
I liked my old Sceptre TV, but after 8+ years it recently stopped powering on. The identically-sized replacement has sound quality that is absolutely horrid... and by that I mean my cell phone sounds better!
Okay, a sound bar might be a reasonable investment but... my new Sceptre TV doesn't do HDMI-ARC, which means a soundbar is a big ongoing hassle, for the life of the TV.
I still give Sceptre credit that they have VGA inputs, and handle DVI converted to HDMI properly (separate audio input), which it seems all other manufacturers just shrug off and don't care to support, even if their know-nothing support reps may tell you otherwise.
I suspect China will swoop in with brands that offer 'dumb' appliances that just work. Quickly moving up-market to the high end, and eventually displacing all these brands.
The Visio business model was always to sell units at a cheaper price (ie lower initial margin) than competitors then monetize the user post-sale via data and adverts. If you bought a Visio television and didn't realize this, you didn't do your research.
It's a legitimate offering in the market for those who don't want to spend much. I purchased a Visio TV for my bedroom, where I only use Plex and therefore expected very little interaction with their ad platform (I was right).
There are a lot of comments here that appear to be about something other than the specific ad this article is reporting on. This isn't like when Roku was having hovering ads over a live TV broadcast for a product ad that finished.
The ad being tested in the linked article is an interactive ad by Fox TV when the viewer is done watching a specific Fox TV show and the end credits are rolling letting viewers know they can watch additional episodes of that show within the FOXNOW app on their smart TV.
The issue is not what kind of ad, where, when, how or why it is being shown. The issue is misfeatures foisted upon consumers.
("But wait," you might ask, "why do you get to decide which features are good and bad? I found that ad very useful - I had no idea one could watch Fox TV shows on the Fox TV app!" The answer is: can you disable it? If not, it's a misfeature.)
Almost but not quite, they have a picture of showing the ad while the episode is still playing. It says they pop up "near the end", not during the credits.
That said it took a moment for me to realize what people were complaining about. That banner is basically identical to what they've put in TV shows for decades, the only difference being that this one mentions streaming and is interactive, while the TV ones tell you when the show airs and aren't interactive.
A pre-credits roll maybe, but it looks like the show is still going above it. But also the positioning looks to me more like it's information about the thing being advertised to the right, with how well it aligns. Though in this case it seems to be the same thing.
A bunch of shows do their credits like this without any end black screen with the credits. It aligns perfectly by design. It's a Fox show airing on a Fox channel with a Fox smart ad added to it. They likely designed the credit roll and the ad to work together.
Too many of the responses to this article have focused on jail breaking IMO - we should be focused instead on the actual problem of the advertising being injected and the surveillance being used to target ads.
TVs have a design life of three years and often ship design changes during different manufacturing runs, so jail breaking every variation of every device when the manufacturer is potentially working against you isn’t feasible. It’s a small percentage of the population that could do any one model of one device.
I’d also suggest dropping “smart TVs” in favor of monitors and a sound bar might be a an option, however Roku already took it to the next level by implementing a similar scheme on their devices. If Amazon, Google, and Apple followed then you’d just be in the same situation again. So again IMO better to attack the problem in general rather then a particular make or model.
I was pretty much committed to never buying a Vizio product just based on my experience with their quality and other reports about their "smart" embedded software, but this pretty much seals it. Samsung has been getting pretty bold here too.
I really prefer the free market to correct this kind of abuse, but I'm not sure how that works when they're all doing it. Theoretically everyone could just stop buying TVs but that's not going to happen. So it's just death by a thousand papercuts (abuses) I guess. Very sad.
I seem to recall Samsung sending me notification banners on my Galaxy phone several years ago, around the holiday season, to buy more Samsung shit. From that moment on, I disliked them.
> Theoretically everyone could just stop buying TVs but that's not going to happen
It has happened which is why manufacturers are struggling now and doing nonsense like this to allow them to sell TVs at the old market prices from back when a TV wouldn’t last that long.
Considering the executives at these companies are mindless automatons, they will view declining sales as a signal that they need more "smart" features (ie: third-party integrations to provide alternative revenue streams) rather than an indicator that they need fewer "smart" features.
I've never owned anything but a dumb TV so excuse what probably is a dumb question but if you buy a smart TV is there a reason you have to use the "smart" features? Why not just never connect it to the network? (Then use an external streaming box and treat it as a dumb tv.)
Digital TVs are driven by software and don't really have a "dumb" mode. You only get the options that the software permits you. In at least one case I've seen, the TV remote doesn't work if you don't connect the TV to the Internet and activate it, so you can't select inputs.
I actually bought a Vizio TV years ago on the basis that it was sold with extremely unobtrusive software -- it had Chromecast support and a configuration/remote app you could put on your phone, but otherwise it did what you told it to do and stayed out of your way. They actually released a firmware upgrade six months or so later that added a crappy smart TV interface that has gotten increasingly crappy and intrusive over the years. It was infuriating. I had no way to opt out.
These are the perils of giving your TV network access. I have a smart TV but you couldn't tell. I use the power button, input, left and right to select the source, and volume, and that's it. And as far as those functions are concerned, this TV is functioning identically to one from 15 years ago. Yes the remote has a button that says 'netflix' on it, but I don't lose sleep over it.
That's wild, I have my vizio completely disconnected from the internet and mostly use chromecast/ps4/pc devices that are connected to it.
I guess I'm willing to try smart tv features but the vizio kept getting into broken blank screen states. it works perfectly fine as a dumb device though.
I don’t understand this take. I think it's pretty clear a lot of people use Netflix and YouTube and it's incredibly obvious that they wouldn't want to add an extra $100 for a lesser (read: non-integrated) experience to use it on their TV when the TV can do it natively. Of course I'm going to connect my TV to the internet, that's the only thing I use it for.
I think the only solution here would be for appliance vendors to have a "nutrition box" for privacy and advertising, so the user can pick the least obtrusive TV and the vendor cannot just add ads later.
But in the US I don't see that happening this decade.
I've seen the performance, advertising, bugs, and connectivity issues that happen on these smart TVs and in no way are those plug-in devices a "lesser" experience. An Apple TV interface just works and keeps rocking incredibly well. Once you've got one, you can use their one remote for their own controls as well as common TV ones (turning it off/on, volume). You pay a premium to never have to interact with the cruddy TV interface again.
> I think it's pretty clear a lot of people use Netflix and YouTube and it's incredibly obvious that they wouldn't want to add an extra $100 for a lesser (read: non-integrated) experience to use it on their TV when the TV can do it natively. Of course I'm going to connect my TV to the internet, that's the only thing I use it for.
A decent Roku can be had for $25 on discount. I think it is $35 regular price. And I'll bet it's better than what most smart TVs offer. I haven't used modern smart TVs, but several years ago, the inbuilt apps sucked. Netflix is more likely going to update its Roku app than some app on some TV. Indeed, those friends of mine who bought smart TVs 10 years ago got burnt by this within 2-3 years of purchase.
The only smart TV I used is a Bravia 4K from 2019 and I was able to install Kodi and side load additional extensions. It was good for me. If Sony stops updating it, I think it’s fine to add a dongle to extend its lifespan. But yeah I was thinking of more expensive pieces like Apple TV.
You get this take because the solution that works right now is to never connect the TV to the internet, and instead do all of your streaming through an Apple TV (or a Pi Kodi box or something).
I’ve never had a smart tv that ran Netflix, etc natively better than a Roku or Fire Tv. Non-integrated means nothing here. You press a button and get Netflix whether it’s on the Roku or the slower integrated Samsung software.
The native TV experience is the lesser experience in this case though, and even my non tech peers agree. These devices are so underpowered they scarcely change the volume without input lag. Most everyone I know uses something like an xbox, apple tv, or fire stick, because chances are the vizio netflix app is terrible, and they might not even offer an app for some other streaming service you buy. The only time I've seen someone personally use a smart tv native app was when it was a tv actually made by roku that integrated the roku device.
This won’t be the case as soon as companies figure out how to embed always-on 5G cellular modems. They may not have the bandwidth to do software updates, but they can probably squeeze analytics into even the weakest cell reception spots.
Google tv on my nVidia shield is now showing ads on the Home Screen. I don’t think it’s nVidias doing though, just that Google decided to show ads. I should be able to return it, just like my wink that was supposedly free for life…
I own a "smart" TV (solely because none of the shops in my area sold dumb ones) but have never connected it to the Internet and never installed any software updates (nor do I ever intend to). It remains a screen. I use an Apple TV and another set-top box from my internet provider for streaming.
Some TVs deliver features they've promised through updates. My 2018 Sony needed an update to support Dolby Vision. More recent models needed updates for HDMI 2.1 support.
There are also bugs that get fixed through updates. (HDMI CEC is notorious for this -- an update might fix something but break something else.)
This is precisely what I do. Plug it in for power, connect receiver and let the receiver handle the rest. Xbox, Nvidia Shield, anything else comes from the receiver. My TV is a display and that’s it.
The menu is annoying (Samsungs) and complains about not being “setup” but it works just fine.
Often you must connect it to download updates and set it up. For my last TV I even had to make a Samsung account for god knows why just to set it up. After that I think you can disconnect from WiFi and use it just fine. You can also turn off the system UI if you have an Apple TV or similar so that it goes straight into Apple TV rather than showing the pre-installed apps.
My Samsung Frame TV has never been connected to the internet (and never will be), but still shows constant nag messages. Not only do I have to not fall prey to them, but also must hope that anyone else using the TV does not lest I get ads foisted upon me. I will never buy another Samsung consumer product under any circumstances.
I've got a samsung tv that asks to set up an account, but I can still apply firmware updates with a USB stick, and the TV works fine if you ignore the prompts, and you pretty much don't see the prompts if you use a 3rd party remote that asks for specific inputs.
These days even HDMI has Ethernet on it so you have to make sure your streaming box doesn't export that to the TV. Or your TV could connect to your neighbor's WiFi or maybe the TV has a 4G/5G modem in it.
Some years ago there was a paper about transmitting malicious TV signals and getting code exploitation on TVs. That could result in a hacked TV that then starts attacking your streaming box to enable networking etc.
One reason might be if the TV channels are delivered over IP to an app running on the TV. One could move the app to a streaming box, but that would be largely functionally equivalent since it would still require the same underlying platform.
The TV could ship with cellular modems, and download the ads even if not connected to Wifi. While not done today, it could be how it operates in the not-too distant future.
I can't speak for all Samsung TVs, but we recently purchased a Samsung 75-in Q70R and it has never been connected to the Internet. Works fine. The only time we use the TV remote for anything is volume control and selecting which HDMI input to show.
Companies go where the money is, this is unfortunately where the money is.
Samsung sells "commercial signage displays" which are kind of dumb TVs. The BE55T-H for example is 55in 4k for $600, stripped down OS / basically just HDMI in. BE65T-H is 65in for $800.
They're also intended for always-on semi-static content from what I understand, which is nice.
> They're also a bit better displays given they're intended for always-on semi-static content from what I understand.
While perhaps true, the extra price you’re paying is all in how they need to reach the same margins without that TV showing ads or otherwise having smart features they can sell.
Yep, and I know TVs are cheap now because they’re always brought up to explain why the official inflation numbers seem lower than actual experience. “Okay, yeah, food, transportation, health care, and housing, sure, they went up… but if you pointlessly destroyed your TV and needed to buy a new one — whoa, Nelly, you’d be sittin’ pretty!”
But that’s the base price people would compare against. A 50% premium to get rid of that creepy stuff is pretty heavy, though it may be less for higher end stuff or newer models.
And the money is only there is the customers are still there.
If they're getting up and walking away with their money (or even demanding it returned for a loss of value), an anti-consumer decision isn't so easy to justify.
I'm never going to buy a TV that tracks what I watch, let alone one that exploits that information to advertise to me.
Those prices seem extremely reasonable. I will be looking at them for my next tv purchase, even though its probably more than a few years off. I just hope they keep the line
Whether that's actually true would depend on the picture quality. Paying $800 for a TV that has similar picture quality to a $300 walmart black friday TV is not "reasonable" at all.
Oh please. My 300$ 55" TCL TV with Roku does show ads for TV shows in the start menu, but it very far from what is described in this article. Same goes for my Fire Stick which is shows ads for their new shows in the main menu.
I have never interacted with any device that did something as egregious as adding a banner on live TV.
I have the very same thing you have, and I have started seeing banner ads from Roku on my Apple TV! It appears in the form of a banner overlaying on top of my Apple TV content saying something on the lines of “more ways to watch this content”. I haven’t interacted with the banner yet and don’t know if it’s actually scanning the content to generate recommendations, but regardless I thought it was incredibly invasive of Roku to insert ads into a service it had absolutely nothing to do with.
This thread reminded me of the issue and I’m currently looking into how this can be disabled. Apparently there is a Roku setting that can disable these ad inserts — if that doesn’t work, off with Roku’s internet privilege. Apple TV’s UX is leagues better anyway.
Those sticks have probably as much processing power as whatever is inside modern smart TV's. It's still more than enough to modify HDMI output and add things that were not in the original source (like banner ads).
I don’t love the Apple TV (especially the remote), but every TV in the house has one connected. It makes watching TV tolerable. Not great, but at least tolerable
It would be much easier to open up a TV and disconnect the wifi antenna. People don't like this idea, but modern TVs are actually pretty simple and modular.
5GHz wavelength = 5.99584916 cm. The spacing of a Faraday cage has to be < 1/10th the wavelength you want to block. So for 5GHz that's 0.599584916 cm or 5.99584916 mm or less.
The cage material has to be made of a conductor like copper or silver. And it would probably have to be grounded too.
A 3m x 3m x 3m room is 54 sq m. You'd need about 791 sheets of the copper 0.63mm mesh + staples to nail is to the walls. Minus the area of the door. Cost about $6,328 + tax.
At 5GHz the skin depth is pretty shallow; in units(1), sqrt(2 / copperconductivity 2 pi 5 GHz mu0) says 0.93 microns. I think you could probably get by with 3 microns of copper vacuum-deposited on Mylar or on fiberglass window screen.
Steel window screen coated in copper might work even better and could be made by electroplating first a nickel flash and then the copper layer, avoiding the expense of vacuum coating. I'm not clear enough on the physics to be sure, and maybe it would be worse, but the skin depth in even ordinary steel is about an order of magnitude smaller because of its magnetic permeability.
"Booster bags" for shoplifting use (ungrounded!) aluminum foil. I think the reason they have to be several layers thick is that anti-shoplifting RFID tags operate at a much lower frequency, and aluminum foil is typically only 10 microns thick.
All it takes is money. Tradespeople all over the world know how to build a room like this because it’s a construction technique used in hospitals for imaging rooms.
I’ve stood in one before the interior surfaces went up - such an insane amount of copper. They had a guard observing it 24/7.
You have to consider this in the context of an active construction site where material handling equipment is strewn about everywhere. 30 pounds is nothing to a pallet jack or a forklift that can go to a telehandler that can put the load in a pickup truck. A wide variety of power equipment is just sitting around, keyed-alike. Thousands of pounds of copper can be gone in a moment to a clever gang of thieves.
Still not a great ROI for the criminal risk being taken, but the people taking this stuff live in very different circumstances than myself and presumably yourself.
They don't need much traffic to send tracking data, so they can get a cheap data plan for the planned life time of the device.
They can even add the costs to the price of the device.
Tesla cars report their state back to Tesla HQ and have done so for years, this is one of the things they were banking on for their self driving work - the ability to train their systems on millions of miles of actual driving data. I don't know who pays for that connection, but they made it work.
Around 2010 the Amazon Kindle 3G with keyboard had a cellular connection for buying books, and it also had an experimentat web browser with worldwide free internet access.
I don't know who pays but it already happens, it's not new to 5G.
They’ll use a mesh network to find a cheap path out. Amazon and Apple already have their own and it’s not going to be long before one starts leasing time.
The firmware updates could come over a TV broadcast at some point.
Some years ago there was a paper about transmitting malicious TV signals and getting code exploitation on TVs, so that is another thing to worry about.
There's been talk in the past about delivering data to STBs via closed-captioning side channels [1]. I don't know if it ever was actually done, but I've got to imagine there's even more room in modern broadcasts for this sort of thing.
To me, the scariest part is that the TV is monitoring what you’re watching. If it recognizes it and has an ad for it, it will display the ad. But in order to do that, it first has to figure out what you’re watching.
and yet so many people would routinely post pictures, text and tag themselves in photos on facebook. i think a lot of people are plain desensitized to this, or plain don't care.
I wish that everyone is as creeped out as you. may be that would affect some change.
There's a considerable difference between intentionally sharing your content with your extended network / the world and then having your entire TV watching history being logged by your TV vendor.
I have a couple of cheap, super huge Walmart black friday-type budget TVs in my house (including Visio). I would never hook these up directly to the Internet, and use a set-top device (Xbox, Roku, AppleTV, iPad, etc.) Never had a negative experience in the last at least 10 TVs I’ve bought. I realize doing it this way adds cost, but I’ve never wanted the lackluster experience these cheap Android-based experiences offer.
Ads are one of the very first things I imagine when hearing about "Smart TVs". That and slow, unresponsive, buggy menus which are worse than Win9x or Windows XP on a 15 year old PC with K-Lite Codec Pack.
I have a Win XP 15 years old PC with K-Lite Codec Pack, and let me tell you brother, it's lightning fast when dealing with latest TV shows I download from internet. Why? Because I don't use latest and greatest when it's about the media player, I use also an old variant of MPlayer. VLC, which is great and works fast on my workhorse PC, is struggling on that one.
I bought a TV hat for one of my Raspberry Pi 3B+. I connected it to my TV antenna on the roof, installed tvheadend (and cursed a little bit the UX but it's mostly a do it once and forget thing), installed TVH Client on my phone and tablet. I ended up with smart devices that can do everything a smart TV can do except that I can bring them around my home and garden (a plus) and have a smaller screen and sometimes worse audio (cons). I don't have ads unless I'm watching free to air TV, because of Blockada. It works as a radio too because basically every radio is also on DVBT here. I'm using VLC as player so I can do popup player (over any app) or play as audio and turn off the screen. If I want a larger screen and I'm in the living room I can turn on my TV. I'm not doing it very often even when I'm in the living room. A 10" tablet at an arm lenght is not much smaller than a TV far away on the wall.
It sounds like from the article that what Vizio is adding is a way for content providers to add interactive ads to their programs. The content provider decides where and when the ad will be shown.
How will the content provider know that a local EAS encoder has been activated? The EAS message is flattened into the video that an advertisement would/could cover. The example image of the jump ad in the article is covering the area that most EAS encoders provide text.
Given that EAS has an incredibly specific tone (that is illegal to broadcast) it shouldn't be hard for Vizio to just detect the EAS tone. I don't get why everyone is pretending like Vizio can't account for a very simple and common edge case in broadcasting.
"Jump Ads represent yet another step in VIZIO’s ongoing mission to unify the smart TV experience with features that benefit viewers, content providers and advertisers," said Adam Bergman, VP of sales, Vizio Ads."
Wow at that.
For one thing, getting prime time coverage of ads, w/o having to pay networks is pretty amazing but how it's done (Just the spin of it all) is just pure evil and that spin - I don't think any ads benefit viewers though.
Ads benefit the customer by reducing the price of a 55" 4K TV down to 300 bucks, which is absolutely below the true cost of the device (parts, R&D, support etc).
They are selling you a below-cost TV and making it up in ads, same as Microsoft selling you a below-cost Xbox and making it up in accessory sales.
I don't think it's correct to say there's not benefit. The benefit of YouTube ads is that you have unlimited 4K content available for free (below cost of bandwidth).
While you may say you'll pay 600 bucks for that 55" TV with no ads, most consumers will disagree with you and they show it through behavior.
I do wonder if they were to offer exactly that - a version with and another without ads, what would happen. This is not without precedent after all. I paid more for my Kindle so as not to have to be advertised to when I want to read.
Free users of YouTube outnumber YouTube Premium subscribers by an overwhelming number. If no ads isn't worth $10/month, you can bet no ads isn't worth several hundred dollars on each TV purchase.
If most YouTube users were Premium subscribers, it would more than double revenue. Premium subscribers are worth more to Google than free ones are in ads revenue, by a lot. Monetized channels receive orders of magnitude more revenue per view from Premium subscribers than free ones.
The most recent TV that I hung on a wall in my house was actually a 42" 4k computer monitor with an external media device and a Bluetooth soundbar. I want absolutely no "interactive media center" stuff on the display itself. Just let me set the resolution, refresh rate, and color calibration, then anything relating to what media shows up on the display is under the complete control of whatever I plug into it.
Methinks it might be cheapest to have an open source main board to replace the internals of a platform-subsidized 4k model rather than build from scratch.
For the DIY crowd, maybe. But there are so many SBCs and set-top boxes out there, my idea would be to have a panel with a very basic firmware and a slot where you could Bring-Your-Own-Kodi-and-tvheadend.
I wonder if someone like Jeff Bezos gets custom made 4K OLED panels made for his mansions and yachts to ensure nobody is spying on him. I’d bet you have to hire all sorts of weird security managers and stuff as a billionaire that a layperson wouldn’t expect, right? Maybe Warren Buffet avoids this because everything in his house is from 1973?
One disgruntled plumber or maid and suddenly you’ve got Bezos dropping a deuce complete with toilet view all over the internet.
The "TV" part is always going to involve software; decoding DVB and sending pixels to the panel. Some years ago there was a paper about transmitting malicious TV signals and getting code exploitation on TVs. Probably even a dumb monitor involves software, for example for the menus with support for languages or the microcontroller responding to the DDC/CI protocol over VGA/DVI/HDMI.
I suspect it's for the simple reason that anyone capable of doing this will choose to never connect a smart TV to the internet, and setup an external source. You'd have to do this with a dumb TV too, it's just fewer steps.
This video[0] from 2021 claims that Google TV gives users the option to switch off all smart features and use it as a dumb TV. Looks like Sony and TCL are making models with Google TV[1].
However, if past is prologue then they will probably be off the market in a year.
I had high hopes for Vizio. We have owned three of them. The latest one, purchased a few years back, was $2,000 US. I did not buy their lowest price model.
Well, the thing is buggy as hell. It can't connect to the network (wired or WiFi) several times per month. Cycling power does not fix it. The only reliable solution I found is to unplug the ethernet cable, and plug it back in.
When it does come back, it will do weird things. For example, when you last turned it off the volume was set to 7 (out of 100). If you have to the thing to get it to connect to the network it will, every few times, blast you at 100% volume even though the volume bar says 5, 7, 15, whatever. You have to jump on the remote and click it down. Just one click at it is back to normal volume.
And then there's all the garbage on the home screen. I want none of it. I just want the few services we are subscribed to and icons for the input connected to the external PC, playstation and WII. That's it. Just a handful of icons would do. Instead, my $2,000 bought me a circus act every single time I turn on the TV.
I really want to not buy a Vizio ever again. And then you realize they are all the same. Not sure what to do other than, as they say in the movies, "science the shit out of it" and design a full replacement main board for the thing and toss their electronics and software in the trash.
There are dumb TV alternates, such as the ones mentioned in this thread, and there are manufacturers which are better in this regard.
If people are going to prioritize cost while making their purchase decision, it is obvious that the manufacturers are going to see how much they can push.
If people stop buying such TVs, they will stop. So, stop buying such TVs.
Why would I purchase something that is actively hostile to my interests so much that I don't want it to connect to the internet? Doesn't sound like anything I'd want in my house.
It seems to me that if you stop paying companies working against your interest money, or only pay them money for products that aren't against your interest, you're probably going to do a lot better in the long run in terms of protecting your interest from unethical corporate raiders.
No. Because the setup screen you get demands that you connect to the network and refuses to let you do anything with your dumb old dvd player until you give it network access.
If they spent the same amount of time and attention on their UI as they do on ads, maybe my 3.5 yo TV wouldn't take 3 seconds to register a button press on the remote.
I wonder how many buyers will regret that purchase…
It’s amazing to me that anyone would knowingly be ok with their tv spying on what content is being showed to serve ads, somethings that literally no-one except advertisers asked for.
The privacy implication of these systems is huge. Profiles about viewing habits can tell a lot about someone’s political and religious affiliations.
Having nebulous third parties manage these databases, probably badly, risking leaks, providing ad and government agencies yet another intimate way to monitor and profile citizens…
I hope some government body like maybe some EU body is going to highlight the risks these technologies pose to all of us.
Samsung does the same, and it seems the race is on for manufacturers to provide these ‘features’ as a way to remain competitive and get additional revenue streams.
I bought a Sony Bravia BZ40H Digital Signage Display. It does have Google's Android TV crap but unlike consumer TVs I refused the agreement when asked and the TV works perfectly fine without talking to any Google services or spying on us even though it is connected to the network (I check its traffic). It also has an API, though I haven't made use of it yet. We use it as a dumb monitor to an AppleTV and so far it has worked OK. It doesn't pop anything onto the screen - that would detract from its use as digital signage after all :)
I went with this model because I specifically wanted a "Digital Signage" display that had a reasonably good panel (a lot of them are garbage).
This is click bait ,it is not an ad. You can think like notification, where you are prompted for opening the app , based on end credits on actual video which is used as an ad.
This is nothing new , second screen technology is now 10 years old. There are multiple ways
1. Gen 1 ,was more like Use audio cues from TV with phone or remote mic picking up for showing relevant ads
2. Gen 2 ,Use ACR (automatic content recognition ) to identify what you are watching and do ad analytics or present ads/ notification to devices using same wifi/login etc.
To escape from any of these , you need to disable ACR and smart recommendations in Roku, LG, Samsung , Vizio, Fire tv etc.. or buy a dumb Tv.
Almost all smart tv have one or more ACRs. They do a screengrab or audio grab every few seconds and send to check fingerprint to identify what’s watched. Also every video you watch from streaming platforms have tracking Id inside from Nielsen Gracenote or something similar and reports back the data as you watch them along with information of which devices it’s being watched on.
So technically it can identify your video that’s being played on tv - is from any pirated website or torrent. HDMI CEC also can coordinate to recognize if it was played from a real Blu-ray or not. Might be able escape if you go HDMI without CEC on smart tv, or go to same argument buy Dumb TV.
Put it this way , As long as you are using internet connected devices/TV , you are not escaping tracking what you are watching.
What i meant was, technically this is a Promo not an Ad. The End credits itself was overlayed on the Same Show Welcome to Flatch , pointing to a deep link for the same show in Fox Now App. All episodes in this show are free.
Isn't there a pretty obvious middle ground for broadcasters, advertisers and TV manufacturers to monetize? Smart TVs can track watching behavior and use it to better target ads placed into ad slots already in the broadcast. It's exactly what YouTube and most streaming audio does. Networks can broadcast shows with markers instead of baked-in ads. TVs can request appropriate length ads based on viewing and get more money per slot without viewers seeing more ads.
Just don't connect it to an internet connection. Although, I might add don't buy one that requires you to connect it on first use (I returned a roku a couple years ago because of this BS, since at the time I just wanted to use it to add netflix to my older TV, and it insisted I add a credit card before allowing anything else).
If you've already gone down this path, just block it on your wifi hotspot/etc. I've got a pile of ways I block things, from wifi blocking, nameserver blocking, to full blown firewall rules blocking IP ranges.
Solves untold grief too, no longer do my windows machines update on their schedule, they don't report usage metrics to MS/etc. Same with my LG tv, it doesn't get to talk to LG services except when I allow it (which is rarely). It just has some generic LG backsplash on the left hand side where it has in the past wanted to display ad's (although they backed off it at one point, but by then it was too late and lost its privileges.
Probably, but there's a caveat they reset the settings anytime. Here, it's been discussed that they'll eagerly connect to unsecure wifi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
I think that statement needs the caveat that that thread discussed with the conclusion that it's a myth (which as far as I can tell originated on HN), and that there was one single post on Samsung support about a TV connecting to a neighbour's WiFi, which unless someone can reproduce I think we have to assume was their kids or guests doing at this point.
It's the same with smart phones and laptops too. The first feature that seems to have 'worse' specs too is the screen (terrible color gamut and accuracy, only 1080, IPS instead of one of the OLED varieties).
As somebody that owns a Roku TV, I’m hoping that somebody releases some software to disable this sort of stuff altogether. This is absolutely fucking bullshit.
I'm sure you all stand ready to make slippery slope arguments, but an inducement at the end of a live TV broadcast for the user to continue watching the same series by other means does not strike me as either novel or objectionable. All streaming services will prompt you to continue watching the next installment of serialized content at the end. How is this actually different from that?
Just another unwelcome participant trying to get some of that sweet sweet attention-economy cash, as if there weren't enough vying for that spot already. In specific answer to your question, I'll just point you to your first sentence correctly identifying this as one of those slippery slope situations that the fallacy is named after.
Not as bad but still upsetting is the Google TV experience. I got a "top of the line Sony 65 A90J" a few months ago. It has Google TV. Turn it on and the screen is covered with ads for movies and TB shows. There's no way to turn them off except to pick "Basic Mode". If you pick "Basic Mode" then you are not allowed to use the Play Store and further, the "home" screen is just a large ad for "Google TV, ... sign in with Google to get apps etc...."
You can still slide load but they clearly want to be able to spy on you and shovel ads in your face. This for a $3k TV I paid for. It's as bad as Windows 11.
Further, Sony also wants to spy on you via some service who's name I forgot. AFAIK you can opt out (well, they ask you to agree with a bunch of stuff when you first turn on the TV and I didn't)
It's infuriating but I don't know where you can get any TV with high end features that doesn't have all the smart TV crap. You can get industrial displays but they aren't top end panels.
Second: What's described is not Vizio inserting their own ads wherever they feel like. It's a way for the network to show interactive ads in their ad breaks, instead of the usual "dead video".
So, assuming this is not an April Fools thing, the viewer doesn't get more ads, the ads they get are sometimes interactive.
This is why my TV’s don’t connect to the internet, period. Have bought 2 Samsung TVs over last 12 months and neither has ever been connected to the internet. The menu regularly complains about it but I’ve learned to ignore that because my TV does one thing, go to source my receiver is plugged into and let the receiver do the rest.
Folks keep saying this, but I can’t find a reference to this actually happening. There is no way that current wireless connectivity can be cost effective to deploy at the scale of consumer televisions.
I think the average number of active cellphones per person and sometimes-used TVs per person are both about 0.8. Where do you live that there are orders of magnitude more TVs than cellphones?
It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to certify an LTE/5g device. Not the chipset, but the entire device. Then, the per part cost of adding LTE chipsets that won’t be used on the majority of devices, since they’ll be connected to consumer internet. Finally, there is a fixed service cost that is not trivial per device per month per kb, usually.
Each stage of design cuts into the already razor thin margins. And for what? To get data on a few people that don’t connect their tv to the internet?
integrate an off-the-shelf 2G modem chip that's been certified for decades and cut a deal with a cellular carrier to only charge you per kb instead of per month like vending machine companies do
> This is why we've started integrating SIM chips into TVs.
WiFi chips plus a deal with one of the big ISPs that already uses customer-site equipment to provide their own hotspot network app would be more economical and cover most urban and many suburban areas quite well.
Usually not with a default pihole setup. Most smart TVs hardcode a dns server of 8.8.8.8, or one the company runs (rarely), which gets around a default pihole setup.
Likely, assuming your router is intercepting and forwarding all port 53 traffic to it (since they tend to hard-code a DNS server). If they hard code an encrypted DNS client, a custom encryption solution or DOH or otherwise, it can’t be defeated via the network and you’re better off not supporting these practices financially by purchasing the product.
I cannot fathom who would be an early adopter of this Vizio TV, but I sure hope it will be someone willing to get a dump of the network traffic to see what might be done to blockade it.
Does this mean it can identify the content being delivered over HDMI ? Not sure if the live TV example here is through their own internal tuner or using a cable box
I believe the tech being used very literally scans the stuff being shown on screen. I have read about this tech in the past. It also raises privacy concerns, as if you watch old family movies or some such, the TV could be beaming metadata of that back to the mothership for analysis. Creepy times we live in.
Smart TV SoCs usually have a capture engine that taps into the video stream being sent to the screen after HDCP decryption and allows it to be DMA'd directly to main RAM [1], and from there analyzed and sent to the manufacturer's ad partner of choice. As long as the firmware does not allow the end user to access these decrypted frames in any way, the TV will still pass HDCP certification with no issues.
This is one of the reasons why I always advocate never using the vendor software on a device and always replacing it with a new OS of your own choosing.
Note of course that even common Linux distributions have privacy issues, here are the ones that we knows about for Debian:
No tv of mine is ever connecting to the internet. I have a roku which is connected to a network level block list. The microwave/oven did a silent update and now my oven refuses to turn off and ignores the smart keypress.
No more hidden updates for me or my family. Fight and complain to the dealer. Returned tvs is how we get these marketing morons and douche nozzles to shutup
That sounds completely unacceptable plus like an easy way to just have all customers disconnect their TVs and just use a third party device like chromecast for watching anything.
Samsung does this nowadays too but at least they show ads in g their own content (they broadcast some TV channels) which I think is fine. I can choose to just not watch their content.
This is little misleading ,it is not a banner ad. You can think like notification, where you are prompted for opening the app , based on end credits on actual video which is used as an ad.
This is nothing new , second screen technology is now 10 years old. There are multiple ways
1. Gen 1 ,was more like Use audio cues from TV with phone or remote mic picking up for showing relevant ads
2. Gen 2 ,Use ACR (automatic content recognition ) to identify what you are watching and do ad analytics or present ads/ notification to devices using same wifi/login etc. It can even present with a add to shopping cart button on tv or phone , while an ad is playing.
To escape from any of these , you need to disable ACR and smart recommendations in Roku, LG, Samsung , Vizio, Fire tv etc.. or buy a dumb Tv.
Almost all smart tv have one or more ACRs. They do a screengrab or audio grab every few seconds and send to check fingerprint to identify what’s watched. Also almost every video you watch on TV has tracking Id inside from Nielsen Gracenote or something similar and reports back the data as you watch them along with information of which devices it’s being watched on.
So technically they have the capability to identify your video that’s being played on tv - is from any pirated website or torrent. HDMI CEC also can coordinate to recognize if it was played from a real Blu-ray or not. Might be able escape if you go HDMI without CEC on smart tv, or go to same argument buy Dumb TV.
Put it this way , As long as you are using internet connected devices/TV , you are not escaping being tracked of what you are watching.
No, since Vizio doesn't release the Linux source code that will run on their TVs. Might be able to hack the existing install though, IIRC that is a normal Linux distro with systemd etc.
I predict all the usual network TV overlay ads will eventually turn into this. Why put a fixed banner saying "don't forget to catch a new episode of The Voice at 9pm!" during a show when you can make it interactive/clickable and tailor it to specific demographics based on the TV watching patterns?
Not mine. I have a "dumb" 1080p Vizio TV. It was quite budget at the time I bought it, 5 or so years ago. But it does everything I need it for quite well, no problems.
I'd like to upgrade to a TV with 4K and HDR eventually but guessing it won't be that easy unless I use a monitor instead.
IMO automatic content recognition, and indeed any attempt by a TV to recognize or react to content or anything a user says or does, without GDPR-style genuine consent, should be outright illegal. Possibly even a felony. (Wiretapping, anyone?)
IANAL but in the USA this might be worth pursuing restitution for the cost of the TV in a small claims court and publicizing it. If a few hundred or few thousand people all did this in a coordinated fashion (via a discord or subreddit) that might be enough to have an effect.
The display of the banner ads is more visible, but the privacy implications are a bigger issue, since the ads seem to be tailored to the content you're watching.
If they do this in countries covered with reasonable privacy laws (e.g. the EU), go directly to regulators.
Seems like nobody is talking about the unbearable quality of Vizio TVs.
I got one for free, and I regret it.
Navigating the menus is painfully slow. After a few weeks, it started losing about 1-3 scan lines per week. It's unusable at this point, only about 18 months old.
Isn’t this illegal in some way. If I’m buying the product as advertised and suddenly it does something that I don’t want it to—something that I could not have know at the time of purchase—it is then no longer the product I paid for?
Run a pihole on your network, block updates and block ads while still enjoying your apps. Adam Bergman, Vizio Ad peddler, is easily reachable on the internet if you want to tell him how you feel about smart tv's and ads.
The pihole doesn't offer DoH that I know of, but it could be in the works. As for blocking DoH request leaving your network, not from your pihole, block it at the router and force everything to use the pihole.
I own two Vizio TVs, they should be never connected to the net. Their antennas should be castrated. Vizio is famous for spying on users and making 1/2 of their revenue from data and ads.
In the last 6 months Vizio's stock price has fallen from ~$20 a share to Friday's close of $9.06. They'll get more from progressively fewer until they have nothing at all.
Console gaming monitors also set a minimum bar of supporting things like 120hz refresh rates, HDR, enhanced VRR ranges, and lower input+processing+output lag. It's disingenuous to blanket assign any cost difference between a specialized product and a low end product to money made from ads. Yes, ads help subsidize low end TVs but it's nowhere near offsetting most of the overall cost.
The real best way to avoid this is disable it in the settings and filter the device on your network then use something like a Shield TV for the smarts, unless you particularly want your TV to be a console gaming monitor in which case that's a fine substitute just not an initial assumption to avoid ads. So far (and likely forever given the average consumer) it has not been cost effective to serve these ads out of band and jurisdictional requirements on requiring opt-out (or defaulting to opt-in) have been getting better not worse on top of that.
Note on something like the Shield (and regardless of display) if you truly want a 100% ad free experience you will need to unlock the bootloader and either patch the official OS or install a stock Android TV image. Either of these options will disable official access to certain content/qualities but at that point you're probably avoiding those sources anyways as such content sources are themselves covered in ads. That or an OTA adapter for non-smart content in which case you're still going to get ads OTA, but at least not additional ones from your viewing device.
> Console gaming monitors also set a minimum bar of supporting things like 120hz refresh rates, HDR, enhanced VRR ranges, and lower input+processing+output lag. It's disingenuous to blanket assign any cost difference between a specialized product and a low end product to money made from ads. Yes, ads help subsidize low end TVs but it's nowhere near offsetting most of the overall cost.
That's true, but those are features you'll want anyway. You'll want 24-120Hz VRR to watch both cinematic films and content like Gemini at the appropriate framerate, you'll want proper HDR support to get a cinema-like movie quality, and you'll want reduced input lag for when you connect your gaming console to it.
The NVIDIA Shield is actually perfectly ad-free in my experience (I've got the Shield 2019 non-pro), but the recent Android update forced some ads on the new Google TV launcher (luckily you can disable that just fine). I'm not sure what you mean regarding ads otherwise.
> The real best way to avoid this is disable it in the settings and filter the device on your network then use something like a Shield TV for the smarts
That's actually a bad recommendation, because then you'll still have to deal with the painfully slow startup times of a smart TV whenever you want to watch content and the TV actually modifying the image (most cheaper TVs don't offer a mode that avoids sharpening/softening/interpolating/color correcting/etc). And regular TVs often don't allow color calibration with an external probe either.
> That's true, but those are features you'll want anyway.
I mean sure, people WANT them. Generally that's not why they are buying budget Vizio TVs though, it's because they are low cost. The tradeoff is they don't do all of these things. Get a normal TV that does and suddenly the price differential is going to change dramatically.
> The NVIDIA Shield is actually perfectly ad-free in my experience (I've got the Shield 2019 non-pro), but the recent Android update forced some ads on the new Google TV launcher (luckily you can disable that just fine). I'm not sure what you mean regarding ads otherwise.
Well, as you say, when you turn on the device the first thing you get is home screen ads. Taking that back the first thing you get when you turn it on is offers for sponsored apps and then some pre-installed ones anyways, after that initial setup you get home screen ads when you turn it on. Then you get whatever ads are in the service apps themselves. Take for example the default apps Amazon Prime and Hulu, the former gives in app banner ads for paid items based on your ad profile and the latter will push anything from TV like ads down to just service upgrade tie ins depending on your subscription level.
> That's actually a bad recommendation, because then you'll still have to deal with the painfully slow startup times of a smart TV whenever you want to watch content
I recommend either turning the TV on at the store or watching a review before buying it. The TVs I have display the picture quicker than my pg32uqx gaming monitor but there are many TVs that won't. Similarly there are many monitors with garbage initialization times as well. Both monitor and TV are allowed to enter deep sleep mode in my case rather than hard power off, each was a god awful wait otherwise.
> and the TV actually modifying the image (most cheaper TVs don't offer a mode that avoids sharpening/softening/interpolating/color correcting/etc). And regular TVs often don't allow color calibration with an external probe either.
I recently got a dirt cheap $300 43" 4k TV for the Niece/Nephew recently, game mode and a few settings disabled most of the processing. As far as color calibration with an external probe... refer back to the price, I'm not expecting the display pass HDR1000 validation with a 98%+ wide gamut accuracy I'm expecting it to not be $900 and it's not just default built in ads removing 2/3 of the price it's the real market space differentiator - cut corners to save cost.
Assuming streaming TV via Sling/Hulu/ATT TV/YT TV, nVidia shield has a DRM module for watching content, however such hardware attestation compatibility is never a given and can spontaneously break[0]. Otherwise, you can get a TV antenna if you’re fine with the reduced selection that provides.
The general premise, though, is to get a non-smart ‘commercial’ TV without ads and use your own streaming box, maybe even a PC (with a proper OS-GPU-hdmi DRM chain), to control your experience.
The german evening news are available as free live stream via their android TV app, and outside of that, we just don't watch live TV.
But if I needed live TV I'd just connect a satellite receiver box to our AV receiver as second input, just like we've connected our Switch, Wii, N64 and the emulator RPi.
Moved on from my Vizio to an LG recently. The Vizio software seemed to have so many issues - and you never knew when they'd push an update that breaks stuff.
They're referring to these ads as "features that benefit viewers"?
Oh hell no. I will never, ever, ever buy any product from any company who does this kind of bullshit. Are you listening, Vizio? I mean forever. I'd rather go buy a 40-year-old tube TV than deal with this.
My father in law will buy Vizio and never even mention the ads. Privacy minded consumers are a small, small, small minority that obviously do not affect the marketing decisions of any TV manufacturer.
At this point I'm actively avoiding buying any tech upgrades due to shenanigans like this. From TVs to computers to dishwashers. I have a good enough set of last gen dumb tech and I'm holding onto it as long as I can. 1080p60 is more than good enough.
I always wonder about these things; at least dozens – if not hundreds – of people were involved developing this: managers, designers, programmers, marketing, that sales guy with his ridiculous "features that benefit viewers" piece of spin, etc.
And no one seemed to have thought "wait, I'm being a complete cunt here – every user who will have this 'feature' inflicted upon will hate it!"
Sorry-but-not-sorry for the strong language, but I've taken to hold people individually responsible for this kind of stuff. Excepting people in social/financial circumstances where they don't really have a choice, if you're doing this kind of stuff then you're just being a gigantic twat. These people are all fairly well paid, so none of this "just doing muh job" nonsense.
I just don't understand how people can do this kind of thing – I'm not surprised because I've seen it many times before, I just don't understand it.
As someone who was involved in developing something… let’s say similar… this starts off as something cool, like, voting for American Idle with your remote instead of having to text in, because your panel understands you’re watching American Idle and can support an overlay with the vote choices. Or overlays with history of a syfi show, to enhance the viewing experience. Then when management finds out no one is going to pay a bunch of Bay Area engineer salaries to do that, it slowly becomes something more sinister. Passively recording everything panel owners are viewing, provided it was public TV and could be recognized. Selling metrics as a “better” version of neilsen. And ultimately something like this.
So, let's say you didn't want to buy my cheap TV. Market's full of TVs. Hardly a trouble to pick another brand, eh? I just give the consumer what they want, and what they want is a cheap TV. We show ads, that's why the TV's cheap. Best way we've found to cheapen a TV. Don't want ads? Don't buy the cheap TV. And yet, people buy the cheap TV and complain about the ads. We're not responsible for your choice, we just gave you what you voted for with your wallet.
> We're not responsible for your choice, we just gave you what you voted for with your wallet.
you are assuming people make their TV-buying choice with complete information
does the cheap TV have a big "NEW! SHOWS EXTRA ADS!" announcement on the outside of the box, or in any of its promotional material? no, of course not.
also: "Vizio TVs are now showing banner ads over live TV" means they didn't use to do this. people bought these TVs not knowing they would receive an update to show ads at some point in the future.
this free-market "consumers made an informed decision about the trade-offs of a cheaper TV" argument is absolute hogwash.
This is kind of unfair given TVs are usually kept for a very long time. You buy the TV, didn’t understand why the price was cheaper than competitors, and a year later regret your decision. It’s not really feasible for most consumers to get a new TV at that point.
How many people actually believe in the culture of their executive leadership at their employer?
I've worked for about 9 different tech companies in my career and I only truly believed in maybe 2-3 leadership teams after a year working there. Execs are politicians at the end of the day, the only difference is that they're chasing profit instead of votes.
> These people are all fairly well paid, so none of this "just doing muh job" nonsense.
Changing jobs is time-consuming and stressful, and there's a lot more to a job than just total comp. Flexible hours, company culture, etc. also play a role. The reality is that if you've been around this industry long enough, there's a semi-decent chance that you have a company on your resume that you might not be proud to admit working for, either due to public or internal knowledge.
"Jump Ads represent yet another step in VIZIO’s ongoing mission to unify the smart TV experience with features that benefit viewers, content providers and advertisers," said Adam Bergman, VP of sales, Vizio Ads
Fortunately, in this case we know exactly who to direct the complaints toward.
Seems like you're insinuating the public should blame the individual peons doing the shitty corporation's bidding rather than the shitty corporation itself. What do you want to do? Do you want to dox a bunch of engineers and middle managers and "cancel" them or something? How about just not buying Vizio products anymore? You can also spread the word and tell others not to patronize companies that do this sort of thing, as well. No need to start mobbing up on a bunch of low level schleps.
This is displaying an interactive ad over the non-interactive version of the same ad. It's not targeted and it's not a net increase in ads or anything.
> These people are all fairly well paid, so none of this "just doing muh job" nonsense.
The most logical explanation I can come up with is that there are compensation incentives tied to financial performance (or even just project completion), and this sort of thing will probably boost the financials enough to trigger those payouts. When enough money's on the line, I'm sure it's easy to wave away any feelings about the end user.
Why do you think anyone in that chain has the power to stop it? Every competitor in the consumer TV market is doing ads somewhere in their smart TV UI; even if none of the underlings want to make this feature, the executives were probably the ones to give the order. These people could leave the company but even in the current competitive labor market, it isn’t hard to find someone willing to compromise their moral code for the position.
When your ability to eat, maintain shelter and healthcare, and what society considers your worth as an individual is, I’d linked you your continued employment you don’t speak out. Many people cannot afford to be fired or resign without another job lined up. Capitalism has made activism unaffordable.
These folks aren't flipping burgers for minimum wage, or working in industries with a huge oversupply of labour. I betcha a significant number could find a different job if they wanted to without too much effort.
Consumers tolerating this and just trying to block the ads locally in their house — this is like ignoring the fact that the manufacturer has stuck a huge sex toy in the center of your TV, and wrapping it with a napkin to continue watching.
Customers should have the right to return a device any time if they don't like a particular update to the product. I know it's drastic, but if companies can turn what should be a basic device into an amorphous system that starts serving ads without the end-users consent after purchase, that should constitute a material change to the end product that was not appropriately advertised.
This is the exact kind of thing that consumer protection laws should be able to cover.