I can’t believe this is real. I’ve just bought a relatively cheap Samsung smart TV and it’s got nothing close to this. I would hardly even say it’s got adverts since it’s mostly just recommendations from my apps in the same way they all do now, I don’t think I’ve actually seen it try to sell me anything or get me to watch something that wasn’t free.
Who the fuck would buy a TV like this? If a company was going to introduce on-screen ads like this they’d start really small.
First rule of smart TVs: if you really have to buy a smart TV, then never connect it to the internet!
Ads and bloat are the main reason I still use my 1080p Bravia from 15 yrs ago, which btw still looks great.
Well, that and that I have better uses for 1k usd
Oops, stepped on another $1200 landmine did you? Should have researched where you put your foot. Everyone knows this neighborhood is littered with landmines. No, there’s nothing we can really do about it except hand out these exhaustive charts and navigation tools. Of course they need to constantly get re-updated and are themselves periodically hijacked by the pro-landmine industry to turn into a second-tier grift. But that just means you have to research who you research for your TV research.
Don’t worry, you’ll get it eventually. God gave us two legs for a reason.
Four legs good, two legs BETTER!
Looked at the CES reveals and aside from some minor improvements, its nothing but overloaded AI crap.
Even on TVs from 10 years ago, the first thing you had to do was turn off the stupid auto frame generation, smoothing, lighting, and other effects so you can actually enjoy your content in original detail and correct FPS.
It took me way too long to figure out what was going on with those settings. One of my relatives tv’s was like this back in the day and at first I thought it was just their “HD” setup which made me completely write off getting anything HD because of the fake look like a soap opera. It wasn’t till I was gifted a blue-ray player that I realized their tv just had horrible “enchancement” shit.
Well yeah, minor improvements really stack up.
A friend is buying a TV or a screen for console gaming anyway and man, the TV’s are actually pretty decent for gaming nowadays. I haven’t checked out any for several years.
I bought a UHD LED tv in like 2016 and what a POS it is compared to these modern models. I mean I haven’t had it for years gave it to my sister but still.
I thought they looked pretty damn nifty. And AI isn’t a curse word when it comes to everything. I get being annoyed at the marketing, I am too, but, like isn’t Nvidia DLSS AI? That’s shit’s actually good.
So smart TVs are now smartass TVs?
Always have been.
Still, Dark Souls the best.
My current TV has started to die. It’s developing a purple spot that starts to be very distracting. I am not excited about researching a new model that doesn’t pull out this kind a shit on me. I don’t intend to ever connect it to the Internet. My current TV is nothing more than a big display for my NVIDIA shield TV and the next one will be the same.
Check out “commercial” TVs. These are TVs for businesses (e.g. displaying a menu at a restaurant). They typically don’t have the “smart” features. You have to look for them specifically.
No, they are NOT tvs! The difference is that the display panels are to slow for fast action scenes or any kind of scene switch, that’s why they only show a set of static images on rotation.
Sceptre makes a decent dumb tv.
I have one. I like it. 4k. Good enough for me.
I got their 1080p 43" “dumb” model for $150 not too long ago. I wouldn’t choose it for my main living room TV, but it is perfectly fine for what I needed it for and they can’t retroactively make it worse like the Roku tv it replaced.
I think mine was around 300 and is 47”. I don’t watch a lot of tv, it’s mostly there for the kids. The 4k picture looks amazing when I do use it. I do most of my gaming on my Steam Deck and I dock that to a 720p Samsung I’ve had for 18 years now (Was very high end when I got it). It is good enough for me.
I’m about to inherit my daughter’s gaming laptop and I’ll plug that in the bedroom and be happy with it too.
$300 isn’t too bad of a price for a 47" 4K where they aren’t getting extra money from your data and ads. I went for the 1080p model because at the distance we sit at it was impossible to tell the difference based on the 4K Roku TV is replaced.
This is where I would go to research a new tv https://www.rtings.com/
This looked really promising but it seems like they only have HDMI 2.0 or lower? Some don’t list the version at all. Unfortunately HDMI 2.1 or better is kind of required in 2025.
I’ve been wanting a Sceptre for a long time but they are hard to find in Europe.
Interesting! I’ll have to see if I can find one to a good price in Germany. Thanks for sharing.
The Nvidia shield ships with the exact same OS as many of these smart TVs
It’s still better. It uses stock android base. So normal play store.
Fair enough, but this setup won’t display an ad on top of my game console feed, like shown above. No guarantee a brand new Android TV won’t start doing this after, could even start doing this after a firmware update.
When I bought my Sony TV from Costco, it let me skip all of the agreements and sign-ups and accounts the day that I bought it. Fast forward a few months later after the return window was over, I turned it on one day and I had to agree to all the different things and it started asking me for an account, if I recall.
I will never buy another smart TV ever in my life.
Its pretty hard to avoid at this point if you want anything larger than a big computer monitor or a refresh rate above 60hz.
Yeah, I’ll probably go with a projector setup next time. Will probably be my luck that they’ll only be selling smart projectors at that point haha
Projector you’re looking at 3 grand for a decent one
Doesn’t the Shield use Google Android? That box is also spying on you.
Yes it does. A significant portion of the traffic gets caught by pihole. I haven’t taken the time of rooting it so far. But with an alternative launcher, SmartTube and Jellyfin, I have a completely ads free watching experience :)
pretty sure it can be rooted + degoogled.
computer monitor + sound bar?
This really seems to be the right answer. At least while computer monitors stay dumb.
Get one of those tiny PCs that you can just leave behind the TV, get a wireless mouse and keyboard too.
Nothing on TV isn’t available online anyway. Paying the cable company for anything more than an Internet connection seems like setting money on fire to me. Maybe sports would be difficult, but that can literally be found if you know what you’re doing. Even games you wouldn’t be able to with TV.
Cable TV just seems to me like a boomer’s version of the Internet. It has no place in a world with the Internet, change my mind. The ads on TV are worse than what you find on any popular website/app.
But as usual, capitalism is messing everything up with the marketing. In a world where hi speed Internet is widely available, “TV” just has no use. None. And worse, the commercials are now leaking through your literal screen.
I’m not saying that ads aren’t a problem, but there’s a hell of a lot more you can do about them.
In a perfect world, there would be a place you could go whenever you wanted something and find products and solutions for that thing, and there wouldn’t be ads in anything else at all.
But until there’s an actual argument to say TV technology isn’t totally worthless, my stance is simply “no TVs are necessary or useful”.
I don’t like sound bars, you can take my old 5.1 Yamaha system out from my cold hands!
Verification can when?
Instead of buying a TV, look for a digital signage display. It’s a TV, but with none of the “smart” crap on it.
Alternatively, just don’t hook your device up to the internet.
Or just don’t buy Samsung. Never had this kind of trouble with any other brand except Samsung. Because of this, I’ll never ever buy another Samsung product.
They cost like 5x more because they’re marketed toward businesses. https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/pro-tv/bh-series/65-bht-series-qled-4k-uhd-hdr-pro-tv-terrace-edition-lh65bhtelgfxgo/
My understanding is that TV prices are subsidized by bloatware. No bloatware, no subsidy.
If they were, they should be free. Yet there’s still triple and quad digit prices on these things that probably cost like 8% of that to build (because of slave labor probably), and the subsidy on top should mean they’re literally paying us monthly to have their screen.
Alternatively, Sceptre are mostly sub-$1k
Plus side there though… Like most devices marketed towards enterprise, once they hit the used market, the price drops dramatically. You can get a pretty good deal on a used one.
There’s other business oriented tvs that aren’t just for signage. It’s more for conference rooms.
This is good advice, but I really wish we lived in a world where consumers could bond together and get laws passed that make this type of crap illegal so that buying TV’s (or any type of appliance for that matter) didn’t involve having to do research on weird non-consumer hardware just to have a nice experience.
EDIT: some morons in my replies keep on saying shit about “voting republican” and We Do In OtHeR CoUnTRiEs. I’m not american, I don’t live in america, and I cannot remember the last time I set foot in america. Shut the fuck up, nobody asked you.
We can you idiots just keep voting Republican
This kind of fucking attitude is why Dems always have sand in their potato salad. "This wouldn’t happen if democrats never lost an election :( " Miss me with that shit. Trump is talking about using military force to annex Panama and Greenland and making Canada the 51st state and you’ve got online Democrats sitting in the corner timidly and indirectly suggesting that maybe ads wouldn’t be so bad under them. The Democratic party deserves to get bullied until they grow a spine and start giving people a real reason to vote for them besides “republicans bad”. Call me when we get AOC hopped up on barely sub-lethal amounts of cocaine and she bites Gavin Newsom’s head off like a praying mantis.
Are you sure. Maybe if we lean in a little further right these “moderates” who are considering authoritarian rule might just change their mind.
Consumer rights is a bipartisan issue, Dems fuck us over too.
Also commas
In other words, you wish we lived in a democracy instead of a plutocracy. 'Cause that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. This thread is squarely about the FTC failing to do its goddamn job, because this should not be legal.
Just look at the printer situation. It’s gonna get worse. Much worse.
We do have that in other countries (so in this world), and you’re going to laugh, but the Dutch one is literally called the Consumentenbond.
The smart stuff isn’t the issue. It is all the connected shit.
There are plenty of smart TVs that you just don’t have to connect to the internet. Then it can’t download ads, be laggy or reboot because of updates, send all your data to the manufacturer, …
Just connect a small PC over HDMI like you would a dumb TV, and other than a slow boot it will work the same.
I can recommend TLC as a TV that doesn’t require an internet connection. But I would steer clear of ever connecting it to a network, the remotes have microphones in them.
Take a crayon, jam it in the pinhole for the mic, then scrape the excess off the surface. Problem solved.
My Samsung tv also has microphones for voice control.
Nothing to research. They’re all the same bad or will get bad in the foreseeable future. Only thing that matters is the screen technology and the specs of your external media center.
My LG has none of this. Any advertising/ai can be disabled as can the network itself.
You mean it doesn’t have any of this yet :)
I say this as someone with two LG TVs. Sure you can just not connect them to the internet, but a lot of people rely on the “Smart” part of the TV to view all their content.
Wasn’t there news lately that LG wants to display ads in pause?
Sure they want to but they let you disable all of this in the settings. Also a TV with no internet likely will be an unable to serve adds.
That’s what i say; use the TV as dumb display or deal with enshitification now or later.
Btw, i have an LG too but i always understood them letting you disable stuff them just anticipating GDPR lawsuits. But seems it’s the same in US? Maybe they really want you not having a bad experience.
Pretty sure it’s a business decision. The risk of showing ADs and getting a bad reputation
I mostly like my LG tv, and it’s nice that I can use it without agreeing to their T&C or logging in. It does really piss me off that if I wanted to change picture settings (brightness, color, etc) I’d have to turn their adware settings back on.
“likely” lol as bad as the adpocalypse has been, at least things aren’t pre-loaded with bog-standard ads for offline delivery
Yet
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I have a TLC that does none of this, too.
I will be very sad when my 16 yo Sony Bravia TV dies
I still have a Panasonic plasma TV from 2008. Still going strong.
That thing likely gulps down electricity unfortunately and a replacement would pay for itself. Just don’t connect it to the internet and use a good streaming box and you’ll have none of these issues. Lemmy hates apple but the Apple TV is great.
I’m in the exact same situation. Old bravias were just about perfect for a television. I dread to think of what they are like now
No way, tell me that isnt real. I remember hearing a patent about being able to deliver ads over hdmi but dont tell me it actually got implemented.
Lmao you can tell no one on lemmy is a baseball fan. This is a meme making fun of the most recent World Series coverage where for the first time they started showing this dumb “Shohei Ohtani is up to bat in X batters” graphic as you see there
American sports ads are wild. They will never cease to shock me.
Sorry I’ll reiterate, this isn’t an ad. The graphic it’s spoofing is shown during the game and is relevant information to it. It was just a bit silly and pandering to people only watching for this one star player.
I don’t know if you follow any sports but imagine if a soccer game popped up a little graphic saying “this star player everyone loves will be substituted into the game in X minutes!” Thats what’s being made fun of here
That ad is not over HDMI. Its a smart TV it inserts the ad on its own.
Just dont give the thing internet access then…
That works unless your neighbor had unsecured WiFi. The TVs will phone home in any way they can.
Setup your own WiFi with the same SSID and block all ports. Bonus points, it will drive your neighbors crazy and maybe get them to up their security stance.
Seriously? If this is true… That’s insane… I can’t even imagine that…
That’s nothing. Check out the Amazon Sidewalk protocol for some real nightmare fuel.
2019?! How does no one else think this is a bad idea?
I’m flabbergasted…
Open the TV and unhook the Wifi antenna then
Easy as
Which then travels… over HDMI. I realize that’s not what you meant but technically…
It doesn’t need to travel over HDMI. That to move signals from one device to another. If the hardware that is outputting the display signal itself wants to insert other data into the signal it’s receiving, it can directly. It doesn’t need to send it through another cable. It’s probably modifying an signal received through HDMI (or other cable), but it doesn’t need to send the modified signal again.
Why would this need “deliver ads over HDMI”. It’s on the telly, ie the HDMI signal has already been transmitted and now the TV itself is overlaying web-derived images in one corner, the same way it will overlay the guide or whatever when you open it.
I totally believe this kind of thing could happens, but I’d expect broader outrage if it were.
When I set up my LG tv it wanted to show promoted content on the Home Screen and the screensaver.
I never connect my TV to the internet. People jerk saying they add wireless modems to them but in reality they don’t have to, most prime leave all the telemetry and “AI” features enabled.
Look up Amazon’s “Sidewalk” network. They don’t need your internet. They have your neighbors internet.
Wrap the sides and back in metal net so it becomes a faraday cage in those directions blocking waves (only half joking? idk if this’d work)
WiFi bounces, and can take multiple paths. Won’t work.
Cover the front too then, noballs.
I too, like to buy a brand new 8K OLED TV just to watch it through a microwave door.
If you’re lucky, the mesh interferes with its internal electronics and you’ll have a new grill, too!
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picture looks like a 'shop. look at bottom right corner of tv.
but, it’s inevitable. corporate greed knows no limit, knows no boundaries.
Isn’t that just the plant blocking part of the TV?
The plant is also receiving blue/white light from the ad. Pretty sure it’s legit.
It’s a plant blocking the TV. If this is edited it is actually done really well.
I’m not sure the picture is edited, but in either case, it would be a lot easier to paste it onto a screencap of the game and open that full screen on the tv…
Not as bad as this, but when I moved to a new town I got a free big TV with my new ISP. I was going with that ISP anyways so a free 4k HDR TV on top was a nice bonus.
I wish I had gotten some other bonus. Viewing angle is atrocious and it is impossible to get rid of the input lag (no there isn’t a gaming mode or similar) so no games with precise timing can be played.
So now we have a big living room TV that is too good to replace with something better but bad enough to be a little bit annoying.
I usually just assume that free shit given away as part of some other sale is going to be bad or shit quality. They probably bought a big batch of them for real cheap because they weren’t selling so great in stores and eventually someone decided to just get rid of that inventory maybe at a loss.
Why not sell it?
It really doesn’t sound too good to replace? It sounds like you got free junk, and haven’t actually bought a TV yet?
Don’t have the budget anyways. And it’s good enough for the wife and kids, they don’t see any issues. And by now I’m disabled and can’t get into living room anyways.
Give it to your parents or some other older people who would use it just as a TV and buy yourself a decent TV.
Trade in for something slightly “worse” then?
