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TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. Trying to find a dumb TV is like tr

TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. Trying to find a dumb TV is like trying to find a car without a built in radio. You're welcome to leave it switched off. Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Some may be slow. Some may have a poor interface. I'd worry about solving for that rather than expecting manufacturers to cater to a very niche group.

fsflover 5y ago
> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Unless they find an open WiFi network.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gryn 5y ago
  or come integrated with an unremovable sim card that connects to a private Corporate APN.
  - nerdawson 5y ago
    There are a million things TV manufacturers could do that would be a problem but I think we should be focusing our attention on what they actually are doing. Hardcoding DNS for example which makes Pi-hole ineffective. That is increasingly happening and should quite rightly be criticised.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      I think we should be focusing our attention on what they actually are doing. It's absolutely necessary to try to anticipate the future, because the future always becomes the present. If we don't try to anticipate, we will be stuck with whatever is given to us. Like the introduction of ads on Android TV.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  Automatically connecting to an open WiFi network without being instructed to do so seems reckless to say the least. Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
  - jkingsman 5y ago
    Not directly a TV, but Amazon Sidewalk is building a mesh network in residential areas for pretty much this purpose.
    - asdff 5y ago
      cant wait until we read articles about someone using sidewalk connected unpatched TVs and fridges to mine crypto
  - Forbo 5y ago
    Last I heard Samsung devices were doing this, I'll need to see if I can find the source again. Found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choose_to_not_connect_your_samsung_smart/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo... Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted. But here's another example of devices getting sold with their own cellular connectivity preinstalled. https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-first-5g-8k-tv-to-one-up-samsung-and-apple/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
    - fouric 5y ago
      > Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted. Fortunately, some thoughtful person saved it in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choose_to_not_connect_your_samsung_smart/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddi... Contents: So I just had a rather annoying experience. I own two Samsung Smart TVs, which honestly gave me the heebie jeebies to purchase. With that said, at the end of the day I decided that as long as I didn't hook it up to the net, I'd be good to go. I've been using them for a few years, and have felt pretty comfortable with the situation, so imagine my surprise when I sit down to watch something on the living room tv (which I don't use all that often) and my show is interrupted by a notification that "SmartHub" had updated. After digging around in settings for a moment, I realized that one of my next door neighbors had installed an open router with internet, and my tv had silently automatically connected to it and began doing its normal internet stuff. I have no idea how long it was connected like that. After looking though the settings and a few Google searches later, I realized there was no actual way to disabled the wireless connection on that TV. It expected an internet connection, and intended to get one. Ultimately, I managed to get it to stop what it was doing by letting it connect to my router and then blocking it via access control. I then followed up by going into "IP Settings" and setting that to manual, while leaving all the values at 0. It complained, but allowed me to keep the setting. Anyhow, figured I'd share, since I imagine quite a few people here are also not keen on a smart tv connecting to the net, given some of the history surrounding them.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Someone says this every time smart TVs get discussed, but has anyone ever cited a verifiable case of it actually being done, noting that it would clearly be illegal to do it in much of the world? Now, if we're talking about the danger of devices incorporating their own wireless communications and phoning home on a network of their manufacturer's own choosing without the knowledge or consent of the owner, that is a serious risk, and one that IMHO should be mitigated by regulating it out of existence before it has any chance to become established practice.
- GrayShade 5y ago
  Or they start shipping with SIM cards.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  Or if they have Alexa, it should be able to mesh to the next Amazon device in range and use their connected internet to do it's thing.
- bkallus 5y ago
  With TCL TVs, it's not hard to remove the wifi card. In the ones I've taken apart it's always just connected with USB internally.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Unless they implement some kind of hardware check against removing it.
    - bkallus 5y ago
      The ones with Roku OS don't do this. Can't vouch for Android TV though.
z2 5y ago
The worry I have with these TVs is that basic functions like channel seeking or brightness controls now rely on a computer running Android. It feels like a 1000-fold increase in complexity and risk for something to hobble the TV part of the TV. Say the CPU overheats due to poor heat design after 3 years--it doesn't seem like manufacturers have a dumb mode to fall back on. Similarly, I'd be very worried if a car's radio prevented the car from driving. It is sad that wanting a simple, modular display that we can upgrade peripherals around is niche these days. In a way, car makers took a step in the right direction with more radios adopting CarPlay & Android Auto, acknowledging that their own radios can't outsmart an evolving mobile ecosystem.
- jrkfkgmfmr 5y ago
  The TV part of the TV requires a CPU anyway these days, because most cable signal or HDMI inputs are digital.
  - apk17 5y ago
    I hope very much that that CPU isn't running android, though. I can't clock it, but our current TV seems to take longer to, well, turn on, than the tube tellys of yore.
    - bdamm 5y ago
      The TV of my childhood took so long to warm up, you'd be standing there for at least 5 seconds wondering if it had turned on at all before seeing something. Usually it was the click of a relay and the hum of a capacitor soaking up a field that was the real clue.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        My current TV takes longer than 5 seconds to turn on, and it's not even smart.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Just get a seperate signal box and a big monitor?
handrous 5y ago
Part of it might be that consumers want smart TVs, but it's definitely the case that consumers are very price-sensitive when it comes to TVs, and that selling ad space (and selling/leveraging data gained by stalking your users—why this shit is legal is beyond me) on an integrated OS lets you sell at, or even under, the cost to deliver the hardware, and remain profitable. This is also why it's really, really hard to build a Roku competitor starting from 0, without a lot of starting capital. You won't be able to match them on price, and also won't yet have the scale to subsidize your own devices with ad sales, so you'll need to sell at a loss (remember: you also need to get onto shelves in stores to compete, and they'll have harsh price requirements, calibrated by what your ad- and spyware-subsidized competitors are selling for, if you want shelf-space with an unknown brand) for quite a while.
pessimizer 5y ago
> TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. No, they're not. They're collaborating to eliminate choice. The vast majority of the market being taken by smart TVs is a theoretical result of the market. The fact that no manufacturers slip in to clean up the 5% of the market who are willing to pay a slight premium not to have a smart TV is evidence of tacit collusion.
- jeremyjh 5y ago
  Or evidence that it is nowhere near 5% of the market that would actually pay more for that.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  Literally everyone I know except for me uses and enjoys their smart TV features. Many people I know are programmers or other technical people. I think you may be over-estimating how typical you are.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I didn't make a claim about how typical I am. If you don't know non-technical people who don't like smart TVs, you rarely talk to people about their TVs (which is not unusual.) This is akin to the oft-repeated claim on HN that nobody but people on HN cares about privacy. What people are is utterly powerless, and living in a kleptocracy that allows markets to be funneled in particular directions by eliminating all alternative choices.
asdff 5y ago
I just want a TV that actually responds quickly to button presses. With the latency you experience hitting the volume buttons or navigating menus on flat screen TVs, it feels like they haven't touched the hardware since 2002, and with the computing gains over those nearly 20 years you'd think a TV could at least turn instantly on and off like a desktop monitor by now.
- bogwog 5y ago
  You can! You just need to replace your Smart TV every couple of years to keep up with the software updates. The expensive LG TV I bought ~5 years ago was snappy and fast when I got it, but today it's extremely slow and unresponsive. That's my fault for being a bad consumer and not buying the latest model every year. On a serious note, I wonder if there's a jailbreak scene for smart TVs? It'd be awesome to be able to replace their spyware garbage with a basic OS that only lets me change inputs, or maybe something like Kodi if I'm feeling fancy.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    There was a really interesting article posted to HN a few months ago now, detailing a deep dive into the firmware of a new Samsung smart TV and what would be required to jailbreak it and run your own firmware. I wonder if part 2 ever came out. E: Ah ha! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25934286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25934286 Unfortunately, the TV proved to be quite secure it seems.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Smart TVs are dumber than a dumb-TV if they aren't connected to the internet. My Samsung TV stays disconnected from the internet, but to change the input between devices I have to scroll past ads that were preloaded onto it in 2018. If I accidentally press the channel up/down buttons on the remote it switches inputs, takes 10 seconds to realize it isn't online, and then tells me "Samsung TV Plus is not available".
fouric 5y ago
> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Until manufacturers start selling TV's that don't work at all if they're not connected. Or, as is the case with my Samsung TV, they could just be arbitrarily annoying until you do connect - pepper the user with requests to connect and put up modals everywhere until they finally relent.
drivers99 5y ago
> You're welcome to leave it switched off. Funny you should say that. My car defaults back to radio on when you start it.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  This drives me bonkers. So infuriating. Mine does this, and also when I disconnect CarPlay, it immediately turns on the radio at full blast. My "smart" TV does the same thing: whereas on older dumb TVs, when I told it to sleep, it worked 100% of the time, on my newer TV, it works 30% of the time. Sometimes it decides to switch to Tuner input (even after I've disconnected the antennae! Argh!). Sometimes it just leaves the whole display on, with no input. Finally, one time in 20, when I try to turn on my TV, it just gets into a reboot loop. Everything about having Android TV is objectively worse for my use cases than my old dumb TV, which just displayed the most recent input and turned off when I told it to.
  - drivers99 5y ago
    > also when I disconnect CarPlay, it immediately turns on the radio at full blast. Me too. Subaru?
alerighi 5y ago
They are not. Smart TVs are slow as hell. I don't want a TV that has "to boot" and takes time to turn on because it has to load a full Android OS, takes 10 seconds to load the channel guide, have a ton of buttons that you didn't ask to open Netflix or other services for which I don't have a subscriptions to press by mistake (and each time you loose 10 seconds or so of the programs you where watching). Really, I find modern smart TV too lagging, it's like you press a button on the remote and the TV responds even 1 seconds after, it gives you the impression that the remote is not working properly, but it's not there the problem. A TV has to do one thing, and do it well, let me watch some TV programs, from external sources or from the aerial, with a good image and sound quality (but the last one it's impossible to find on any TV these day and you need always an external sound system). I don't need Netflix or other video streaming services, if I need that I just plug a media center PC in the HDMI port, why complicating the TV with stuff that still doesn't work well and it's slow as hell? Speaking about car radios... car radios these days are horrible. They present you DAB radio as the primary choice, that has an terrible sound quality. FM reception is still bad. The quality of the speakers either as bad. And I'm taking about the car radio of a Mercedes car that costs 40k euros. The stock car radio of my 2010 Volkswagen Golf is far better, better sound quality, better radio reception, better responsiveness of the radio (physical knobs and buttons that I can operate without looking at them VS unresponsive touch screen interfaces that are dangerous to use when you drive). And the worse thing? You cannot update the radio in every modern car. They destroyed the market of aftermarket car stereos, how can you replace the radio if it's not only a radio but it's the interface that you use to control all the car functions?

fsflover 5y ago

> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Unless they find an open WiFi network.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gryn 5y ago
or come integrated with an unremovable sim card that connects to a private Corporate APN.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  There are a million things TV manufacturers could do that would be a problem but I think we should be focusing our attention on what they actually are doing. Hardcoding DNS for example which makes Pi-hole ineffective. That is increasingly happening and should quite rightly be criticised.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I think we should be focusing our attention on what they actually are doing. It's absolutely necessary to try to anticipate the future, because the future always becomes the present. If we don't try to anticipate, we will be stuck with whatever is given to us. Like the introduction of ads on Android TV.
nerdawson 5y ago
Automatically connecting to an open WiFi network without being instructed to do so seems reckless to say the least. Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
- jkingsman 5y ago
  Not directly a TV, but Amazon Sidewalk is building a mesh network in residential areas for pretty much this purpose.
  - asdff 5y ago
    cant wait until we read articles about someone using sidewalk connected unpatched TVs and fridges to mine crypto
- Forbo 5y ago
  Last I heard Samsung devices were doing this, I'll need to see if I can find the source again. Found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choose_to_not_connect_your_samsung_smart/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo... Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted. But here's another example of devices getting sold with their own cellular connectivity preinstalled. https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-first-5g-8k-tv-to-one-up-samsung-and-apple/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
  - fouric 5y ago
    > Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted. Fortunately, some thoughtful person saved it in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choose_to_not_connect_your_samsung_smart/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddi... Contents: So I just had a rather annoying experience. I own two Samsung Smart TVs, which honestly gave me the heebie jeebies to purchase. With that said, at the end of the day I decided that as long as I didn't hook it up to the net, I'd be good to go. I've been using them for a few years, and have felt pretty comfortable with the situation, so imagine my surprise when I sit down to watch something on the living room tv (which I don't use all that often) and my show is interrupted by a notification that "SmartHub" had updated. After digging around in settings for a moment, I realized that one of my next door neighbors had installed an open router with internet, and my tv had silently automatically connected to it and began doing its normal internet stuff. I have no idea how long it was connected like that. After looking though the settings and a few Google searches later, I realized there was no actual way to disabled the wireless connection on that TV. It expected an internet connection, and intended to get one. Ultimately, I managed to get it to stop what it was doing by letting it connect to my router and then blocking it via access control. I then followed up by going into "IP Settings" and setting that to manual, while leaving all the values at 0. It complained, but allowed me to keep the setting. Anyhow, figured I'd share, since I imagine quite a few people here are also not keen on a smart tv connecting to the net, given some of the history surrounding them.
Silhouette 5y ago
Someone says this every time smart TVs get discussed, but has anyone ever cited a verifiable case of it actually being done, noting that it would clearly be illegal to do it in much of the world? Now, if we're talking about the danger of devices incorporating their own wireless communications and phoning home on a network of their manufacturer's own choosing without the knowledge or consent of the owner, that is a serious risk, and one that IMHO should be mitigated by regulating it out of existence before it has any chance to become established practice.
GrayShade 5y ago
Or they start shipping with SIM cards.
BackBlast 5y ago
Or if they have Alexa, it should be able to mesh to the next Amazon device in range and use their connected internet to do it's thing.
bkallus 5y ago
With TCL TVs, it's not hard to remove the wifi card. In the ones I've taken apart it's always just connected with USB internally.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Unless they implement some kind of hardware check against removing it.
  - bkallus 5y ago
    The ones with Roku OS don't do this. Can't vouch for Android TV though.

z2 5y ago

The worry I have with these TVs is that basic functions like channel seeking or brightness controls now rely on a computer running Android. It feels like a 1000-fold increase in complexity and risk for something to hobble the TV part of the TV. Say the CPU overheats due to poor heat design after 3 years--it doesn't seem like manufacturers have a dumb mode to fall back on. Similarly, I'd be very worried if a car's radio prevented the car from driving. It is sad that wanting a simple, modular display that we can upgrade peripherals around is niche these days. In a way, car makers took a step in the right direction with more radios adopting CarPlay & Android Auto, acknowledging that their own radios can't outsmart an evolving mobile ecosystem.

jrkfkgmfmr 5y ago
The TV part of the TV requires a CPU anyway these days, because most cable signal or HDMI inputs are digital.
- apk17 5y ago
  I hope very much that that CPU isn't running android, though. I can't clock it, but our current TV seems to take longer to, well, turn on, than the tube tellys of yore.
  - bdamm 5y ago
    The TV of my childhood took so long to warm up, you'd be standing there for at least 5 seconds wondering if it had turned on at all before seeing something. Usually it was the click of a relay and the hum of a capacitor soaking up a field that was the real clue.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      My current TV takes longer than 5 seconds to turn on, and it's not even smart.
bruce343434 5y ago
Just get a seperate signal box and a big monitor?

handrous 5y ago

Part of it might be that consumers want smart TVs, but it's definitely the case that consumers are very price-sensitive when it comes to TVs, and that selling ad space (and selling/leveraging data gained by stalking your users—why this shit is legal is beyond me) on an integrated OS lets you sell at, or even under, the cost to deliver the hardware, and remain profitable. This is also why it's really, really hard to build a Roku competitor starting from 0, without a lot of starting capital. You won't be able to match them on price, and also won't yet have the scale to subsidize your own devices with ad sales, so you'll need to sell at a loss (remember: you also need to get onto shelves in stores to compete, and they'll have harsh price requirements, calibrated by what your ad- and spyware-subsidized competitors are selling for, if you want shelf-space with an unknown brand) for quite a while.

pessimizer 5y ago

> TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. No, they're not. They're collaborating to eliminate choice. The vast majority of the market being taken by smart TVs is a theoretical result of the market. The fact that no manufacturers slip in to clean up the 5% of the market who are willing to pay a slight premium not to have a smart TV is evidence of tacit collusion.

jeremyjh 5y ago
Or evidence that it is nowhere near 5% of the market that would actually pay more for that.
cameronh90 5y ago
Literally everyone I know except for me uses and enjoys their smart TV features. Many people I know are programmers or other technical people. I think you may be over-estimating how typical you are.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I didn't make a claim about how typical I am. If you don't know non-technical people who don't like smart TVs, you rarely talk to people about their TVs (which is not unusual.) This is akin to the oft-repeated claim on HN that nobody but people on HN cares about privacy. What people are is utterly powerless, and living in a kleptocracy that allows markets to be funneled in particular directions by eliminating all alternative choices.

asdff 5y ago

I just want a TV that actually responds quickly to button presses. With the latency you experience hitting the volume buttons or navigating menus on flat screen TVs, it feels like they haven't touched the hardware since 2002, and with the computing gains over those nearly 20 years you'd think a TV could at least turn instantly on and off like a desktop monitor by now.

bogwog 5y ago
You can! You just need to replace your Smart TV every couple of years to keep up with the software updates. The expensive LG TV I bought ~5 years ago was snappy and fast when I got it, but today it's extremely slow and unresponsive. That's my fault for being a bad consumer and not buying the latest model every year. On a serious note, I wonder if there's a jailbreak scene for smart TVs? It'd be awesome to be able to replace their spyware garbage with a basic OS that only lets me change inputs, or maybe something like Kodi if I'm feeling fancy.
- Arrath 5y ago
  There was a really interesting article posted to HN a few months ago now, detailing a deep dive into the firmware of a new Samsung smart TV and what would be required to jailbreak it and run your own firmware. I wonder if part 2 ever came out. E: Ah ha! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25934286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25934286 Unfortunately, the TV proved to be quite secure it seems.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

Smart TVs are dumber than a dumb-TV if they aren't connected to the internet. My Samsung TV stays disconnected from the internet, but to change the input between devices I have to scroll past ads that were preloaded onto it in 2018. If I accidentally press the channel up/down buttons on the remote it switches inputs, takes 10 seconds to realize it isn't online, and then tells me "Samsung TV Plus is not available".

fouric 5y ago

> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Until manufacturers start selling TV's that don't work at all if they're not connected. Or, as is the case with my Samsung TV, they could just be arbitrarily annoying until you do connect - pepper the user with requests to connect and put up modals everywhere until they finally relent.

drivers99 5y ago

> You're welcome to leave it switched off. Funny you should say that. My car defaults back to radio on when you start it.

mercutio2 5y ago
This drives me bonkers. So infuriating. Mine does this, and also when I disconnect CarPlay, it immediately turns on the radio at full blast. My "smart" TV does the same thing: whereas on older dumb TVs, when I told it to sleep, it worked 100% of the time, on my newer TV, it works 30% of the time. Sometimes it decides to switch to Tuner input (even after I've disconnected the antennae! Argh!). Sometimes it just leaves the whole display on, with no input. Finally, one time in 20, when I try to turn on my TV, it just gets into a reboot loop. Everything about having Android TV is objectively worse for my use cases than my old dumb TV, which just displayed the most recent input and turned off when I told it to.
- drivers99 5y ago
  > also when I disconnect CarPlay, it immediately turns on the radio at full blast. Me too. Subaru?

alerighi 5y ago

They are not. Smart TVs are slow as hell. I don't want a TV that has "to boot" and takes time to turn on because it has to load a full Android OS, takes 10 seconds to load the channel guide, have a ton of buttons that you didn't ask to open Netflix or other services for which I don't have a subscriptions to press by mistake (and each time you loose 10 seconds or so of the programs you where watching). Really, I find modern smart TV too lagging, it's like you press a button on the remote and the TV responds even 1 seconds after, it gives you the impression that the remote is not working properly, but it's not there the problem. A TV has to do one thing, and do it well, let me watch some TV programs, from external sources or from the aerial, with a good image and sound quality (but the last one it's impossible to find on any TV these day and you need always an external sound system). I don't need Netflix or other video streaming services, if I need that I just plug a media center PC in the HDMI port, why complicating the TV with stuff that still doesn't work well and it's slow as hell? Speaking about car radios... car radios these days are horrible. They present you DAB radio as the primary choice, that has an terrible sound quality. FM reception is still bad. The quality of the speakers either as bad. And I'm taking about the car radio of a Mercedes car that costs 40k euros. The stock car radio of my 2010 Volkswagen Golf is far better, better sound quality, better radio reception, better responsiveness of the radio (physical knobs and buttons that I can operate without looking at them VS unresponsive touch screen interfaces that are dangerous to use when you drive). And the worse thing? You cannot update the radio in every modern car. They destroyed the market of aftermarket car stereos, how can you replace the radio if it's not only a radio but it's the interface that you use to control all the car functions?