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Let me defend smart TVs for a second I own a smart TV that was at least partially subsidized by the mess of ads I see on the home page. But when manufacturers

Let me defend smart TVs for a second I own a smart TV that was at least partially subsidized by the mess of ads I see on the home page. But when manufacturers make a high quality panel, I’m not really convinced there’s a market for dumb TVs - people just use their own box if they want, and the marginal cost of the electronics required may even be negative now that Android/Google TV can also handle TV settings while providing a new revenue source.

blueflow 2y ago
Ads come with the spyware to target them.
ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. I've an old dumb 1080p Samsung TV. Apart from the panel not being up to date everything about it is better than the smart version that I bought 8 years later.
nemomarx 2y ago
the smart TV is probably cheaper, but let me buy some pro grade version of the panel without it and vote with my wallet right?
- renewiltord 2y ago
  I think I could probably sell you a 55” with no smart features for $4999. Let me know if interested and I can follow up.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I looked into this briefly. Many TVs run Linux under the hood, and can be flashed, as the firmware is available because of the GPL. (Sometimes. Vizio had to be sued into doing so iirc.) so "all" that has to be done is to repackage and rewrite some firmware, reflash the TV to only ever use HDMI1, and Bob's your uncle. The problem (aside from the fact that redoing the firmware isn't trivial - but that's the fun part) is that TVs are big and bulky, and come in multiple sizes and resolutions. And then shipping them around the country gets expensive, limiting reach, and then that means that taking returns also becomes difficult too. Especially because you'd be reboxing existing televisions to begin with. But maybe you could open up a storefront to sell these from and serve a local area first. Anyway, this is more a comment on the issues with this as bother me, and not an indightment of the whole idea. Someone else with a lot more capital to bootstrap could pull it off - assuming there really is enough of a market for such a product. It might be like the support for a small phone contingent or light truck. There's a vocal crowd that does exist, but they don't exist in great enough quantity relative to the rest of the market, leading to not enough sales to support a business built on that singular premise. The other issue is HDCP. If the Apple/Google TV won't play high res content to your modified firmware, the idea's dead in the water without an additional device like from hdfury, but at that point, how many customers are just going to put up with a "smart" tv?
toast0 2y ago
I've owned several lcd tvs and several tv boxes. A big problem with smart tvs is the difference in lifetimes between the two. Tv boxes have a maybe 3 year lifetime before they get kind of junky. Lcd tvs go at least 5 years, sometimes much longer. If you have a smart tv, around year 3 or 4, you're going to want to hook up a (new) tv box, but you're still going to have to fight the built in OS anyway, at least a bit. Economics of ads subsidizing the tv aside, it makes more sense to have the tv firmware be focused on the essentials like responding to user input quickly and if it has a tuner not locking up on poor or malformed signals, and the user can choose between the tv box ecosystems they like. Separately, it'd be nice if the tv box ecosystem got some more longevity... Maybe that will happen soon. 4k@60fps with dolby vision and/or hdr10+ seems like a likely plateau of streaming video for a while... if they'd start regularly putting in 1g ethernet to handle peak bandwidth of 4k BluRay rips, things would be pretty good. 8k seems unlikely to get mainstream adoption (but I could be wrong)

blueflow 2y ago

Ads come with the spyware to target them.

ghjfrdghibt 2y ago

This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. I've an old dumb 1080p Samsung TV. Apart from the panel not being up to date everything about it is better than the smart version that I bought 8 years later.

nemomarx 2y ago

the smart TV is probably cheaper, but let me buy some pro grade version of the panel without it and vote with my wallet right?

renewiltord 2y ago
I think I could probably sell you a 55” with no smart features for $4999. Let me know if interested and I can follow up.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I looked into this briefly. Many TVs run Linux under the hood, and can be flashed, as the firmware is available because of the GPL. (Sometimes. Vizio had to be sued into doing so iirc.) so "all" that has to be done is to repackage and rewrite some firmware, reflash the TV to only ever use HDMI1, and Bob's your uncle. The problem (aside from the fact that redoing the firmware isn't trivial - but that's the fun part) is that TVs are big and bulky, and come in multiple sizes and resolutions. And then shipping them around the country gets expensive, limiting reach, and then that means that taking returns also becomes difficult too. Especially because you'd be reboxing existing televisions to begin with. But maybe you could open up a storefront to sell these from and serve a local area first. Anyway, this is more a comment on the issues with this as bother me, and not an indightment of the whole idea. Someone else with a lot more capital to bootstrap could pull it off - assuming there really is enough of a market for such a product. It might be like the support for a small phone contingent or light truck. There's a vocal crowd that does exist, but they don't exist in great enough quantity relative to the rest of the market, leading to not enough sales to support a business built on that singular premise. The other issue is HDCP. If the Apple/Google TV won't play high res content to your modified firmware, the idea's dead in the water without an additional device like from hdfury, but at that point, how many customers are just going to put up with a "smart" tv?

toast0 2y ago

I've owned several lcd tvs and several tv boxes. A big problem with smart tvs is the difference in lifetimes between the two. Tv boxes have a maybe 3 year lifetime before they get kind of junky. Lcd tvs go at least 5 years, sometimes much longer. If you have a smart tv, around year 3 or 4, you're going to want to hook up a (new) tv box, but you're still going to have to fight the built in OS anyway, at least a bit. Economics of ads subsidizing the tv aside, it makes more sense to have the tv firmware be focused on the essentials like responding to user input quickly and if it has a tuner not locking up on poor or malformed signals, and the user can choose between the tv box ecosystems they like. Separately, it'd be nice if the tv box ecosystem got some more longevity... Maybe that will happen soon. 4k@60fps with dolby vision and/or hdr10+ seems like a likely plateau of streaming video for a while... if they'd start regularly putting in 1g ethernet to handle peak bandwidth of 4k BluRay rips, things would be pretty good. 8k seems unlikely to get mainstream adoption (but I could be wrong)