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I thought it was relatively common knowledge within technical circles to never give smart TVs an internet connection, but I suppose not. Also, it's worth notin

I thought it was relatively common knowledge within technical circles to never give smart TVs an internet connection, but I suppose not. Also, it's worth noting that TVs built on Android TV have a massive advantage here in that you can plug them into your laptop and remove the content recognition package using adb (Android Debug Bridge) just like you might with a phone or tablet. This might be possible with Samsung Tizen and LG webOS devices too, but both are going to require more esoteric tooling.

ekropotin 10mo ago
What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?
- vel0city 10mo ago
  Well, there's little choice for TVs without smart features these days. Especially if you're wanting certain quality and other features.
  - Alive-in-2025 10mo ago
    What you do is you should never do is connect your tv to the internet. You connect something you control and can turn off if you don't like it, like say a google youtube tv dongle, or apple tv. You can unplug them if you don't like them. If you connect your tv to wifi, it can spy on you all the time. It can upload info on what you watch even if you used an external google tv puck to watch tv. It can see what you type on the screen if say you use it for say a monitor. There are reports of people deleting networking info but the tvs occasionally connecting back even though they deleted wifi info. You have to get a new network name to block them. It's much much better to connect an external device, and if not that then use an ethernet cable to connect, because you can physically remove it. Because the vast majority of people use whatever their tv came with these days in terms of smart tv connections, they don't set privacy settings. There's every reason for the tv makers to keep spying on you. If you have an external device their is motivation for them to not make you angry - but it's true that they can spy on you.
- spudlyo 10mo ago
  You get a much cheaper TV. The folks who manufacture the TV expect to make a certain amount of revenue from your data, so they price this into the cost of the TV. This saves you from having to spend more money on a commercial display that often has a worse panel.
- cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
  The specs and quality of the panel, backlighting (if applicable), and image processing. These days, the few "dumb" TVs that are still sold are either cheap and bad or are designed for signage use and aren't well suited for TV/movies/games relative to their mass-market smart cousins. A smart TV used as a dumb TV alongside a quality streaming box (Apple TV or Nvidia Shield TV) or console gets you the best overall experience.
  - ekropotin 10mo ago
    Not for everyone, I guess. Many people, including myself, don’t want to buy “quality streaming box” just for watching Netflix or YouTube sporadically.
    - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
      To each their own, but the good ones last a long time even if they’re a little pricey. As an example, the original Apple TV 4K which was released in 2017 is still quite serviceable and continues to receive updates even now. A unit purchased in 2017 for $179 will have worked out to $18/year assuming they’re still using it in 2027.
      - 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
        The cheapest Roku player at this moment is selling for $16, the plush model for $80. So, you do have to eat that financial hit for the least-bad privacy option.
        zie 10mo ago
        Right, but the Roku literally monitors what you watch 2x a second. They call it ACR: https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-of-tv-and-audience-data https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...
    - Pooge 10mo ago
      From my experience, TVs are not as ubiquitous as they used to be 10 years earlier. However, one must acknowledge that you can now watch "TV" on almost all your devices.
- hapticmonkey 10mo ago
  The best (in terms of image quality) consumer displays on the market right now are OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. But they’re also “Smart” TVs. I keep mine disconnected and use an external media box (AppleTV 4K).
  - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
    Several Sony models are also very good, being built with Samsung panels and their own in-house image processing which is some of the best in the industry. Their TVs run Android and support offline firmware updates, too, which is why they're usually what I buy.
    - mancerayder 10mo ago
      Which Sony line? I usually get Samsung and now I'm nervous about nag screens to connect to the Internet.
      - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
        I usually buy midrange to high end Sony Bravias. Don’t know as much about the lower end models.
- forbiddenlake 10mo ago
  Mine's in the living room hooked up to a gaming PC, and I don't watch TV/movies.
- kazinator 10mo ago
  One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want. You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.
- zeta0134 10mo ago
  The ability to own a TV at all, since even the cheaper sets now have this nonsense built right in. Loosely I think the idea is to subsidize the cost of the hardware with the marketing deals, but I don't actually know.
- 0manrho 10mo ago
  There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days. Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)
- epgui 10mo ago
  The point is I don’t want my TV, my refrigerator, my toaster, my dishwasher, or my washing machine to be “smart” or to have any AI or internet connectivity. These all have a very simple job to do, and there’s absolutely zero value-add to the smart edge software nonsense.
  - ekropotin 10mo ago
    I may want sometimes to use my TV for watching something (I know, sounds wild), and I don’t want to buy additional piece of hardware for that.
    - ycombinatrix 10mo ago
      Then go ahead? Not sure why you're so surprised that some of us don't like running spyware on our devices.
  - Moldoteck 10mo ago
    I do have some use-cases for a tv to be 'smart'. It's on/off trigger from a smartphone and casting anything you like from YT/Spotify. It would make sense for a washing machine to be smart/have ai if it could detect clothes types and suggest a washing regime or warn you that selected regime can damage them. It'll also be nice to be able to schedule the washing so for ex. it's done when you get at home from work. For dishwasher - maybe somehow detect stuff that's incompatible with dishwasher and warn you? I do also see a point in having a smart fridge that would detect products that expire based on some qr codes printed on them, otherwise idk...
    - bgbntty2 10mo ago
      Those aren't real problems for most people, though. I've never damaged a piece of clothing and I only use a few programs. It's obvious what you can put in the dishwasher. And expiry dates don't mean anything. Food is usually fine to eat long after the expiry or best before date. It's easy to see if someone is bad because the color, texture, smell and taste change. Those examples seem like they would be useful for mentally disabled people. Not trying to be a dick here, but someone with declining cognitive abilities is more likely to put a sock in the dishwasher, to wash delicate clothing at 90 °C or to forget food in the fridge for months. It reminds me of those items primarily designed for physically disabled people that (used to) be advertised for normal people on infomercials because the market for disabled people wasn't big enough.
- Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
  I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents). This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.
- SomeUserName432 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access? The difficulty in finding an affordable TV without smart functionality alone means that you're most likely buying a smart TV. I yet again bought a Samsung smart tv (despite having sworn never to do so again..) and I'm never letting it connect to the internet after what happened to the last one.
- nottorp 10mo ago
  The difficulty of buying a dumb TV.
- mancerayder 10mo ago
  It's more that they don't sell dumb TVs anymore, so you have to simulate it yourself by preventing Internet access. Now, whether it won't nag you to connect with pop ups is a different question.
- Rebelgecko 10mo ago
  It's often much cheaper than an equivalent "dumb" or commercial tv screen
stainablesteel 10mo ago
i hardly consider this post to be within a technical circle, this is normie-stream i expected someone to be diving deep into the software within a TV, not some guy who finally decided to check the settings tab even if you turn that off it's definitely still spying on you
dmayle 10mo ago
The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview. Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung). I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting. Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it. Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.
- zie 10mo ago
  An Apple TV 4k: https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/ https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/ It will just work. You will maybe get an ad or two from Apple, rarely, about Apple services, but it's very rare and easy to ignore. Otherwise you only get ads if your service(Netflix, etc) delivers ads. Apple won't share your data with anyone, and generally does a fairly decent job(compared to other giant tech companies) of not collecting much.
  - rebeccaskinner 10mo ago
    The only acceptable number of ads is zero.
    - zie 10mo ago
      Good luck with that, no company anywhere offers no ads.
      - pavel_lishin 10mo ago
        Which is why things like The Pirate Bay remain popular.
queenkjuul 10mo ago
I recently did a lot of looking into this, and sadly most of the previously wide-open loopholes for rooting LG webOS were all patched in the last ~6 months. You can fiddle with dev mode but you can't get proper root. I basically settled on an (incredibly expensive) Sony commercial Android TV -- beyond the ADB method, their commercial line gives you additional admin controls over which apps are allowed to run and which are allowed on the network. Between the two i felt I'd be pretty content. Granted i haven't tried it because my new job fell through and a $1400 TV was no longer an option.
kittikitti 10mo ago
This advice is great until a normie comes around and goes "aren't you an engineer? You should be fired" for not having internet setup already on your TV.

ekropotin 10mo ago

What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?

vel0city 10mo ago
Well, there's little choice for TVs without smart features these days. Especially if you're wanting certain quality and other features.
- Alive-in-2025 10mo ago
  What you do is you should never do is connect your tv to the internet. You connect something you control and can turn off if you don't like it, like say a google youtube tv dongle, or apple tv. You can unplug them if you don't like them. If you connect your tv to wifi, it can spy on you all the time. It can upload info on what you watch even if you used an external google tv puck to watch tv. It can see what you type on the screen if say you use it for say a monitor. There are reports of people deleting networking info but the tvs occasionally connecting back even though they deleted wifi info. You have to get a new network name to block them. It's much much better to connect an external device, and if not that then use an ethernet cable to connect, because you can physically remove it. Because the vast majority of people use whatever their tv came with these days in terms of smart tv connections, they don't set privacy settings. There's every reason for the tv makers to keep spying on you. If you have an external device their is motivation for them to not make you angry - but it's true that they can spy on you.
spudlyo 10mo ago
You get a much cheaper TV. The folks who manufacture the TV expect to make a certain amount of revenue from your data, so they price this into the cost of the TV. This saves you from having to spend more money on a commercial display that often has a worse panel.
cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
The specs and quality of the panel, backlighting (if applicable), and image processing. These days, the few "dumb" TVs that are still sold are either cheap and bad or are designed for signage use and aren't well suited for TV/movies/games relative to their mass-market smart cousins. A smart TV used as a dumb TV alongside a quality streaming box (Apple TV or Nvidia Shield TV) or console gets you the best overall experience.
- ekropotin 10mo ago
  Not for everyone, I guess. Many people, including myself, don’t want to buy “quality streaming box” just for watching Netflix or YouTube sporadically.
  - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
    To each their own, but the good ones last a long time even if they’re a little pricey. As an example, the original Apple TV 4K which was released in 2017 is still quite serviceable and continues to receive updates even now. A unit purchased in 2017 for $179 will have worked out to $18/year assuming they’re still using it in 2027.
    - 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
      The cheapest Roku player at this moment is selling for $16, the plush model for $80. So, you do have to eat that financial hit for the least-bad privacy option.
      - zie 10mo ago
        Right, but the Roku literally monitors what you watch 2x a second. They call it ACR: https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-of-tv-and-audience-data https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...
  - Pooge 10mo ago
    From my experience, TVs are not as ubiquitous as they used to be 10 years earlier. However, one must acknowledge that you can now watch "TV" on almost all your devices.
hapticmonkey 10mo ago
The best (in terms of image quality) consumer displays on the market right now are OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. But they’re also “Smart” TVs. I keep mine disconnected and use an external media box (AppleTV 4K).
- cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
  Several Sony models are also very good, being built with Samsung panels and their own in-house image processing which is some of the best in the industry. Their TVs run Android and support offline firmware updates, too, which is why they're usually what I buy.
  - mancerayder 10mo ago
    Which Sony line? I usually get Samsung and now I'm nervous about nag screens to connect to the Internet.
    - cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
      I usually buy midrange to high end Sony Bravias. Don’t know as much about the lower end models.
forbiddenlake 10mo ago
Mine's in the living room hooked up to a gaming PC, and I don't watch TV/movies.
kazinator 10mo ago
One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want. You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.
zeta0134 10mo ago
The ability to own a TV at all, since even the cheaper sets now have this nonsense built right in. Loosely I think the idea is to subsidize the cost of the hardware with the marketing deals, but I don't actually know.
0manrho 10mo ago
There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days. Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)
epgui 10mo ago
The point is I don’t want my TV, my refrigerator, my toaster, my dishwasher, or my washing machine to be “smart” or to have any AI or internet connectivity. These all have a very simple job to do, and there’s absolutely zero value-add to the smart edge software nonsense.
- ekropotin 10mo ago
  I may want sometimes to use my TV for watching something (I know, sounds wild), and I don’t want to buy additional piece of hardware for that.
  - ycombinatrix 10mo ago
    Then go ahead? Not sure why you're so surprised that some of us don't like running spyware on our devices.
- Moldoteck 10mo ago
  I do have some use-cases for a tv to be 'smart'. It's on/off trigger from a smartphone and casting anything you like from YT/Spotify. It would make sense for a washing machine to be smart/have ai if it could detect clothes types and suggest a washing regime or warn you that selected regime can damage them. It'll also be nice to be able to schedule the washing so for ex. it's done when you get at home from work. For dishwasher - maybe somehow detect stuff that's incompatible with dishwasher and warn you? I do also see a point in having a smart fridge that would detect products that expire based on some qr codes printed on them, otherwise idk...
  - bgbntty2 10mo ago
    Those aren't real problems for most people, though. I've never damaged a piece of clothing and I only use a few programs. It's obvious what you can put in the dishwasher. And expiry dates don't mean anything. Food is usually fine to eat long after the expiry or best before date. It's easy to see if someone is bad because the color, texture, smell and taste change. Those examples seem like they would be useful for mentally disabled people. Not trying to be a dick here, but someone with declining cognitive abilities is more likely to put a sock in the dishwasher, to wash delicate clothing at 90 °C or to forget food in the fridge for months. It reminds me of those items primarily designed for physically disabled people that (used to) be advertised for normal people on infomercials because the market for disabled people wasn't big enough.
Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents). This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.
SomeUserName432 10mo ago
> What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access? The difficulty in finding an affordable TV without smart functionality alone means that you're most likely buying a smart TV. I yet again bought a Samsung smart tv (despite having sworn never to do so again..) and I'm never letting it connect to the internet after what happened to the last one.
nottorp 10mo ago
The difficulty of buying a dumb TV.
mancerayder 10mo ago
It's more that they don't sell dumb TVs anymore, so you have to simulate it yourself by preventing Internet access. Now, whether it won't nag you to connect with pop ups is a different question.
Rebelgecko 10mo ago
It's often much cheaper than an equivalent "dumb" or commercial tv screen

stainablesteel 10mo ago

i hardly consider this post to be within a technical circle, this is normie-stream i expected someone to be diving deep into the software within a TV, not some guy who finally decided to check the settings tab even if you turn that off it's definitely still spying on you

dmayle 10mo ago

The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview. Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung). I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting. Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it. Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.

zie 10mo ago
An Apple TV 4k: https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/ https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/ It will just work. You will maybe get an ad or two from Apple, rarely, about Apple services, but it's very rare and easy to ignore. Otherwise you only get ads if your service(Netflix, etc) delivers ads. Apple won't share your data with anyone, and generally does a fairly decent job(compared to other giant tech companies) of not collecting much.
- rebeccaskinner 10mo ago
  The only acceptable number of ads is zero.
  - zie 10mo ago
    Good luck with that, no company anywhere offers no ads.
    - pavel_lishin 10mo ago
      Which is why things like The Pirate Bay remain popular.

queenkjuul 10mo ago

I recently did a lot of looking into this, and sadly most of the previously wide-open loopholes for rooting LG webOS were all patched in the last ~6 months. You can fiddle with dev mode but you can't get proper root. I basically settled on an (incredibly expensive) Sony commercial Android TV -- beyond the ADB method, their commercial line gives you additional admin controls over which apps are allowed to run and which are allowed on the network. Between the two i felt I'd be pretty content. Granted i haven't tried it because my new job fell through and a $1400 TV was no longer an option.

kittikitti 10mo ago

This advice is great until a normie comes around and goes "aren't you an engineer? You should be fired" for not having internet setup already on your TV.