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Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads
- Aurornis 8mo agoThe fact that the ads are rolled out to customers a long time after purchase to escape the return window is extra frustrating. The part about being able to e-mail an obscure support address with your device's ID to have ads turned off on your device suggests that they're trying to see how far they can push this without damaging their brand. Users who complain enough get solutions, everyone else has to deal with it.
- add-sub-mul-div 8mo agoRoku has patched so much new garbage into the product since I originally bought mine. I'll never get another Roku device again.
- chromic04850 8mo ago[dead]
- mox1 8mo agoIts the only device in our household that I have utterly failed at securing or blocking content from our children on. My son has found about 25 different ways to access YouTube across our Android, Android TV, Apple and Roku devices. I have found ways in almost all of them to "nicely" block youtube for him (while keeping it for me or keeping the device functional). Roku is the only one that just doesn't give a crap. Screw Roku.
- nosioptar 8mo agoRoku loves auto changing to really innapropriate shit after the kid appropriate episode ends. For example, start an episode of Mittens and Pants for four year old, at end of episode, instead of playing next episode, it switched to Married With Children.
- ffsm8 8mo agoFrom your first paragraph I was expecting something from the old degen meta like "naked yoga" or "transparent haul" or whatever they're currently doing... Or maybe some of the brainrot genai content that's been booming on kids tv Kinda surprised you consider a completely banal sitcom to be problematic for children. I mean I'd expect the kids to think it's boring and not get any of the subplot... But it's completely family safe?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo agoThe kid is four. There is a difference between safe and appropriate. The recommender could at least suggest something in the same genre. It could also have suggested a deep dive into financial markets, not unsafe content for kids, but also not kid appropriate either.
- mindslight 8mo agoIn addition to being "extra frustrating", it's a straightforward CFAA violation - if laws actually applied to corpos.
- longislandguido 8mo agoIf you deliberately buy a bargain brand Chinese television, you earned the consequences of that decision. Be happy they're only showing you ads and not implanting malware into your network or turning it into a residential proxy.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoFire sticks also show ads
- notrealyme123 8mo agoThis is in no way a china exclusive problem.
- OkayPhysicist 8mo agoWhen did we start calling things "residential proxies" as opposed to "botnets"? I feel like the latter term, while perhaps not as descriptive, has a much better "this is evil" message.
- halJordan 8mo agoIt's not a botnet. The fact that you're trying to use that term because you prefer the emotions it gives you instead of a different term based on reality is all anyone should need to reject your suggestion
- nerevarthelame 8mo agoFor years Hisense has been a highly recommended brand for mid-tier TVs on (relatively) objective review sites like rtings.com. Their customers don't deserve bad things to happen to them. And the Anti-Chinese sentiment is especially weird in the context of advertising, as though the West was spared from intrusive ads prior to this.
- Kasutaja111 8mo agoYea instead of blaming the company for pulling crap like that let's shame the owners of the hardware they paid for because of course that'll help, yeah let's blame each other instead because at least that way we're not blaming the holy corporate overlords
- baal80spam 8mo agoI wonder who came up with this idea and thought: "This will surely bring customers!".
- sejje 8mo ago"This will surely raise revenues and get me a promotion before I make a lateral move to a new company!"
- throwaway173738 8mo agoIf you can sell the ads as a subscription with a yearly contract you can get a 10x multiple on it in your valuation.
- mortsnort 8mo agoI assume the logic is that you can now sell the TV for less than competitors, which would surely bring customers. Seems pretty straightforward and inline with how the whole TV broadcast industry has subsidized content with ads for decades.
- whatevaa 8mo agoNot just TV's. Xiaomi subsidizes it's mobile phones by having ads in it's file manager and other default basic apps. Just as an example.
- lenerdenator 8mo agoCustomers don't matter. Revenues do. TVs are now a commodity that competes almost solely on price. You can walk into most big box stores in North America and buy a TV that will display at a higher resolution than your eyes are physically capable of processing at the distance of the average living room, have a screen bigger than the average person's wingspan, and it'll cost well under $500. If you don't keep the price low you're going to lose sales. Since you're not making cash on the front-end, you make it by selling the ad space. Everyone who could want a TV more-or-less has one. You either cut quality so they have to buy 'em more often, or you monetize what's already there. They're probably doing both, but this is an example of the latter.
- graypegg 8mo agoI wonder if the australian customer support email address is related to Australia's surprisingly strict consumer rights laws. [0] They even offer a form that helps write the specific sort of complaint you should send [1] that presumably, may jump start the process in removing the ads if you had bought the TV under the impression it would continue to work as advertised originally. [0] https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-services/consumer-rights-and-guarantees https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic... [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/problem-with-a-product-or-service-you-bought/contacting-a-business-to-fix-a-problem/help-writing-a-complaint-letter-to-business-tool https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/problem-with-a-product-or-...
- moepstar 8mo agoHaving added Hisense to my shitlist of TV manufacturers a long time ago - did they ever make a model that haven’t had its power supply die after about 4 years? I don’t think so…
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322966
- halflife 8mo agoObligatory: never connect your tv to the internet, only use Apple TV for streaming
- lenerdenator 8mo agoThat works... for now. It'd be trivial for them to introduce some sort of network connectivity check that would need to be completed before audiovisual signals come out of the device. I'm pretty sure they already have that in the pipeline. Why wouldn't they?
- pier25 8mo ago> Why wouldn't they? Plenty of places in the world with bad connectivity or people who can't afford an ISP.
- Sharlin 8mo agoI doubt smart TV manufacturers care about those places or people.
- pier25 8mo agoWhat manufacturer would prefer to not sell millions of TVs?
- BigTTYGothGF 8mo agoYeah but advertisers don't pay as much for those people.
- mikestew 8mo agoObligatory: “but they can run Ethernet over HDMI!” Ignoring, of course, that no implementation has ever been observed in the wild, for purposes malicious or otherwise.
- recursive 8mo ago
- Jgrubb 8mo agoI know nothing about hardware, but is there a world where an OpenWRT firmware for smart TVs is possible? Are there that many different chipsets and manufacturers?
- dlcarrier 8mo agoThere's a homebrew scene for WebOS TVs: https://www.webosbrew.org/ https://www.webosbrew.org/ I don't know of any for Android, but rooting is quite common.
- Kasutaja111 8mo agoI have that on my LG tv but it's kinda pointless, it doesn't remove the adware from the home screen and hunting the ip addresses down it connects to is a pain in the ass so the tried and tested method was to not give it Internet access
- throwaway173738 8mo agoAs long as they haven’t done HAB. And provided you’re willing to live with 720p resolution for all your video streams.
- cynicalsecurity 8mo agoThe article showed me an intrusive popup to subscribe to something several times. What an irony.
- disillusioned 8mo agoIf you're going to be forced, Clockwork Orange-style, to endure unwanted ads on your TV, you might as well just get the whole thing for free, right? That's what Telly does: https://www.telly.com/ https://www.telly.com/ For me, it worth it to spend marginally more to not have to deal with _any_ of that, but I get the appeal.
- k33n 8mo agoThe implicit contract when you buy from Hisense is that you'll see ads. They are obviously deploying more aggressive advertising strategies as their more tech-savvy customers break the implicit contract and get around ads entirely -- leaving the less tech-savvy customers holding the bag. That's all that's happening. Had zero customers done that, they wouldn't have had to go nuclear.
- zedlasso 8mo agoIt's not just TV's. My banking app always spams every time it loads up to sign up for one of its subscriptions. The insanity needs to stop.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- CrzyLngPwd 8mo agoAll they need next is a camera that watches you, and if you are not looking at the ad then the ad is paused. How amazing would that be!?
- choward 8mo agoI've never liked the idea of my display having an integrated computer. Especially one I don't control. This non-sense just furthers that. Displays last a long time. Eventually the computer will become outdated especially if companies can just remotely load viruses like this onto them. I just connect my computer to my TV and that's the only input I ever use. Full control. The "smart" part of "smart" TVs is idiotic.
- krickelkrackel 8mo agoThat's quite 'Black Mirror': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
- notorandit 8mo agoDon't connect TVs to the internet as they are actually computers programmed to serve ads. Actually, don't buy TVs at all. Buy books.