Televisions that can stream platforms like Hulu or Max usually come loaded with technology that collects information on what viewers are watching, and buyers consent to have their viewing tracked when they open their new TV and click through terms of service agreements. Sometimes, data firms can connect those viewing habits to a voter’s phone or laptop via their IP address, promising a trove of information about an individual and the ability to track them across screens.
Other times, firms focus on dividing households into groups based on what they’re watching, how they use their TVs and how many campaign ads they’re seeing, which is a boon to political campaigns eager to target specific groups of voters. Connecting this data to voter files is increasingly a focus — a move that adds individual voting habits into the mix.
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The year is 2024. I purchase a nice TV to shun nearly all of its features and never connect it to the internet because it’s designed to be actively malicious.
While I get your point, the TV isn’t nice because of its app features. If it’s a nice TV it’s because of its display panel and features like upscaling, interpolation, etc., and it’s being subsidized by those built-in apps and tracking functionality.
By purchasing a nice TV, never using the built-in apps, and never connecting the TV to the Internet (or better yet connecting it to a segregated VLAN and dropping literally all traffic to/from the TV), you’re costing the company money on that TV set. Or probably more accurately you’re like the credit card user that maximizes their point rewards while paying off the balance every paycheck, you’re profiting off people who are in debt to their credit card company for whatever reason.
To be clear, I have a G series LG OLED that is not only in its own VLAN with no traffic allowed in or out, but I drop all DNS that isn’t coming from my pihole at the WAN port on my edge router, I watch stuff from a secondary device, and most everything I watch is pirated and streamed locally anyway, so I’m definitely subsidizing my entertainment with the privacy invasion of others. If I could get an OLED tv without any of the built in OS stuff I absolutely would, and would be willing to pay more for a SKU with that stuff stripped out, but afaik that’s just not possible.
If you can’t produce a product without subsidizing it by pumping it full of data tracking nonsense then you don’t deserve to be a fucking company.
Fuck that and you know it. They only produce this garbage because they get more value out of your data not because they can’t fucking manufacture a good affordable tv.
The problem isn’t just subsidization. It is that they make way more money over time with ads. One time profit vs long term profit
Exactly! It’s more profitable for them to manufacture spyware over building a functional machine. There is no excusing their behaviour, they can manufacture a tv that’s good and affordable, they just won’t.
Shit like this is why we need more antitrust laws and consumer protections. Break up some monopolies already!!
Im sure they could pump out LED panels without spyware at pretty much the price they’re selling at now, sure. I have doubts they could produce OLED panels without the spyware garbage and keep them at an affordable price for someone making the median annual salary or lower in the US. You just have to look at OLED monitors to get a rough picture of this. A 34” OLED monitor sells for roughly the same price as a 48” OLED television.
I’m not trying to excuse television manufacturers at all here, it’s bullshit and I hate it, I just don’t have much choice if I want a TV. I just try to be as invaluable as possible to them after that. I don’t see what monopolies have to do with anything here though, there’s a huge of TV manufacturers, from Sony, LG, and Samsung down to bottom of the barrel Chinese brands like TCL and stuff.
Consumer protection laws that prevent data siphoning by TV manufacturers? Yes please. I’m just not sold on there being any antitrust/monopoly shenanigans going on.
The more and more of stuff like this I see, the kore I just wan’t to buy the cheapest possible mini pc, make it tv remote controllable and just put it to open jellyfin directly that’s connected to my home media server.
And then hook it up to the most dumb tv I can fijd with decent picture quality.
That’s what I’ve done. It’s the way to go. Got a TV from the panel manufacturer that’s so basic you can see light shining through the back when it’s on lol
Which manufacturer, and how did you get it?
It’s a Changhong, they’re one of the biggest TV manufacturers in China. I bought mine second hand though, so I can’t offer you a link, I’m afraid
I wish there were more high quality dumb TVs. Most of the dumb TVs I can find today are both very expensive and lack the features I’m looking for like HDR and 120hz+ frame rates.
I know the argument is that the privacy invasions are subsidizing the cost of the TV but I have yet to see non-anecdotal evidence of that and suspect that the price of the TV would be the same either way because the market will only support so much expense.
Just don’t let it connect to internet.
There are no good dumb teevees for home use
That is the solution. Connect your box to the internet, never the TV.
It will work at a premium cost, and only until they start selling them with LTE chips buried away in the motherboard.
So many devices come with those now… I open up my products and remove the card, the antenna, or the whole board if possible.
Which do?
For example, my sleep apnea machine had a wifi for home and a LTE modem. Data gathered by the machine was sent off-site…no reports available on the host. Privacy policy read it would gather info, run diagnostics on itself and the local network without explanation of what it was doing.
My sleep data could not be viewed by me, only through the 3rd party, so I ripped out the wifi board and LTE chip. I haul the machine into my doctor office so he can cycle through data on the tiny display.
He hates it, but I remind him he picked the machine without asking me if I agreed to to the data collection.
As others have said, just buy a TV that meets your A/V needs and don’t connect it to the internet.
I know everyone talks about Jellyfin these days, but Kodi is an excellent option too if you don’t need streaming to multiple devices. I use Kodi via LibreElec on an rpi4 and it’s been great. All media is stored on my home server and shared over Samba, but you can easily store it locally on the box if you don’t have a server.
For music streaming, I run a separate instance of miniDLNA on my server, since I like to browse-by-directory for my music instead of relying solely on metadata. This also allows you to stream to any DLNA-friendly device on the LAN.
I’ve digitized my disc collection and just keep the physical media as a backup. The local library has a huge selection of media too…and if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it.
Jellyfin has a much nicer user interface and is overall a better way of doing things. But libreElec and Kodi are great at being a cheap open source client that handles lots of different codecs without much fuss.
I have a JF instance running on Proxmox as well, but it hasn’t won me over yet. Still, I know a lot of folks do prefer it to Kodi and others so there must be something to it.
I use Jellyfin through the Jellycon add-on for Kodi, running LibreELEC on a RPi 3B+ to get the best of both worlds.
This makes the content available for direct playback since Kodi supports most formats and codecs, assuming your device is powerful enough. The RPi 3B+ I use is happy with H.264 but can’t handle H.265, VP9 and other more compressed video files, though various other SBCs or USFF PCs have the capabilities if you need them. Or, if your server is powerful enough, you could set it up to let Jellyfin transcode the video to a supported format on the fly as it’s streaming.
For a better UX, I recommend using a skin like Arctic: Zephyr - Reloaded and taking some time to understand how to make relevant content available through custom widgets on the homescreen, such as New Episodes, Continue Watching, Next Up, etc. if you want a Jellyfin-like experience. I’ve done that, and it has been convenient at times to be able to use the TV remote through HDMI-CEC, though I must admit I mostly just initiate playback from the Jellyfin app on my phone by connecting it to the RPi, resulting in a more casting-like experience. However, I still use my TV remote for player control, but I can also use the Kore app for remote control of Kodi. I use that app for controlling the player of Kodi since it’s better at staying in sync with the Kodi playback status than the Jellyfin app, and because it can control the entirety of Kodi instead of just the current Jellyfin media playback.
Don’t even need to mini pc, we use one of the silverstone amp-sized cases with an asrock
Also we don’t jellyfin we just use vlc on a win7 base. Means i can run retroarch and UT on the tv as well :)
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Fuck off spammer
I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.
Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.
None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.
If you find torrenting to be distasteful, you can get a cheap USB DVD reader and rip dvds instead.
It’s still technically considered infringement, but at least it’s completely private.
