• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Anyone know of a reasonably priced OLED/QLED, >60", 4k TV without smart features?

    I really don’t want the spyware and adware that come with newer smart TVs, and I’m willing to pay a bit of a premium for it. I’d also be happy with a unicorn smart TV that doesn’t have any of those anti-features.

    • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      What about just not connecting it to the network? Then put a video device on it like Roku or Apple tv or whatever.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        just not connecting it to the network?

        Some TVs require connecting to the network to set it up, and I’m concerned TV manufacturers will get more brazen going forward. If there’s a company that doesn’t do this nonsense, I’d rather reward them for being good instead of working around misfeatures in popular brands.

        Roku

        Has ads that can be disabled, at least as-of last year. Not sure how long that’ll last…

        Apple TV

        Apple also seems interested in ads.

        Any other option will likely degrade to having ads at some point. I could probably get rid of them w/ a PiHole or something, but that could end up being a game of whack-a-mole.

        I’ll probably end up w/ a Raspberry Pi or something running Kodi or similar, which is really annoying because that’s yet another thing I have to self-host just to avoid this stupid obsession with ads.

        • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          In the future we might have to hack our TV’s to make them ours…like disconnect the camera and the microphone or feed them bullshit data or inject trick hacks… 🤔 Hmm what is this thing? rm -f…copy paste to see what it does! Oh shit! Half the country looses Disney plus for a few days. And it repeats 5 times every month so they stop fucking with us.

        • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I know this isn’t purely TV-related, but there used to be a secret menu for Roku where you could disable home screen ads. That stopped working for me several months ago. So I recently bought an Onn box (which is basically Android TV, but had as very cluttered UI) and side-loaded one of the open source launchers onto it. It’s been a much better experience than Roku, not least because there’s are no more home screen ads.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            there used to be a secret menu for Roku where you could disable home screen ads

            That’s the first link. If it no longer works, I guess Roku isn’t an option anymore. 😟

            • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              I should clarify: the secret menu can still be navigated to and the options there set. But ads now appear regardless. I went back into the menu and verified the options hadn’t changed (they hadn’t). It’s like Roku has gotten wind of the exploit and ‘fixed’ their OS to ignore those options.