It’s Still Stupidly, Ridiculously Difficult To Buy A ‘Dumb’ TV

Great article, I really appreciate someone taking the time to acknowledge the hell that is our world with advertisement (many things involve a subscription (the "as a service" model, data, ads or some combination of the three, online surveillance/spying and we can't escape it unless we resort to workarounds like the Pi thing (yeah no one outside of all of us technical people will spend time doing that, be realistic) or buying expensive equivalents without the spying smart functions that seemingly on purpose, lack all of the features that smart tvs gatekeep, want current HDR support? 4K 120hz? 8K 60hz? (LG QNED 8K), pay us all this money for this display and give us all of your hdmi video data through ACR (automatic content recognition) for us to sell to advertisers or the highest bidders. Sure, you can block a lot of it, but the smart tv still records screenshots of everything it can spy from you in its nand storage chip, overall to deal with this is a lot of unnecessary hassle (factory resetting all settings after a firmware update like with an LG OLED smart tv used as a PC monitor) and adds way more maintenance to something that is supposed to be at the most basic level, a television/media display panel with hdmi inputs and speakers.

I want to say first, I really miss the days of being able to buy a basic and also high quality display and having a choice of if I even want to have all this streaming application garbage shown to me through a device attached through HDMI (the common display connector for televisions). Samsung almost did this with their 4K televisions having that OneConnect kit, an hdmi streaming box basically, that could have been sensibly designed to house ALL of the smart functions, and would have worked just like a Roku or Nvidia Shield. For blu-ray support, they could put a UHD bluray disc drive for people that will use it also, the best all in one solution that is able to connect to any HDMI display and is not e-waste built into the television, I will get into that later.

My privacy respecting idea for it would be, People could buy a new Samsung 4K tv display to get the new streaming kit with it, or buy the new kit separately to use with any old television (or even PC monitor) as long as it had 4k hdmi inputs (I’d say put 2.1 ports on the kits right now, to have backwards compatibility with 4k 60hz older screens), then sell new streaming kits with hdmi 2.5 or 3.0 or whichever they slowly move to). Samsung would have still made money and also given people a choice to buy the tv as just a basic high quality monitor with hdmi inputs and all the latest features like HDR with full array local dimming etc;. The kit could have been designed to need a usb 3.0 connection for supplying power (no need for any AC adapter) and an hdmi connection, much like the new Google TV streaming usb things. How manufacturers are doing it now (building the streaming kit into the televisions and giving no choice) is incredibly wasteful on resources and very much e-waste once they stop software support, and they leverage this control to even remove applications at their arbitrary whims.

To Karl Bode or anyone who can, please bring more awareness by reporting on it getting worse in this link here:

https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/samsung-pitches-advertisers-and-streamers-on-ads-that-take-over-its-smart-tv-platform/

I will just quote the Samsung spokesperson in that article, (meaning they speak for company in the absolute case no nonsense about that person doesn't represent Samsung's thoughts, views opinions, etc;, in this case this person does all of that) Samsung spokesperson, Tom Fochetta, said. "It's important that we don't overload users with ads because, as a consumer myself, I too get frustrated," Fochetta said…."Because we own the hardware, we own the service, and own all the targeting and ad tech stack, we have full control over the ad experience."

Disgraceful. Read what he just said. He said you don't even own a Samsung television, no, you’re just paying the electricity bills to run it, and paying them a one time rental fee of whatever you paid to get the screen in your home for them to spy on you to steal and sell your viewing/streaming data. It doesn't matter if its a Black Friday price, full price, sale price, 1000 or more than 2000 dollars for their television screens, these people disgust me and I will continue to never buy any Samsung products ever and neither should you, teach them the only lesson they understand, that will cost them a lot of lost money after abusing customers like this, stop buying all of their products and go to alternatives. Stop enabling their abusive practices by buying their products!