I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.
I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.
The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.
E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.
And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.
The amount of devices in the national spy network which is passed off as just advertisement data is really providing full spectrum live video and audio to third parties that can and do share it for any reason that benefits them.
Still infuriating.
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.
Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.
So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...
I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.
[0] https://kb.cablematters.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=147
They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.
144/24 = 6
120/24 = 5
60/24 = 2.5
TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.
Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?
Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.
All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.
As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.