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Comment by abbycurtis33

5 days ago

Until somebody releases a dumb TV, you just can't connect your tv to the Internet.

Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.

  • You won’t get a choice; they will come with a 5G connection that doesn’t ask you, doesn’t notify you, doesn’t cost you, and has no user-visible toggle. Like cars do these days. And a mesh-networking fallback so if you’re in a city and your neighbour also has one of the similar brand it will connect through their internet instead.

  • I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.

    [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/samsung-touches-lcds...

    • It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.

      Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.

      There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.

      3 replies →

    • I bought the top of the line TV from Samsung in 2011. The 'smart' functionality services went offline after a year or two, which means all 'smart' functions no longer work and I am now happily using it as a dumb TV.

      Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.

      2 replies →

  • I think you underestimate how shameless the vendors can be. I imagine in a couple of years the TVs will refuse to function unless periodically connected to the Internet to get updated ads and an updated firmware so that you can't jailbreak them...

  • They don’t need your internet for a connection

    • I'd like to hear more how that could work. If I get a new TV and never configure it for access from Day 1, how would it connect to the Internet or some unknown service with I guess Internet access as a proxy? On its own?

      2 replies →

Yeah, as someone with two of these I would never let them connect to the internet. It’s chock full of ads.

I do connect them to a jailed LAN so I can control them over the network.

Doesn't matter when the neighbor has a smart TV as well, tethering all the bad stuff to yours, whether you like it or not.