Comment by cosmic_cheese
16 hours ago
I thought it was relatively common knowledge within technical circles to never give smart TVs an internet connection, but I suppose not.
Also, it's worth noting that TVs built on Android TV have a massive advantage here in that you can plug them into your laptop and remove the content recognition package using adb (Android Debug Bridge) just like you might with a phone or tablet. This might be possible with Samsung Tizen and LG webOS devices too, but both are going to require more esoteric tooling.
What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?
The specs and quality of the panel, backlighting (if applicable), and image processing. These days, the few "dumb" TVs that are still sold are either cheap and bad or are designed for signage use and aren't well suited for TV/movies/games relative to their mass-market smart cousins.
A smart TV used as a dumb TV alongside a quality streaming box (Apple TV or Nvidia Shield TV) or console gets you the best overall experience.
Not for everyone, I guess.
Many people, including myself, don’t want to buy “quality streaming box” just for watching Netflix or YouTube sporadically.
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There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days.
Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)
It's more that they don't sell dumb TVs anymore, so you have to simulate it yourself by preventing Internet access.
Now, whether it won't nag you to connect with pop ups is a different question.
You get a much cheaper TV. The folks who manufacture the TV expect to make a certain amount of revenue from your data, so they price this into the cost of the TV. This saves you from having to spend more money on a commercial display that often has a worse panel.
One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want.
You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.
The best (in terms of image quality) consumer displays on the market right now are OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. But they’re also “Smart” TVs.
I keep mine disconnected and use an external media box (AppleTV 4K).
Several Sony models are also very good, being built with Samsung panels and their own in-house image processing which is some of the best in the industry. Their TVs run Android and support offline firmware updates, too, which is why they're usually what I buy.
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I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents).
This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.
The point is I don’t want my TV, my refrigerator, my toaster, my dishwasher, or my washing machine to be “smart” or to have any AI or internet connectivity.
These all have a very simple job to do, and there’s absolutely zero value-add to the smart edge software nonsense.
I do have some use-cases for a tv to be 'smart'. It's on/off trigger from a smartphone and casting anything you like from YT/Spotify.
It would make sense for a washing machine to be smart/have ai if it could detect clothes types and suggest a washing regime or warn you that selected regime can damage them. It'll also be nice to be able to schedule the washing so for ex. it's done when you get at home from work. For dishwasher - maybe somehow detect stuff that's incompatible with dishwasher and warn you?
I do also see a point in having a smart fridge that would detect products that expire based on some qr codes printed on them, otherwise idk...
I may want sometimes to use my TV for watching something (I know, sounds wild), and I don’t want to buy additional piece of hardware for that.
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The ability to own a TV at all, since even the cheaper sets now have this nonsense built right in. Loosely I think the idea is to subsidize the cost of the hardware with the marketing deals, but I don't actually know.
The difficulty of buying a dumb TV.
Mine's in the living room hooked up to a gaming PC, and I don't watch TV/movies.
Well, there's little choice for TVs without smart features these days. Especially if you're wanting certain quality and other features.
What you do is you should never do is connect your tv to the internet. You connect something you control and can turn off if you don't like it, like say a google youtube tv dongle, or apple tv. You can unplug them if you don't like them.
If you connect your tv to wifi, it can spy on you all the time. It can upload info on what you watch even if you used an external google tv puck to watch tv. It can see what you type on the screen if say you use it for say a monitor. There are reports of people deleting networking info but the tvs occasionally connecting back even though they deleted wifi info. You have to get a new network name to block them.
It's much much better to connect an external device, and if not that then use an ethernet cable to connect, because you can physically remove it.
Because the vast majority of people use whatever their tv came with these days in terms of smart tv connections, they don't set privacy settings. There's every reason for the tv makers to keep spying on you. If you have an external device their is motivation for them to not make you angry - but it's true that they can spy on you.
> What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?
The difficulty in finding an affordable TV without smart functionality alone means that you're most likely buying a smart TV.
I yet again bought a Samsung smart tv (despite having sworn never to do so again..) and I'm never letting it connect to the internet after what happened to the last one.
This advice is great until a normie comes around and goes "aren't you an engineer? You should be fired" for not having internet setup already on your TV.
The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview.
Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung).
I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting.
Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it.
Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.
An Apple TV 4k: https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/
It will just work. You will maybe get an ad or two from Apple, rarely, about Apple services, but it's very rare and easy to ignore.
Otherwise you only get ads if your service(Netflix, etc) delivers ads.
Apple won't share your data with anyone, and generally does a fairly decent job(compared to other giant tech companies) of not collecting much.
The only acceptable number of ads is zero.
My main peeve with the Apple TV (device) is that the home button keeps sending me into Apple TV (App) instead of to the main screen.
I have to click it twice to get back to the home screen.
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I recently did a lot of looking into this, and sadly most of the previously wide-open loopholes for rooting LG webOS were all patched in the last ~6 months. You can fiddle with dev mode but you can't get proper root.
I basically settled on an (incredibly expensive) Sony commercial Android TV -- beyond the ADB method, their commercial line gives you additional admin controls over which apps are allowed to run and which are allowed on the network. Between the two i felt I'd be pretty content.
Granted i haven't tried it because my new job fell through and a $1400 TV was no longer an option.
i hardly consider this post to be within a technical circle, this is normie-stream
i expected someone to be diving deep into the software within a TV, not some guy who finally decided to check the settings tab
even if you turn that off it's definitely still spying on you