• daddy32@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

    Fuck me, this is the amount of money that’s enough motivation for them to ruin my experience and make me angry?

    I guess regular users have much higher tolerance to ads than me, but our home has a strict zero ad policy.

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.

    • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      That was the sentence that stuck out to me the most in the whole article as well. Incredible how much is lost for so little. I imagine it’s like drug dealers though, maybe $5 for the first seller, then gets chopped up and cut again and sold for less and chopped up again…

      My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.

  • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.

    • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      That is beyond the capabilities of normies.

      My wife would agree with this:

      Media PC

      And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.

      • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.

        • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.

          This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.

          • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml
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            1 month ago

            Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).

            If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile (edit: apparently the default 1080p quality profile has the 1080 remux quality enabled so this might have been the problem). By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main quality profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 (which is just below remux) with custom formats copied from trash guides set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.

    • ChillPill@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…

      • yggstyle@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.

        Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.

        • TrenchcoatFullOfBats@belfry.rip
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          1 month ago

          My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.

          This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.

      • MagicShel@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.

        Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.

        • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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          1 month ago

          I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.

  • HolidayGreed@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    My HiSense Vidaa OS TV shows ads for newer TV’s from their online store.

    Is an Apple TV box a good platform choice to avoid this?

    • Hazzia@infosec.pub
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      1 month ago

      I’d probably opt for an external streaming box and simply use the TV as a monitor instead of the whole system (as it was originally)

      • HolidayGreed@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        That’s what I’m planning to do and curious if Apple TV box is a good option. Fire stick is riddled with ads. Not sure about Roku and Apple TV.

        • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          No matter how you feel about Apple in general, Apple TV boxes are really the only way to go these days. Everything else is designed to aggressive sell to you whether you like it or not.

          It’s either that or use something like a Raspberry Pi and settle for websites, which also have a habit of streaming you lower-quality content.

  • DJDarren@thelemmy.club
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    1 month ago

    My TV is a smart TV whose smart features I never, ever use because the first thing it does is switch to the input my Apple TV is on.

    Ironic really that the reason I chose an LG is because webOS seems less cunty than Android TV and whatever shit Samsung are offering. But I still never use it.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      webOS seems less cunty than Android TV

      Every time they do an update, things get worse. But my last TV had some dying pixels, so there’s no going back.

  • Sabata@ani.social
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    1 month ago

    I revived the old LCD my grandparents were throwing out because it had good specs and no built in ads. Tossed in a new capacitor and it was good to go, otherwise I would just not own a TV.