How hard is it for companies to just make a good screen screen with the necessary ports any nothing else.
We are all losing our minds.
It’s textbook rent-seeking behavior. They discount the TV $201 to undercut someone else, and make up the difference selling the ads over the life of the TV.
This is how SO many things work, it’s only surprising that it’s taken this long. If you watch YT on this fancy TV, you’re getting the same thing.
“Brand denies wrongdoing”
Of course. “Use is consent to the user agreement.”
They could get you to swear eternal fealty to Lord Xenu, Alien God of the Universe in the user agreement that you consent to by connecting the TV to the internet.
Thats why you dont get smart tvs.
We’re all going to be buying computer monitors to watch TV soon.
Genuine question, is there a downside to a HTPC?
They’re becoming “smart” as well, unfortunately.
Not trying to be a Sony Bravia shill but I have two Sony Bravia XBR (X950G and X900H) TVs. Neither of these has ever attempted to show me an advertisement. They aren’t the newest versions nor the most expensive. I don’t include YT ads since those are YT generated.
Get 'em while that last:
“In a major industry shift announced in early 2026, Sony is entering a strategic partnership where TCL will take a 51% stake in its home entertainment division, including Bravia TVs, with a new joint venture expected to be fully operational by April 2027”
It’s the end of an era for the Sony Bravia.
This is misleading.
TCL will only be manufacturing the panel. Sony will continue to perform integration.
From what I read earlier beyond the single line you quoted, this seems to be for the panels and not the processors/boards.
Don’t let your TV be on the internet.
changing the TV’s DNS servers or disconnecting it from the internet entirely.
Chiming in as an Australian budget VIDAA owner.
I spotted that this TV attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings. I implemented a port 53 (DNS) redirect so those queries get resolved by my local server.
I also figured out which servers are serving up ads/tracking. I fired an email to Pete and got them added to his list. You’re welcome. I’m guessing a pi-hole would work with it.
https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php
I didn’t install the latest update, and probably never will. My TV contacts the unruly ACR servers, but the later firmware probably contacts nexxen.
I fear the day these fucks figure out DOH or something. Not sure there’s any way to suppress or intercept that, short of just blocking all external traffic to the TV.
You need plain DNS to resolve the DoH server. Just block that.
For other readers here is a tutorial to do DNS capture into a pihole server or other DNS
People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope
attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.
Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they’re assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember… users who don’t really understand what they’re doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It’s not always evil.
Thank you for this. I will check later today on my own tv to see what its pulling in the background.
Fuck that. heh.
I use a TV for my computer monitor and it’s perfect. I do not use any of the TV features. And it pisses me off when something happens to lose my signal and it switches over into TV mode because it autoplays some free channel that spouts fascist nonsense. I have to poke around for the remote (which is always around but never close because I only need it every month or few months) so I can cut that shit off as soon as possible. heh
Any video I need to watch happens via my computer, thanks, where I’m in control.
They can’t force me if I don’t connect it to the internet
I can imagine future TVs refusing to work without an always-on internet connection.
I can imagine them shipping TVs with built in cellular data just for ads
… and exactly 2 weeks later modders will have figured out how to get their hands on the yummy free unlimited data inside it.
SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP don’t let them hear this!
…what am I saying? And idea like that they’ve had, just waiting for the price to be right. heh
Or having prebaked fallback ads.
It’s going right back to the shop, if that’s the case. Not accepting an HDMI input means it’s not fit for purpose.
I saw an unboxing for a TV for a Chinese market and it refused to start until the owner paired it with a Chinese phone otp for “age verification” 😉
🙈
We need openWrt for TVs :(
This. Have played with similar devices in the past and I was surprised how many of these devices are running standard Linux kernel with some custom engineered distros. Projects like Buildroot, OpenWRT, Busybox and a few others are what the vendors use to roll their own builds.
A few of them agressively lock down the bootloaders in an attempt to (try to) prevent people from owning the device they’ve paid retail price for. Many don’t really bother. The good news is, that such measures are relatively easy for experts to circumvent and break down. This, of course, is not cheap, but needs to happen only once, often for more than a single model. Some kind of bounty-based system could provide incentive and financing for such efforts.
Retail price or rental price lol
I believe some custom firmware for TVs exist, the issue is that they are relatively new pieces of tech, while routers have existed for a comparatively long time.
cfw on smart TVs would be difficult in the first place due to the TVs’ heavily TiVo-ized nature (pun not intended)
I had a 65" Hisense TV for just over a year, and a firmware update bricked it. It was stone dead, and Hisense wouldn’t even try to repair it. So I spent a little extra money and got a Samsung instead. And once it was set up, I turned off its wifi…just in case.
Hisense can eat a bag o’ dicks.
My first 4K TV was a Samsung. The last update broke eARC making the Samsung home theater in a box thing I had much more inconvenient.
My 2nd (free in a raffle) Samsung 4K TV connected to my WiFi without a password when a guest in the house casted a video to it despite on setup refusing to consent to any web things due to privacy concerns. Kinda interesting and concerning.
I haven’t bought a TV in a decade. What kind of setup is required? Why would it need internet access for that?
LG work out the box without internet.
I let my Vizio TV connect for firmware updates as it has an issue that they’ve improved but I immediately turn off wifi and wipe the connection details right after.
I have a Hisense that I bought late last year and have never connected it to the internet (I stream everything through my PS5) and boyhowdy does that TV take every chance it gets to let me know I’m not connected lol
IF YOU BUY ANY TV, DO NOT CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET.
Televisions were never meant to be smart devices. There’s no reason your screen should have software of its own. That would be like your face having a mind of its own.
Ummm, <eldrich horror rant text>
The apps available on the TV may work when it’s new but quickly become nonfunctional because of a lack of updates. Best to use something else to stream, hopefully something more trustworthy.
Cell modems are getting cheaper and cheaper, it’s only a matter of time before cheap smart TVs will flood the market with always-on telemetry and intrusive personalized ads.
Well then I guess I make the room a giant faraday cage.
Like the other comment said, if you drive a car made after 2014, don’t bother. You drive a rolling tracking beacon regardless of what you do with your smart devices…
That sounds like a great reason to return it and buy used lol
Until a few years later when all the used TVs have cell modems. The same thing is already happening in the used car market, it’s getting harder and harder to find a reliable vehicle that doesn’t have a cell modem and a long T&C that let’s them spy on you.
But why not give AI to the TV???
I haven’t experience this myself but I’ve read that some newer TV’s are forcing you to connect to the internet before you can do anything else.
Not to mention it seems like the apps on a smart tv get ignored when it comes to updates.
My face’s mind sits right behind my face.
I find myself wondering just how complicated TVS could actually be before it’s no longer possible to hijack the display signal that’s fed to the display
Unlike with cars, TVS seem simple enough that a sufficiently motivated novice could modify a cheap TV to circumvent these bullshit features. If they ever started requiring internet connections to start or use these, i think enough people would be bothered by it that there would probably be a secondary market of modified hardware
As with most enshitifications, the question will ultimately be one of complacency of the average consumer.
The basic thing is to get some product that YOU control and never allow the TV to be connected to the internet.
