An ad giant wants to control your next TV’s OS

Is there a reason to go for a dumb TV as opposed to just not connecting your smart TV to wifi?

Getting increasingly hard.

I finally learned why those 50" tvs are so cheap, like $200. Buy a dumb TV that's the same size is easily 5x the price.

Then again, nobody needs a TV and I only bought one during the pandemic, then connected it to my pi hole.

unfortunately,
on some markets they are gone.
"Smart" TVs have squeezed them out.

You'll see these marketed as monitors sometimes, from what I've seen. Mostly it's for businesses but if you want a dumb screen to connect things to, it might be called a "monitor" even if it has the form factor of a TV.

Look into Sceptre. 4K with no OS, no ads, doesn't ask for WiFi - just a TV.

It’s hard but not impossible, as even ‘retail displays’ run an OS in the background to control input switching, image settings etc.

Honestly the best thing to do is buy whatever TV you want (we have a couple of the LG OLEDs in our household), and don’t ever plug them into your network (or WiFi). Otherwise, with updates OS and apps become sluggish, with more ads crammed in.

Instead, use a seperate media player (e.g. Apple TV if you’re already on the iOS ecosystem, Nvidia Shield or similar for Android, HTPC if you’re so inclined etc.) - they’re more powerful, arguably more secure & private, and portable between displays if/when you upgrade.

EtherNet over HDMI

Then block 8.8.8.8 and use 1.1.1.1 or Quad9

Block all port 53 traffic from your network outside of your DNS server/pihole itself.
Block all known DoH servers.

If you want to get REALLY fancy you can write a NAT rule that will force any outgoing request on port 53 to route to your dns/pihole.

I do all of this. It's actually funny to see the requests that were hardcoded to go somewhere. Giant fuck you to those companies.

I always have issues with dns blocking so I tried something sneaky I redirected all DNS requests to 1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1 and it worked brilliantly, for about a month when it stopped working all together, I don’t know if a cache was wiped or google saw what I was doing and made a special exception just for me, obviously I want to believe I’m a special snowflake taking the world’s largest internet company head on in an epic battle of wits and skill but I think the cache thing might be more likely for some reason.

Depending on your router you can forward all request on port 53 to your DNS server regardless of the IP they try to use.

What a shower of twats. Don't block the request in that case, just redirect it to your local server that returns a 1x1 transparent png for all requests.

I connected an old laptop with linux mint and put the TV always in HDMI mode. Problem solved.

Dang, so you'd have to block Google's DNS at the router level too?

I just give smartTVs no network at all

Same here, one of our "smart" TVs needs Ethernet for networking, the other needs a Wi-Fi dongle. Rest aren't even smart. All 1080p.

Up until that TV dies.

Yup. My 58" 4k LG TV has a bunch of apps (we only need Netflix and Jellyfin), and the only ads I've seen are in their apps, which don't need to be opened. It's a little slow and apparently can't even handle Jellyfin over HTTPS, but it works well.

My SO wants a bigger TV, and I'm dreading looking through the current market to find a decent replacement. I'd really like OLED and for it to be a few inches bigger, but it seems everything has ads and spyware out of the box. Screw that...

I suspect in the near future it will be impossible to buy a TV without spyware/adware. The only option will be to not connect it to the internet and run your own Raspberry PI/SBC based solution.

Checking before buy buying will be possible for computer and privacy « educated » people only, that leaves almost everyone helpless in the real world, in a store facing TVs all playing the demo video. Maybe some will read Amazon reviews or do actual research… hope.

What about just not connecting it to the network? Then put a video device on it like Roku or Apple tv or whatever.

For a lot of people it’s a good use that’s the difference. I’ve been fucking around trying to set up home assistant for a year when I have time (yeah idk I know it’s supposed to be plug and play but it isn’t for me), but my wife and I were talking this morning and she’s the computer person and once we live somewhere there’s a smart thermostat she’s probably going to set it up because at that point it’s worth the effort, and if she didn’t at that point it would be worth me dedicating the consistent effort to make happen. What you’re describing is similar. If I see it I might try it if not doing it is inconvenient

phones and laptops got that covered

Done! Take any Smart TV, factory reset it. And never let it connect to the Internet again .

Buy a commercial display, thats what I do.

Look into commercial monitors like the Samsung BET-H series. I bought a 43” one years ago, plugged an Apple TV into it, and haven’t really thought about the screen ever since.

According to the specs it runs Tizen, but I haven’t had to look at a menu since I got the settings dialed in, i.e. years, so I completely forgot. Don’t even know where the OEM remote is, it works with the HDMI-CEC commands sent by the Apple TV.

This is the way. 20 years ago, I got rid of an old Sony CRT that literally weighed as much as I did, and have had nothing but projectors since. Lots of complaints from the rest of the family around “it’s not bright enough”, and “it’s too complicated”, but hey ho.

Not good enough. Any OTA updates your TV can get over the web will eventually be trying to circumvent your IP blacklists to shove in any ad-riddled garbage they can.

Literally just blacklist your TV’s MAC address, and use a dedicated set top box of some kind to avoid this shit. My current choice is my NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019, which I installed a 3rd party WOLF launcher (there’s also F-Launcher) and turned off auto-updates so I could avoid NVIDIA and Google doing the same.

At some point, I will probably need to switch to a NUC or other HTPC with some flavor of Linux on it, as eventually the Shield may succumb to this shit as well.