This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just a reminder you can get iiyama 4k computer monitors up to 43" for under 600€ that do not even try to connect to the internet. People who get the series have reported that while they aren't ultra high end, they last for a very very long time.
ProLite series.
Essentially any TV is okay if you can set it up without Wi-Fi. TCL sells Google TV models which let you do this.
I knew this was coming at some point. Forced updates need to be illegal, or allow users to roll back updates at their discretion.
When you buy something, the seller cannot enter your house without permission and break it. Legal action is going to spread - Hisense should be next, they did the same thing to me.
I would love forced support for downgrade. Especially with reverse engineering and jailbreaking
You fail to mention, to buy that item you had to sign away your right to sue, and instead bring any dispute to binding arbitration of their choosing. Scotus endorsed this officially over a decade back, but it's been standard since around 2001, also for low wage employment contracts.
That is illegal in the EU. TOS doesn't have the power to take away rights. It is nothing more than guidelines.
The part that hasn't been litigated is unilaterally modifying the agreement and whether you separately own the TV apart from the software covered by the click-wrap contact of adhesion.
I think a court would decide you have the right to use the TV without the software if you disagree with the terms. Except they currently give you no way to do that.
Further, it should be illegal to require an update that updates the terms, since the manufacturer effectively can force you to agree to new terms while holding your TV hostage.
Contract rights have a limit, especially with TOS agreements that are not negotiable.
Yeah part of the terms are always that they can change the terms with no notice. Also that any promises anyone gives you from the company that aren't from like a higher up and in writing are worth nothing.
Yes, but a) not all terms are legally enforceable in all situations, and b) that enforceability has not to my knowledge been tested for situations where the software fully disabled the hardware unless the new software and terms are accepted.
It used to be when one part of a contract was illegal the entire thing was thrown out. Not any longer, and that's why we now have 100 pages of legalese rather than a single one.
As to your hypothetical, I wouldn't expect the federal courts in the US to side against the industrialists. The Federalist Society controls the courts, and are now being guided by the gangsters that seized our government and are trying to permanently affix themselves in absolute power, and those judges believe those efforts will succeed.
They think the republic is already dead. Don't expect anything good from them.
"A routine software update should improve your tech"
That's funny. My Samsung watch just gets shittier and more laggy when it gets an update.
...ok I've never felt more justified in completely turning off my TCL's ability to connect to the internet, then.
damn. the only reason I initially did it was because they'd introduced an update that put ads on the bottom of the screen every hour or so.
factory reset, internet gone. dumb TV is the best TV.
…ok I’ve never felt more justified in completely turning off my TCL’s ability to connect to the internet, then.
My main TV is an originally bricked Vizio from a bad update. I was able to buy a replacement logic board for $20 to get the TV to work again. When I reassembled it I intentionally never connected the TVs Wifi antennas to the logic board. The TV has been operating fine for close to 2 years now having never been attached to the internet.
I don't know how it is now, but I know a few years ago if Roku was pre-installed on the TCLs, they would be required to connect to the internet in order to even set it up because they required a Roku account in order to operate.
We had issues setting up demo units for it because our demo broadcast used a unified source that was via HDMI and we couldn't get the TV to broadcast a HDMI signal without setting up a Roku account.
We ended up just not setting those TVs up, and when customers would ask to see how it looked, we'd say unfortunately we don't have the capability of showing you.
Nobody was about to sign up to Roku using a store account and then have to deal with juggling the passwords just to use a display TV.
I have an old Google chromecast. Anything else I have an HDMI casting dongle setup that just screen shares from my PC or phone.
Raspberry Pi 5 set up as a mini computer with the old SSD from my laptop combined with a Rii rechargable keyboard/mouse remote.
It's the best streaming box I have had.
No connection,no issue.
A couple months back, I had an Internet outage, and decided to just watch some over the air TV. My TCL TV wouldn't even display the standard TV broadcast without an Internet connection.
My TCL disables aftermarket CEC remotes after being taken offline, even when it was previously working great
I had to give Roku internet access to scan over the air channels for "reasons"... however, I am able to watch OTA channels now with no access for Roku TV
If I bought a tv the required internet access, I'd return it.
This is the answer.
I agree with the sentiment... sadly it's almost getting to the point where if you stuck to your guns on that one, you may not find a TV you could buy
You can 100% still buy them. They’re just prohibitively expensive for the average person. Business/commercial TV displays don’t require Internet connection. They’re often used for things like digital signage, corporate meeting rooms, etc… But they’re going to be like 2-3x the cost of a consumer-level TV. Because the price of modern consumer-level TVs is heavily subsidized by the fact that the company is planning on selling your data.
As a bonus, lots of commercial TVs have quality-of-life things like built-in WiFi casting and Bluetooth controls. The WiFi is just for casting, not for data collection and telemetry. Because no company in their right mind would sign a privacy policy to allow potential trade secrets to leak because a smart TV is using OCR to send screenshots back to the TV manufacturer. Because when you’re using them in a meeting room, you want any of the corporate people to be able to mirror their laptop to it without any hassle. So casting to them with your phone or laptop is usually straightforward.
Lmao, I just realized I have a Roku (apartment issued), but I never use it because the local internet connection is too weak to function (and who watches cable?)
My TV is purely a second monitor with a 5m HDMI cable. All my shows and music come from my PC.
I suddenly feel needlessly cyberpunk about my setup lmao
Until your tv turns the internet connection back on without your consent. Some are even connecting to your neighbors tv to share WiFi and update themselves in order to avoid blocks at router level.
That really shouldn't be legal
Oooooooh let it be something class action I can get money for. I have three rokus and a TCL.
Granted, none of them are on my network; the rokus were removed from it when that update came out that would brick the tv if you don't accept them spying (fortunately roku was blocked on my pihole except occasionally when they wanted to be updated to repair the apps that stopped working every month forcing online connection to syphon data) and the TCL was never allowed on the network in the first place because i learned my lesson..
But I still want money back from them for their anti-consumer choices, because fuck them.
Let's be real. The best you'll get is a $5 off coupon on the purchase of your next Roku Express.
And 5 million for the lawyers who negotiated the settlement.
Never connect your TV to the internet and you won't have to worry. TCL is one of those brands that allows you to use it without network.
Everyone wants to access Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, etc through their TV interface and I just don't get it. The best experience is when you hook up a PC to your TV... not some TV-centric Android OS or Roku's thing.
Install Kubuntu on some old PC with a GPU that can handle 4K @60Hz and you're good to go. KDE and Firefox let you crank up the zoom so everything's easy to read and it even has HDR support (though I prefer going without it... Old person eyes).
It's such a vastly superior experience. Not only do you get the usual stuff, you can use a real keyboard to type into that search bar. You can also access all those pirate streaming sites and do normal PC stuff like play games.
I'm excited for kde big screen, it should be coming out this year.
I'm sorry, but that's a terrible setup for 99% of the people. I don't want a big loud box near a tv. How would you even control it ? If all you are going to do is launch those apps, most people would be better off with apple tv. You can even install jellyfin there if you have your own home server and stream to it.
As I just wrote in a post under the previous poster's one, you can use a Mini-PC with a low-power processor like the N100 and a wireless remote and it will definitelly not look or sound like a "big loud box" (not least because the fan almost never goes on and when it goes it's quiet - it turns out that even an N100 is overpowered for just working as a TV box so CPU usage is almost always below 10%).
Further, you can put Linux in it and then manage it remotelly via SSH, so after setting it up you don't need a keyboard or mouse connected to it.
The end result is something that doesn't at all look like a PC and which, thanks to the remote, you use just like a dedicated TV box.
Hardward for reference: Mini-PC, Remote
PS: That PC is a lot more expensive now than when I bought it 2 years ago.
Loud?
You can get a minipc with no fan for a couple hundred bucks.
You control it with a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard.
Or with kde connect using your phone.
Or however you want to control it because it's linux and you can do whatever the fuck you want and use ubkock or pihole or whatever and never see another ad for the rest of your life.
I use a media center PC and never want to go back to anything else.
very easy to split screen / picture-in-picture
not reliant on: did this service release an app on whatever platform, and will it continue to support it
can use a real browser (read: ad-blockers)
mouse/keyboard - yes it's perfectly fine to use wireless mouse/keyboard in a livingroom on a couch
I want my tv to turn on instantly; not to wait for a pc to boot, have to log in, and only then opening my streaming app. Such a hassle.
I personally have a tcl with custom launcher, debloated the most I could, on a network with adguard, streaming only from jellyfin (Wholphin client) and Navidrome (Chora), and sometimes Youtube (Grayjay). I click the power on button, it instantly turns on into Wholphin most often, then I click the play button. Litterally 2 seconds. What's the big deal? Ok, it still has traces of google and other stuff, but it sounds like a decent compromise. Ofc, if someday somebody out there makes a custom rom I'll be the first one to install it, but until then..
I use a Mini-PC with an N100 CPU.
It literally has a peak consumption of 15W, though I seldom see it go above 10% CPU usage (which is nice because even the small fan it has almost never goes on) so even when I'm actually using it as a TV box it consumes a lot less than 15W. It consumes even less when idle.
So it's always ON.
As a side benefit it's my home NAS and a bittorrent server managed via a web-interface, both things for which it makes even to have a machine always running.
Haven't actually seen any difference in my power bill.
As someone who had been doing exactly this setup for a years, even before streaming was a thing, the key issue is the lack of ease.
When I was watching my own collection just streamed through local intranet, using VLC and a “remote mouse”, the problem always came down to the interface or the remote. It is vastly easier to navigate through menus, etc. on a TV using a remote than even a remote-shaped keyboard. Even when you had everything set up reasonably well in Kodi or something, there was always the issue of having a remote to control the TV and then a remote to control the TV’s PC. Using a keyboard, even one of the small mouse-keyboard combos is a hassle and is ripe with issues when trying to manage anything that needs to be navigated at the PC’s resolutions, especially if you are 8-10ft away from the screen on a sofa. Then, trying to let friends and family use your setup is not even worthwhile. It’s easier to just say, “I don’t have TV” than try to explain.
Case in point, a few years ago, I discovered Jellyfin and it completely changed the way that I watch media. Instead of ensuring that the TV laptop was properly connected to my main desktop where all the drives were connected, and running all shows and movies through numerous playlists, I had Jellyfin doing all the heavy lifting. When it came to adding Jellyfin to my TV, I added the app to the TV, and it all worked exactly like Netflix. One remote, one simple interface, working on nearly every device (PS5 interface can get fracked 😤).
No more ensuring that every TV in the house has a cheap laptop connected to it. No more buying the extra TV-PC remotes with scattered connections and continually having to reconfigure each time I decided to try something else in the setup. No more ensuring that playlists were accessible to each laptop, updating all the laptops, Windows internal connection randomly stopping on the downstairs laptop, trying to duplicate favorite film and TV to extra drives to have on hand in case I’m watching something with friends and the network folders stop registering randomly. Everything just works. Add Jellyfin app to the TV or Roku, or iPad, or whatever, and I have access to my entire collection with ease.
I’ve been doing this for literal decades at this point, and the ease that comes with “install the app and watch” is the reason that people don’t just connect a PC.
I have a $150 N100 Mini-PC with Lubuntu and an always on Kodi for that.
I even got a wireless remote for it - turns out Kodi's keyboard shortcuts are standard so there are wirelless remotes that just identify themselves on USB as a "keyboard" and just have the remote buttons mapped to the correct shortcut key for that function. The remote looks the same as any other remote (though if you press the power button it switches OFF the PC and then you can't switch it ON again with the remote).
It works pretty much like a dedicated TV media box and it's my living room were you can't really tell it's a PC unless you know what to look for.
As an upside, it's also my home NAS and bittorrent server, remotelly managed from my official PC via SSH and web (the bittorrent server has a web interface).
I've actually been using TV media boxes for over a decade (long before Smart TVs) and this is the best setup I've ever had.
Most people don’t have a PC laying around, just so it can be hooked to a TV.
Even more true, most people don’t know how to do what you just described.
While I agree wholeheartedly with this comment, I felt the need to add a footnote to it.
if you currently use mainstream media services such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc., be careful going this route because some service providers are known to intentionally drop the quality of your stream If it realizes you're on a browser instead of an official app. I know Netflix for sure does it because I've seen it first hand.
This is why the smart bet is to never give network access to your tv, it will only get enshittified.
would locking usage behind an account post sale be concidered bricking devices? because if so they should add those customers on.
am glad i have a piece of shit 720p TV from 2012 rather then a smart tv.
or not even watching a tv, only using the PC or other.
