Posted by decimalenough 3/30/2025
As much as I complain a lot about roku for their spying and ads (they deserve it and I'll never buy one) I do give them some credit for not filling that fish show they have with ads. I know people who have had those fish (or some version of them) on their screens for many years and it's a decent little virtual fish tank.
The bad news: like many modern products, and as freely confessed in the linked article, you don't own the TV, it owns you.
The remedy: Connect the TV to your computer as a dumb monitor -- make it show only content you directly control. And disable the TV's network connection -- without that connection, it can't show ads.
My large-panel TV serves only as a computer monitor. My Linux computer runs the Brave browser and has a frequently updated ad-block list in /etc/hosts. This means no "Scenic Mode" ads and no YouTube corporate ads, only ads embedded by video content creators, which I skip over with a pointing device because the video is being controlled by a browser, not a TV.
The FBI recommends use of ad blockers to guard against fraud and malware (https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...). On the other hand, some sites refuse to function if an ad blocker is in use. Those sites don't deserve access to my eyeballs.
If all this fails, I pick up a book. Books don't have ads ... so far.
You skip over the ones that are obvious, but not the ones that are more stealthily integrated into the content. IMO if a video creator sells out and adds sponsored content of any kind they are no longer to be trusted to not be manipulative in other ways.
- TVs are cheaper here in the US than they are in China (or at least they were when I lived in China), and these revenue opportunities are likely the reason
Vizio kind of has a lot of dark pattern messaging. As an example, they make it seem like you HAVE to enable the microphone on the remote or install an app to change the TV volume. They don't provide a diagram of the remote, so if you don't notice the volume rocker on the side, it seems like you only have two rather invasive options.
Another example is they use wording that makes it seem like you can't use the TV if you don't agree to the terms, but if you do select the disagree button (and after confirming you really want to disagree lol), it just reverts to a dumb TV.
Ha, that's a good one!
Gotta have regular updates to my videos of forests, waterfalls, lapping waves and crackling log fires. You never know when they're going to launch a new version of trees.
> Q: My TV started playing a video in full screen by itself. What happened? A: Your TV launched Scenic Mode, a FREE, new feature that displays relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time. Scenic Mode delivers an experience that adds to the environment of your home or office.
It's relaxing, so you need to RELAX rather than getting in a huff over blaring ads. What, you're not relaxed and going to pull the plug?
The difference between an Android TV launcher that's designed give people what they want, and the baroque monstrosity that results when Google tries to extract every fraction of a cent of advertising revenue that it can is startling. My TV just became an appliance that does exactly what I want, no less and no more, instead of a cacophony of distractions and diversions trying to convince me to do things I don't want to do.
The Apple TV is the only thing connected, and it will auto turn the TV on/off by itself(thanks HDCP).
So I guess someone could go really far out of their way to make the Smart TV parts work again, it doesn't seem very likely.
We use Plex almost exclusively, it provides the Live TV.
It used to happen between 3 and 4 am, if I remember correctly, and was very annoying because the TV is in the same room I sleep in.
I guessed that it might be the Flex box doing it after I remembered that the Flex box was scheduled do to automatic updates between 3 and 4 am. My guess was that sometimes when it reboots after an update it turned on the TV.
To check that I changed the update schedule to do them between 2 and 3 pm. Sure enough the unexpected turn ons then started happening between 2 and 3 pm which is pretty good evidence my guess about the Flex being responsible was right.
1st night - disable CEC on the TV
2nd night - to hell with you, into the garbage it goes
If any of my devices turn on in the middle of the night, they get the business end of a 48" crowbar that weighs too damned much. They all saw what happened to the printer when it refused to print a black and white document without yellow ink. I think their fear will keep them in line.
Actually anything you do on your internet connected Smart TV is being collected and sold by the TV manufacturer.
Smart TVs should be called Surveillance TVs at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2YTL25iyHU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM8_kJENdoQ
There are plenty of other videos but the vast majority are not in English - they seem to be some Indian or Russian.
I’ll live with watching Plex on my phone before I buy a TV like that.