Ads and bloat are the main reason I still use my 1080p Bravia from 15 yrs ago, which btw still looks great.
Well, that and that I have better uses for 1k usd
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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I needed a second t.v for the basement and i decided to just not buy one.
I had an old mini projector I repurposed and there a nice tv upstairs/phones for anything else.
Cant wait till "minimal" stuff becomes the trend.
I’ve seen LG getting trashed alongside the other offenders in the industry in smart TV discussions. I have an LG CX65 OLED from 2020, and I’ve always seen the onboard WebOS as pretty serviceable. Have they gotten a lot worse in the last few years? And/or does it vary by product price?
There are definitely some advertising options to turn off in the menus, and with all that taken care of the only UI I use is a row of app icons that pops up. No ads anywhere, and I don’t seem to be logged into the TV with any kind of account. (Though typing this reminded me that the cheap LG LCD in my son’s room does want a login in order to update firmware)
Note I said it was serviceable, not great. The UI could be more responsive on better hardware, but it’s also convenient for my family to just be able to use the Wiimote-like motion pointer built into the remote.
LG sucks in many ways. I have a cx as well. I rooted it and blocked updates and all lg services, which helps a lot
If you update it though lg automatically and silently opts you in to data sharing without your explicit consent, which is bullshit and disgusting, but you can turn this of by unchecking a box in settings, which is easy enough. Although given how they handled it I don’t necessarily trust them to honor the opt out and thus traffic from the tv has to be to whitelisted servers (I don’t use any webos apps aside from ad free youtube app)
That said imo compared to all the other smart tv options webos is one of the best options. Especially if it’s rooted (though rooting it is becoming much more difficult these days). Then you can install adfree youtube with sponsorblock, permanently block updates, etc.
Android tv is absolute garbage and loaded with more ads than anything. But at least android doesn’t break when you use adblocking; my old Roku tv doesn’t allow you to set custom dns servers and when you set an ad blocking dns server at a router level the TVs apps break. Android still works although googles ad game is so strong that even blocking all their ad networks still allows some ads somehow, even deleting caches. I’m pretty sure android tv just has ads installed in it
Of course the best thing to do is never ever ever connect your smart tv to the internet at all and buy a secondary device to utilize for watching media. I recommend ugoos devices. I use the am6b+ but they have other/newer devices that may fit your use case better. Stripped down android with 0 ads but can still run all streaming apps/dolby vision licensed and you can flash them with Coreelec so they natively boot to kodi
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Nothing to research. They're all the same bad or will get bad in the foreseeable future. Only thing that matters is the screen technology and the specs of your external media center.
My LG has none of this. Any advertising/ai can be disabled as can the network itself.
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computer monitor + sound bar?
This really seems to be the right answer. At least while computer monitors stay dumb.
Get one of those tiny PCs that you can just leave behind the TV, get a wireless mouse and keyboard too.
Nothing on TV isn't available online anyway. Paying the cable company for anything more than an Internet connection seems like setting money on fire to me. Maybe sports would be difficult, but that can literally be found if you know what you're doing. Even games you wouldn't be able to with TV.
Cable TV just seems to me like a boomer's version of the Internet. It has no place in a world with the Internet, change my mind. The ads on TV are worse than what you find on any popular website/app.
But as usual, capitalism is messing everything up with the marketing. In a world where hi speed Internet is widely available, "TV" just has no use. None. And worse, the commercials are now leaking through your literal screen.
I'm not saying that ads aren't a problem, but there's a hell of a lot more you can do about them.
In a perfect world, there would be a place you could go whenever you wanted something and find products and solutions for that thing, and there wouldn't be ads in anything else at all.
But until there's an actual argument to say TV technology isn't totally worthless, my stance is simply "no TVs are necessary or useful".
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