The TV That Watches You Back

May 5, 2023 12:39 PM

Why are TVs so cheap now? Still too expensive? How about a completely free, ad-supported TV?
posted by meowzilla (65 comments total)

The Atlantic archive.org link

"Ad supported" and "free" don't belong in the same sentence.
posted by dancestoblue at 1:10 PM on May 5, 2023 [18 favorites]

Yeoh, I bought a Hisense 43" 4K tv for about $300 CAD and it's an incredible display for my Mac Studio and boy, when I hooked it up, it begged me to log into my wifi. It would still be doing it if I hadn't figured out how to bypass the menu entirely and have it just display the computer HDMI port automatically when switched on. It'll never taste internet if I have any say about it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:11 PM on May 5, 2023 [36 favorites]

The best play seems to have it only get input from an external device like a Roku or AppleTV.

No WiFi for you, television!
posted by wenestvedt at 1:12 PM on May 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either. Just because they came in a fancier case doesn't mean the components were better.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:15 PM on May 5, 2023

Yeah, our television has two ports we use, one for our DISH box and one for our TV. We used the built-in Roku once, to watch the Weird Al movie. Otherwise, our television is just a display device for other tech.
posted by hippybear at 1:15 PM on May 5, 2023

But don't Roku and/or AppleTV track every move and then report home also?
posted by dancestoblue at 1:16 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either.

Well, I mean, they did. Growing up, I was born into a household with a black and white tube television. I remember being quite young and going with my father to get replacement tubes. That was replaced when I was about 10 with a Zenith solid state television. That one had a card you could get to slide out and you could make adjustments to the picture quality with a screwdriver directly affecting how the electron gun hit the screen. But those two televisions, the second being an upgrade, not replacing a dead piece of tech, lasted my parents nearly 35 years. I moved out well before they replaced that Zenith. They were using it well into the era of modern televisions.
posted by hippybear at 1:18 PM on May 5, 2023 [21 favorites]

Sorry, got the first one wrong --- this one works:
The Atlantic archive.org link
posted by dancestoblue at 1:23 PM on May 5, 2023

This is going to be a wonderful source of decent-quality panels and spare parts, but none of that hides how badly we need privacy legislation. Treating this kind of pervasive surveillance-capitalism as normal is grotesque.
posted by mhoye at 1:27 PM on May 5, 2023 [18 favorites]

I'd love to find instructions for de-smarting a TV. It must be possible, right? Buy the cheap TV, keep the screen and power supply, replace the motherboard? All Google is finding for me is instructions on how to turning your TV into a smart TV.
posted by ourobouros at 1:30 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I bought my current flat-screen TV 10 or 12 years ago, before TVs started trying to be connected and invasive. Still works fine and I hope to keep using it for another 10 years.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:30 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'd love to find instructions for de-smarting a TV.

Don't connect it to the internet. Now it isn't smart.
posted by hippybear at 1:31 PM on May 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

Roku reports home every now and then what's displaying on the screen. Also, for some TVs, you have to connect to the internet to enable features not related to the internet at all. And some will scan for an open WIFI connection and use that if you don't let it use your network.
Whenever this comes up on Hacker News, the recommendation is to buy the TVs that institutions use, which tend to be a lot more expensive, but are really "dumb" TVs.
posted by Spike Glee at 1:43 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, for some TVs, you have to connect to the internet to enable features not related to the internet at all.

That's interesting to me. What would those features be, and could you switch them on and then disconnect the television and have those settings remain?
posted by hippybear at 1:48 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd love to find instructions for de-smarting a TV.

Hit it a few times with a hammer.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:56 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

This post from a pihole forum shows a Samsung TV trying to phone home every literal 2 seconds the entire time it's on.

Also, for some TVs, you have to connect to the internet to enable features not related to the internet at all. And some will scan for an open WIFI connection and use that if you don't let it use your network.

Terrifying.
posted by Superilla at 1:58 PM on May 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

But don't Roku and/or AppleTV track every move and then report home also?

At this point, the objective is just reducing the number of parties spying on you, or choosing ones that would be a better steward of your data - not preventing all tracking entirely.
posted by meowzilla at 1:58 PM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Surprised this article didn't even mention that the NSA and whoever can also use your TVs to spy on you, including using speakers as a mic to listen in. I guess nobody really cares about privacy anymore, but idk, I can't think of Smart TVs without thinking of those random PRISM programs targeting specific consumers devices and brands and whatnot.

I don't have a TV because anytime I think about getting one, I can't resist the urge to get another monitor instead. Three is good, but wouldn't four being more gooder?
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:59 PM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

And some will scan for an open WIFI connection and use that if you don't let it use your network.

This, plus the annoying "connect to the internet" message, is why I connected my TV (an LG) to a guest WiFI network that's not routable. I check the logs sporadically and, other than seeing its failed attempts to phone home, I haven't caught it trying to jump ship to an open network. It's smart enough to know it wants a network connection but still stupid enough to not complain about a dead network connection
posted by nathan_teske at 1:59 PM on May 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

Growing up, I was born into a household with a black and white tube television.

You could still buy black & white tvs well into the '90s. I had plenty of them, and color too, and none of ours lasted 35 years. Also replacing tubes definitely counts as a repair, and you can repair flat screen tvs, it's just not economical to do so since the tech is still rapidly changing. My oldest flat screens are like 15 years old. My flat screen computer monitor I use occasionally is from 2005.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:01 PM on May 5, 2023

I'd love to find instructions for de-smarting a TV.

Old-school Metafilter:

Turn it on.

AskMe:

Here are some tips from Consumer Reports.

Fishing for favorites:

Tune it to Fox News.
posted by box at 2:01 PM on May 5, 2023 [18 favorites]

I don't have a TV because anytime I think about getting one, I can't resist the urge to get another monitor instead.

I mean... given how much media is consumed these days, a television is just basically a giant monitor anyway? We don't use the built-in speakers -- I feed the audio into my surround system. We don't use the tuner in the TV, we have external boxes feeding it signals.

If you have the right kind of viewing habits, if you can find the monitor with the specs you want, what is the difference? (My comments here are having a tone problem -- I have a bit of snark about this, but I'm genuinely curious about this kind of tech stuff.)
posted by hippybear at 2:04 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either.

My parents fretting every time the TV went on the the blink, “I just hope it's not the picture tube!”
posted by brachiopod at 2:06 PM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sorry I can't give you a technical answer, but I've several times though "oh I'll just get a big TV to use as my monitor" and looked into it, they were not as good for the different applications of a PC. It used to just be TVs were super expensive for the same resolution as a monitor, like when tv "HD" came out it was like, a fairly small resolution for a modern PC at the time. These days I think most TVs are just too slow of a refresh rate for gaming. The color accuracy isn't as good on TV vs monitor (and even among monitors big diff in how they handle colour gamuts) so doing art/design/print work you want color accuracy.

That said, I'd consider adding a TV to my current setup if I had a room that was suddenly six feet longer and I could stick the TV on the wall behind monitor setup, since streaming shows isn't where the diff between tv/monitor matter.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:10 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: My comments here are having a tone problem
posted by joannemerriam at 2:14 PM on May 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

I have a 14-year-old TV ... I forget what display technology it is I guess LCD. It's still good and no noticeable performance degradation.

If you have the right kind of viewing habits, if you can find the monitor with the specs you want, what is the difference? (My comments here are having a tone problem -- I have a bit of snark about this, but I'm genuinely curious about this kind of tech stuff.)

I think TVs are generally cheaper than monitors of similar size, probably because they are designed for longer viewing distances so they don't have the same demands of resolution and sharpness. Nice monitors seem to be brighter too. (I guess there is some expectation that you watch TV in a darkened room?)

Like a nice 40" TV is what a couple hundred dollars now? Whereas a nice 40" monitor is like a couple thousand or something.
posted by grobstein at 2:16 PM on May 5, 2023

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either.

I have a feeling we have different definitions of “olden.” Much like hippybear, I, too, grew-up with b/w tube tv (properly mid-mod with a blonde wood cabinet and legs.) The thing was still going when my folks decided to join the cool kids and get a color tv, somewhere around 1972 or so. I had a load of fun dorking-around adjusting the guns through the back of the set with a screwdriver. It was still chugging-along when I graduated college and left home in 1980.

Much like most other home appliances of yore, TVs were made to survive a lot longer than they are today.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:27 PM on May 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

A 4K tv is just as crisp as a 4K "monitor" given the same digital HDMI input. You may need to use the "gaming" mode to disable some of the BS image processing though. My TV is perfectly crisp; To type this comment I'm reading 6pt type in a text box in on a 43" screen from two feet away and it's just fine.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:28 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either. Just because they came in a fancier case doesn't mean the components were better.

Uhm. Yes they did.

I grew up with a terrible, ugly, no-name brand color tv that my parents got from my grandfather as a wedding gift in the late 1970s. He obtained it second hand from a friend who was moving. For twenty years that set was our primary TV until it finally stopped working in 2002. Yeah, okay the tuner had crapped out about five years before that and it was perpetually on channel 3 for the cable box, but we still used it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:33 PM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't think televisions of yore were made to survive a lot longer, I think it's that they tended to degrade in ways that still left them usable. Televisions today are much more delicate and when they fail they just don't work at all.

For years I had a television in my bedroom that I had damaged with a magnet as a small child. If the screen was displaying a solid color you could see pink splotches in the middle, but otherwise it worked fine and you couldn't notice the defect if you were actually watching anything.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:41 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, for some TVs, you have to connect to the internet to enable features not related to the internet at all.

That's interesting to me. What would those features be, and could you switch them on and then disconnect the television and have those settings remain?

The feature I remember was the OTA show listings. Digital TV channels broadcast their schedules, and on one particular TV the only way to see them was to connect it to the internet. I'm not sure whether it worked or not after the TV was blocked from the wider net. I've also seen lots of references to people pi-holing their TVs, which I assume would require getting a Raspberry Pi or the equivalent.
posted by Spike Glee at 3:37 PM on May 5, 2023

My parents' black and white TV from the late 60s/early 70s, a hideous harvest yellow plastic Zenith, lasted so long that it was what I used with my Commodore 64 through the mid-80s.

But then, the LCD TV in the upstairs bedroom is approximately 15 years old now and also works just fine.
posted by Foosnark at 3:41 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've also seen lots of references to people pi-holing their TVs, which I assume would require getting a Raspberry Pi or the equivalent

A lot of smart TVs use a hard coded DNS provider instead of honoring the DNS coming from DHCP or what you manually set in your TV's network settings. There are work arounds but unless you're comfortable configuring firewall rules from a command line prompt, it ain't exactly easy.

Your best option for privacy is to not let your TV on the internet. Full stop. Use a 3rd party streaming box like an AppleTV or AndroidTV — Apple and Google are definitely going to try to collect as much data on your watching habits as possible, but I trust them to honor their analytics and privacy settings A LOT more than the manufacturers who treat the TV as a loss-leader.
posted by nathan_teske at 4:06 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you have the right kind of viewing habits, if you can find the monitor with the specs you want, what is the difference?

Most monitors can't get bright enough to be really hdr.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:09 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

In capitalist America, TV watches you!
posted by jonp72 at 4:31 PM on May 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

We got a Samsung 55" last fall. It puts up a banner for about 20 seconds every time we turn it on, asking us to give it permission to find a network. We ignore it, it goes away. We don't really even notice it anymore, just watch stuff OTA or through our Roku. The TV works great. Fortunately most of our TV watching is streaming or via a cable replacement service, since the Roku remote is much friendlier than the TV remote.
posted by lhauser at 5:37 PM on May 5, 2023

No WiFi for you, television!

The TV manufacturer could just partner with a mobile service provider and put a sim card in it. You wouldn't have to give it wifi, just cell phone reception.
posted by ctmf at 5:52 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Wasnt there a myth that Nixon asked about using TV's as a listening device.
posted by clavdivs at 7:09 PM on May 5, 2023

"Television Delivers People" (Richard Serra, 1973)
posted by not_on_display at 7:36 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whenever this comes up on Hacker News, the recommendation is to buy the TVs that institutions use, which tend to be a lot more expensive, but are really "dumb" TVs.

Ha ! I’m old enough to remember the time when the best plasma TV you could buy for a home theater setup was a commercial Panasonic panel, no tuner, no speakers and cheaper than the consumer model. At some point somebody at Panasonic figured out what was happening and they adjusted the price. I’m still rocking my 2009 Plasma 58 inch, which was really expensive at the time but worth it considering how much gaming/movies I was doing back then. It’s still in good shape and I’ll probably upgrade it the day I feel I’m missing out on 4K/HDR content.

Last thing I would ever do is put my TV on the wifi, hard no.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:47 PM on May 5, 2023

I can equivocally state that I have never purchased a TV and I think I could possibly go the rest of my existence in this hell-space without doing so. I inherited my parents’ very small tv which was in their bedroom and used that up until I moved to Upper Manhattan, post-Sept 11, when there was no clear OTA signal. A 24” monitor for my desktop computer serves as my viewing device, and I’m hoping to upgrade to a larger monitor soon-ish. No cameras on it, no mic either. When I do spend any time at somebody’s home, I am flummoxed how you all figure how to use all the damn remotes involved.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:53 PM on May 5, 2023

I am flummoxed how you all figure how to use all the damn remotes involved.

For a couple of dev cycles I got universal remotes and got all the codes fed in and... yeah, still no.

My level of simplification is mostly "here's the selector on this stick, here's a stick for THAT input, and a stick for that OTHER input" and one of them has volume. If I want to get fancy and watch a DVD, that requires steps I'm not even sure I remember at the moment.
posted by hippybear at 8:02 PM on May 5, 2023

I am flummoxed how you all figure how to use all the damn remotes involved.

We Alpha Males are born with an inherent ability to manage multiple remote control devices.
/s
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:05 PM on May 5, 2023

A 4K tv is just as crisp as a 4K "monitor" given the same digital HDMI input

Yes and no. It'll be the same resolution, but it'll probably be across a bigger panel. One of the things you're paying for with the expensive monitor over the cheap TV is DPI, which is pretty much what we think of as sharpness.

(Which is not to say that 4k over 40 inches is bad, just that 4k over 24 inches is better.)
posted by Dysk at 8:06 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

TVs in the old days were good except when they weren't. We had what must have been an economy color set, wood tone plastic enclosure, with components that were prone to drift, which needed fine tuning way too regularly. Horizontal roll adjustment was another finicky sub circuit. My dad decided I would be the TV remote unit, tasked to maintain a stable picture, in addition to changing channels and adjusting volume. The damn TV did last way too long. It just did so in a pretty shitty way.

I do admit I was fascinated looking in the into the rear vent grill to see all the glowing vacuum tubes inside, like some kind of miniature nighttime alien city scape.

Dumping those heat generating tubes for solid state was a significant boost in improvement overall.

As far as spying smart TVs, I think this is way overblown.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:11 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Last year I bought a TV that's over 20 years old. Works great, looks beautiful. Hell I even have a repair shop that will service it (just hoping they stay in business for a while). When I mentioned this old TV here on the green, someone offered to drive to my house and give me a nice big new TV as a straight swap. So different strokes for different folks etc.

Count me as another who will probably not buy a 'smart' TV, ever.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:38 PM on May 5, 2023

I'd love to find instructions for de-smarting a TV.

Back in my day it was suggested you simply kill your television, but I don't know if we're still doing that.
posted by loquacious at 8:43 PM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I bought a small video projector recently; no smarts.
posted by chromecow at 8:46 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

components that were prone to drift, which needed fine tuning way too regularly

The same could be said of old VW Beetles, yet look how popular they are.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:57 PM on May 5, 2023

Last time I installed a TV it did indeed INSIST on wifi for the install step to proceed. So I turned on my hotspot on my phone, had it connect to that, finished the install and turned off my phone hotspot. It hasn't been connected to the internet since.

But the story gets worse. I was developing a proof-of-concept bluetooth scanning app for my iPhone for a project, and in the list of devices seen broadcasting was something that had a name that made me think "huh, that's the TV". Went to the specs page on the manufacturer site and no mention of bluetooth. Downloaded the manual, didn't mention bluetooth. Eventually I found out that it does that so the "universal" remote app by that company could easily figure out what to connect to on the wifi. I guess that's what you get when you use a chipset in designing a device that has all wireless stuff by default, why not use what you have.

But you end up with a device that's a security risk in a new way - anybody with a bluetooth scanning app (and there's plenty of those to choose from) walking through my street knows exactly what house to break into to get the best TV in the street.

I really wish designers started thinking about what they're doing...
posted by DreamerFi at 12:31 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

A 4K tv is just as crisp as a 4K "monitor" given the same digital HDMI input

This is technically true, but some tvs won't accept the hdmi equivalent of the uncompressed RGB signal standard on displayport. Some tvs top out at 4k /4:2:2, or half the color information of the uncompressed stream. This can result in mildly blurry text especially over color.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:04 AM on May 6, 2023

I lived without TV for four years while in college. I only watched it when I returned home for the usual breaks. In many ways life was more engaging then. It was the 1960's, so there was the music and books.
posted by DJZouke at 4:57 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

TVs in the olden days didn't last a long time either.

I was married in 1994 and we were gifted a black and white TV that my grandparents had given us, purchased around my sister’s birthday in 1976. (Or earlier.) We only replaced it in 2001 when we got a gaming system. Not coincidentally, I was one of Rogers’s first customers to buy just cable internet with no TV. It took a few weeks of escalating to get a price.

One amusing story about that TV was in between it was in my parents’ basement. They had cable installed - this must have been the mid 80s - and the guy took a long time and finally confessed he didn’t know why the colour wasn’t showing up.

We do have a normal smart TV now and stream things.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:32 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nobody is saying that there were exactly zero old tvs that were durable. Your memory of that tv that lasted a long time is fine.

But... only the tvs that lasted a long time, lasted a long time. The tvs that didn't last a long time were just shitty appliances that nobody thinks about very much. That's how survivorship bias works, same for tvs as for houses or anything else.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:42 AM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Old TVs weren't just more expensive - they were a lot bigger and heavier too. You couldn't just schlep a 55" TV in the back of a sedan and carry it up a flight of stairs by yourself. It required a lot more people and a lot more planning to move it and place it.

So people spent a lot more time before buying to make sure it was good, because there was a lot more overhead just moving it around. And once they had a TV, it would have to be seriously damaged or broken to replace it.
posted by meowzilla at 8:34 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I use over-the-air tv and roku, and these days, weeks go by without turning it on. I stream shows on a laptop and 24" screen, or an old laptop next to the bed (music stand works well) for when sleep is elusive. The (32" flat panel) tv is maybe 25 years old, a cheap Olevia, amazing that it's lasted. It would be handy to have a small tv for road trips for over-the-air tv, because they have the most useful weather reporting. Radio no longer fills that need, which is a drag. That one time, in Kansas, when there was a massive storm, getting a good weather report sucked. So I posted this Ask.Me.

I know whatever subscriptions I have will sell my information. I'm pretty sure they'll report that I'm a cheapskate who picks up services for a while, then drops them for others. It does suck that privacy is so dead, that our wholly-owned Congress does nothing to protect privacy, and that younger generations seem to accept this as a given.

Remember when you'd get a computer and it would have a bunch of games and software and crap, listed as Free Software Worth $$$!!! but really AOL and others paid them to put software trials on it? Same. Kudos to whichever hackers help us connect to and hack the linux distro on the smart tv.
posted by theora55 at 9:25 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I skimmed this thread and the articles, but tl;dr: could someone block their TV from getting internet/wi-fi at the router level? I know this doesn't apply necessarily to bluetooth, but I don't think I ever have been asked to accept any random bluetooth signals, or seen any appear on any of my devices. Could be wrong.

I watch my TV via my computer and usenet; and my other TV is youtube and similar sites. And I assume my data is all out there anyway and has been for years. WELLP!
posted by not_on_display at 1:04 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The same could be said of old VW Beetles, yet look how popular they are.


Ummm... yeah? I don't think the existence of crappy TVs (or cars, for that matter) ever lessened the popularity of TVs (or cars). I just disagree with the blanket statement that TVs used to last longer. TVs (and cars) were really not better in the old days in any significant way.

Old TVs weren't just more expensive - they were a lot bigger and heavier too. You couldn't just schlep a 55" TV in the back of a sedan and carry it up a flight of stairs by yourself. It required a lot more people and a lot more planning to move it and place it.

A 55" TV, in the way we measure TVs today, didn't really exist unless it was some sort of projection system, which I always thought looked kind of shitty for how much they cost, and how much commitment you needed to make.

Just by coincidence, I was looking at an old Heathkit catalog from 1967, and saw their top of the line TV kit, a 23" color TV, a DIY kit, mind you, going for the handsome sum of $469! The shipping weight was 131 lbs. One selling point was "No costly service calls for picture adjustments or simple repairs." Duh - YOU were the service department!

This kit didn't include an enclosure. Because you wanted the flexibility of installing your TV in a wall. If your walls were thick enough to accommodate a 23" CRT. Heathkit offered a couple different cabinets for this kit if you wanted a less permanent option. Mercifully, the cabinets they offered for this kit seem to have been pre-assembled.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:14 PM on May 6, 2023

A trail of suggested links from TFA led me to a 2019 article called The Doorbell Company That’s Selling Fear [archive.ph].

The author of the article, Joshua Benton, talks about his experience with the Ring “Neighbors” app at home. It’s remarkably prescient.

“Also, two young people, one male, one female, wearing identical T-shirts and lanyards with name badges, carrying clipboards—likely trying to get signatures for some cause or another—rang a doorbell and then walked away when no one answered. “Anyone know who they are?” the post from a Neighbors user asked, perhaps concerned about Islamic State infiltration of the Boston suburbs. “Call the police,” one helpful commenter replied. (It doesn’t take a critical race theorist to suspect that that suggestion might turn into action for people of color who dare to approach a front door.)”.
posted by bendy at 9:28 PM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Roku gets roughly 80% of its revenue from "services", and only 20% from selling the boxes and integrated "Roku TVs". That means that, basically, the box is a loss leader so they can make the real money in advertising. I'm not convinced this is better than a "smart" TV.
posted by wnissen at 9:29 AM on May 8, 2023

The last TV I bought came from our local tip shop. It's big and bright and sharper than my eyesight and it cost me $50.

Everything it's ever displayed has arrived via an HDMI cable attached to an Odroid N2 running CoreELEC, pulling content from a stack of 10TB USB3 drives attached to another Odroid N2 running Armbian. I collect most of that content from Transmission running on the cheapest available seedbox offered by ULTRA.cc, and most of the rest using yt-dlp.

Tracking can fuck off.
posted by flabdablet at 11:38 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

So many grim parts to this, but one that sticks in my craw is the betting lines/click here to wager screen shown in the football game example. Literally, this is a TV for people who don't have a few hundred bucks to buy a TV and Telly is pushing instant gambling using their TV remote.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:59 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

The double post based off this got deleted, like just now it seems, this is a reply to something said there:

Given the various precendents everyone is naming, rather than some harbinger of a dark future, don't you think it's more likely that it's a simple business idea that will fail, like those before?

The arc of the business universe is long, but it bends towards failure. But lots of bad ideas do gigantic harm before their inevitable failure, and that failure could be decades, even centuries off.

I lived without TV for four years while in college. I only watched it when I returned home for the usual breaks.

I was similar, for a time we couldn't afford TV while I was in collect, and as a result I lost the habit of watching broadcast things. I never looked back really. It helped that was about the time that reality television started being a thing, which I consider was the beginning of TV's great enshittification.

Also: flabdablet, you're an inspiration.
posted by JHarris at 11:37 AM on May 16, 2023

Responding to something deleted:

non overlapping Venn diagram of consumers too broke to buy a tv VS desirable demographic for advertisers

Everybody gotta eat and wash. If you dig in, here’s a pretty long history of poor people being *more* brand-focused and skeptical of generics, tied in part to hucksters and racism.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:40 PM on May 16, 2023

you're an inspiration

I doubt that I could inspire in anyone else the same degree of visceral distrust, recoil and loathing I have for the advertising industry and all its works, but one does one's best.
posted by flabdablet at 12:32 AM on May 17, 2023 [2 favorites]