I’m mostly sailing the high seas, using the tv as a giant monitor for the always-on laptop connected to it. I’m afraid of the 1984-esque “You must connect to the internet to continue using this TV” that might come after some time.
I’m mostly sailing the high seas, using the tv as a giant monitor for the always-on laptop connected to it. I’m afraid of the 1984-esque “You must connect to the internet to continue using this TV” that might come after some time.
Or pushing ads on the device idle screen, or inserted into other things you are trying to watch. (pre-rolls on HDMI sources…)
What the hell kind of TVs you have, guys? I mean, home screen ads sure. You don’t need to see them much if you’re always on the one external source, but sure.
But what kind of TVs do you have inserting pre-roll ads on external sources? The one example of that I can think of off the top of my head was this one weird concept of a TV you’d get pretty much for no money and was primarily funded by acting as an ad service in your house, which was a crappy business model and that’s probably nobody else is doing it.
Man, I wish people would get better at dealing with these types of issues well instead of making up new ones to get mad about. Getting your TV usage milked for data is a very real issue. And yeah, the enshittification of smart TV UX with targeted ads is as well. And it’s hard to sidestep because a lot of it is also baked into the media sources you’re paying for on the side, so even if you watch them elsewhere you get a lot of the same crap.
Is that genuinely not bad enough of a problem to solve to go into weird edge cases like HDMI pre-roll ads, self-destruct firmware updates or mandatory connection prompts? It is in my book.
You may think it’s crazy talk, but the concept has already been patented.
I don’t think it’s “crazy”, I just gave you an example of something similar that actually exists.
I think it’s a bad business model, which is why I only gave you an example.
As opposed to the real stuff you should care about, which not only exists, but is widespread and nearly unavoidable. You don’t need to dig through patents in ragebait articles to be concerned about this for real reasons.