this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Smart TVs, and advertising as a whole
50 years ago, a TV was a device that you plugged an antenna into to watch shows. 20 years ago a TV was a device that you plugged some component cords into to watch shows. 10 years ago, a TV was a device that you plugged an HDMI cord into to watch shows. Today, a TV is a device that you hook up to the internet so it can serve you ads while it can track what you watch, while a corporation profits off of the data it harvests from you watching shows.
In 10 years, a TV will be a device that lets you watch shows occasionally, in between ads. There's already a service that gives you a free TV in exchange for watching ads. How long will it be until offline TVs become as rare as headphone jacks in phones?
The problem is that television was never developed to allow for time shifting as giving that much control to viewers would mean people would skip over ads. It took a while for Neinsens to even track that.
You're just seeing a race to the bottom that the market couldn't bear a generation ago.
It all depends on how you watch tv. Any tv can be a conduit for your computer. And if you download or own hard copies, there’s nothing really stopping that, is there? It’s possible I’m ootl, the last tv I bought (actually, the first AND most recent are one in the same) was $125. I think it’s an earlier gen smart tv, but I’ve never hooked it up to anything but wall power, my computer, my sound system, and my Xbox.
My brother is super into tech stuff and he hanks the way I do a lot of stuff is very “stupid” because I make it more cumbersome. But I don’t want a streaming stick and all that bullshit. I know how to control my computer. I don’t know how to control a little box that’s connected to everything that has no buttons.
Modern smart TVs don't have a stick that you plug in, they have that stick built in. Of course you can still hook up anything you want to the HDMI input, but my worry is that manufacturers will start locking that behind some garbage online requirement
I use a pihole which is a small computer that checks every domain request and blocks them when they are on one of my blacklists. This works great for browsing the web because you just don't see most ads anymore. I also use adblocks for, for example, YouTube because pihole can't distinguish between ads or legitimate requests when they come from the same domain.
I also download all videos from YouTube to watch. And I also don't have cable.
Basically, I see so few instances of ads anymore that any few ads are getting so annoying. The 1-2 ads in front of a YouTube video or in the middle, I just don't watch that video anymore.
But when I really noticed that was when I was spending the day with my father and we were watching a TV show on some free provider, every 10 minutes there were 1.5 minutes ads. Which is by far better as normal TV in my country (Germany) but damn, this was really annoying after just a single episode and I'm glad I don't have to see those at home. It just interrupts the flow.
If I'm watching youtube on someone else's TV, I will hook up my premium account and let them pollute my search history before I put up with a single ad. It's one thing for a creator to do a sponsor bit–I can skip past it, and leave a nasty comment if it's something like established titles, but I'll die before I watch another damn wendy's ad. I worry that a pharmaceutical ad would radicalize me to CIA watch list levels if I were forced to watch one at this point
The general direction I agree with, the only part I can't see is where the 'only smart' style of tv could ever take off fully. The notion of main room screen ever being an internet only thing would have to contend with a gaming industry that doesn't build their consoles into tvs, or where personal content to view it on a big screen needs some kind of interface outside the network.
So long as that exists there should always be an option of simply not connecting the device to a network to avoid the issue. The only way I could see a forced to be online would be if their use started being treated as a licenced service that needed to confirm a subscription or such. Not that anyone should be giving them ideas, but it seems a stretch.
I can imagine a timeline in which TVs start requiring "updates" out of the box, refusing to display what's on the HDMI input without a constant network connection for "security" or "quality of service" or some horseshit
Oh I'm sure that'd be tried, given the appitites of the major media orgs any way to move towards a payperview-per-viewer model would be fair game. My doubt for it's viability woud be more that human resistance to it would end up the same way it always has for the media firms, trying to defy the will of a determined population of internet dwellers and fighting against reality. Someone would end up creating a widgit/app/script or hell even manufacturing an offline model to market to the glampers and cabin dwellers to circumvent the efforts. Cats and mice will forever keep at their games.