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https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/its-still-stupidly-ridiculously-difficult-to-buy-a-dumb-tv/
Historically, "smart" TVs aren't always particularly smart. They've routinely been shown to have lax security and privacy standards. They also routinely feature embedded OS systems that don't age well, aren't always well designed, don't perform particularly well over time, are slathered with ads, and are usually worse than most third-party game streaming devices or video game consoles.
Yet when if you go shopping for "dumb" televisions — as in just a high quality display with a bunch of HDMI ports and not much else, you're usually going to be out of luck. There are options, but guides on this front will usually shovel you toward computer monitors (too pricey at large sizes), or business-class displays (ditto).
[...] Of course it's challenging because TV manufacturers now make more money collecting and monetizing your personal data than they do selling the actual hardware. Last year Vizio noted it made $38.4 million in one quarter just from tracking and monetizing consumer viewing and usage data. It made $48.2 million on hardware (which also includes soundbars, and other products) in that same period.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 17 2022, @01:50PM
You forgot the best part of OTA updates for "smart TVs": obsolescence at the click of a mouse button. CEO needs to boost sales numbers in the coming quarter: push an update which nudges owners to buy a new TV - either by making the old one glitchy, pushing sales promos (obvious and covert) into the software, etc. Best for the people in control, that is, and that's never really been the "consumer." Consumers have a choice to consume or not, but that's nothing like having the choice of producing or not, how to produce your product, how to sell it, etc. Vape manufacturers had the option to produce a product without nicotine, not marketed to adolescents whose brains are still forming nicotine receptor pathways, etc. They had that option, but they took the other one - not because they didn't know what they were doing, but because they were willing to accept the backlash down the road to make a quicker buck before the backlash hit. Big tobacco did a quick hit-and-run on the processed food industry - if you follow the money I would expect that a lot of it pivoted to healthcare after their work was done in the grocery store aisles.
All of this is "opt in" nobody's "making" teenagers buy nicotine vape cartridges that happen to be twice as addictive as cigarettes, nobody is making people buy processed foods that have pivoted from causing heart disease to causing diabetes (heart disease kills the customer too quickly, diabetes is chronic suffering with a much longer payback period and overall healthcare bill.) Entertainment delivery devices are small potatoes by comparison.
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