I like Amazon's model for this on the Kindle: Kindles are subsidized by ads, so you can buy what is effectively a REALLY cheap tablet from a well-known company if that's most important to you. OR, if you prefer, you can go pay a one-time fee an eliminate ads from the OS.

Yeah, I would be less upset about the ad situation if they had made it clear up front and given me a choice like Amazon does with the Kindle.

That said, when companies price the ad-free premium at 1000x the expected ad revenue, it gets aggravating again.

What's the advantage of this? Surely they're better off pricing it at 2x the expected ad revenue, since then they can expect to get twice as much now as they otherwise would get eventually? Indeed, even if it were 1.01x the expected ad revenue they've won with this upsell.

A willingness to pay signals that you A. have money and B. care about quality, which makes you a ripe target for price discrimination, which is why "ad-free" premiums often exceed the ad revenue by an enormous factor.

Charging 1.01x the expected ad revenue wouldn't cover the cost of implementing the no-ad option. Even 2x might be in break-even territory when you include extra support costs and the like (one person on the phone because they bought no-ads and got ads due to a mishap somewhere wipes out the profit from a lot of no-ad sales).

There's also the funny issue where people who can afford to pay extra for the no-ads option are exactly the people that advertisers want to show ads to. If the no-ads option is $5, then you're left selling ads with a target market of people who can't afford or don't want to spend $5, and that ends up driving down your ad revenue. A large gap between the expected ad revenue and the price of the no-ad option helps mitigate this effect.

Isn't this advertising pricing paradox proof of the exploitative nature of advertising?

Pretty much. In Australia Pay TV has more ads in it per hour than free to air TV.

Or you can buy the cheap one with ads and keep it on aircraft mode, longer battery life, no ads. (Download content from PC via USB)

True - but the fact that's even possible still makes me happier than the TV my comment was replying to.

> Sony dropped playstation support for my 4K monitor in an irreversible software update

What kind of support does it need? Isn't it just an HDMI cable?

Nope. It was a specific HDMI codec that was common to early 4k TVs and monitors, and it worked great until they decided it shouldn't anymore. Something about HDMI 1.4 vs HDMI 2.0.

Sounds like something a $20ish active adapter should be able to fix. The box shouldn't care what's on the other end of the cable as long as whatever it is speaks the right version of the protocol.

The box would have to decrypt HDCP, swizzle one codec into another, and re-encrypt. I spent about $50 on dongles and the better part of a weekend pursuing that angle to no avail. Sony didn't make the announcement ahead of time, so nobody had an FPGA module ready. Of course, a cynic would say that was the whole point.

I wasn't alone in having this problem -- the support forums were overflowing with outraged threads about this. Support would give non-answers, wait for someone to say something objectionable, and then use it as an excuse to lock and delete the thread. Rinse, repeat. They had it down to a science.

Active adapters of the sort you might need probably start around $70 and go up depending on the ports required. To get a 4k hdmi 2.0 to dp adapter would cost like $120+ for example.

I'm sure someone eventually made one to address the market need, and $120 sounds like a fair price given the complexity. It wasn't available when I needed it, and it doesn't change the fact that Sony just up and dropped support for old displays.

My guess is the TV must support DRM

That's only for Bluray playback, for gaming the PS4 doesn't care about HDCP.

I'm pretty sure that is not correct. I've had issues with games on the PS4 not wanting to start, and I know the PS3 required HDCP for certain games as well.

HDCP?

If you open up a smart TV, isn't the "smart" part of it basically an embedded ARM cpu SBC, with a somewhat standard connection to the LCD cable? If so, how hard would it be to rip out the smarts and put in a passive HDMI to LCD converter board?

This exact strategy is mentioned elsewhere, and it appears there are people trying to reverse engineer the base firmwares as well.

That last part is my nightmare ... which company is it?

TCL. The screens are cheap, but they get you with the ads.