A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.
B: People don't like ads on their TV.
A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: No.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.
C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?
The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.
Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).
The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.
I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).
Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.
"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"
TuneIn does this.
(partially kidding, but only partially.)
I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.
On the other hand, we have to keep the toilet seat down or they'll try to drink toilet water.
I begun suspecting that one day when my wife was preparing dinner. Soon after she took the meat from the fridge to work on it, our baby started crying and making noise for absolutely no reason. My wife immediately dropped everything and went to investigate, and the cat used this opportunity to attempt to steal our dinner meat.
Ever since, I've been noticing many more cases where the baby and the cat are either simultaneously attempting to do things they're not allowed to, or the baby starts distracting us while the cat goes out to carry out some mischief. It's all coordinated too well to be happenstance.
But I have come to believe they are far smarter than me, particularly with scheming methods of sneaking around to quietly appear when they can get food. One used to push donut boxes off the side so that they would burst open, and would then run off with a donut. I have no idea why he wanted to eat donuts. He also tried to eat bread through the wrapper. Or they fein illness. Our one cat had an operation on his leg so we put a little box as a stepping stone so that he could get onto the bed, and then onto the window sill. Turns out he didn't need it at all and could jump perfectly fine, but would still use the box all the time.
They're really clever, just not at jigsaws or sudoku.
The problem is cats are really good at hiding pain - being physically able to jump doesn't mean it isn't uncomfortable or painful for him.
We have a pair of very senior cats (18/19ish years old) and make sure the house has little staircases dotted around to make getting on to their regular lounging spots easier, as we noticed they prefer to use a step if something happened to be available - while they are still fairly mobile, I suspect they are developing some level of arthritis. Given they've been good companions for nearly two decades it's the least we can do to make sure they're comfortable.
Apps which lay their buttons out contrary to the conventions of their platform are evil. Apps which randomize the positions of their buttons are unspeakably worse.
I always, always thought this is what X buttons do, so I was simply closing the tab :))
- same color background
- in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake
- I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just opens the ad
- Also very small, 1-2 pixel "X" so literally one pixel off and you've opened the ad
- I don't remember what company did this, but they would pop the ad and after three seconds, it would reload, all but a few pixels higher so when you're in the process of closing the window, it would reload and then you'd open the ad by mistake because the "X" is in the wrong place now.
I've seen a lot more devious stuff but the sad thing is, I have decent vision. How do these dark patterns affect people who have impaired vision or other issues with their vision? How infuriating it is it for them to deal with this BS? I can't imagine.
The app asks once per month if I would consider seeing an ad to support the developer. I usually watch one ad a day, as a rule, because it's the best way to do this. I've clicked on those ads, and have actually made purchases from those ads (it was for a product I was already researching and probably going to buy, but I clicked through the ad when I finally purchased it).
More apps need that level of respect for their users' time.
Windows 3.11 / 95 UI seems such a good idea by comparison to today's UIs - checkboxes with obvious tick marks or X marks in them, radio buttons, buttons that look like actual buttons, scrollbars you can see without having to flail the mouse around just for them to appear, scrollbars that go the right way when you use the mouse wheel (ok that was Windows 98), maximise buttons that actually maximised a window without having to hold alt like on macOS these days...
Fact check. You cannot make an X with anything less than 3 pixels. ;)
``` *:not(.videoContainer){ background-color: black!important; color: black!important; } img { display:none!important; } ```
An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.
Of course now I'm part of the problem, because some asshole has a graph that shows that (a suspiciously small fraction of) users are able to opt-out so there's no legal liability for having the ads that way.
I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.
Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.
Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.
If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.
I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...
"Hey, have you seen the new COVID-19 contact tracing app? It's named TikTok-19".
Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them
Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.
Pro tip: if the competitor uses your trademark in their ad copy, you can do a takedown notice and usually the ads will be removed.
The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.
There are a few good reasons to do this:
1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.
2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.
The difference from Samsung is that the ads on the LGs are in the same place they've always been (on the smart tv menu overlay), they've never been obtrusive, and they're always in some way connected to video content (usually VOD movies that you can purchase through one of the streaming apps, or adds for streaming apps you can install on the TV).
I’m more excited about the HDMI 2.1 and variable refresh for the new Nvidia cards.
I took that stupid TV off the network as soon as I could.
I think the manufacturers are all as bad as each other. My current Panasonic TV will refuse to load any of the "smart" apps (even Netflix) if it cannot reach Panasonic's servers, which means the entire TV becomes useless as an Internet device (no Netflix or ANY streaming services) if Panasonic has a server issue (which they sometimes do).
Might revert to VHS at this rate.
I didn't push it again because in about 2015 I found that if you push it, it locks up for exactly 30s, which is how long it takes to hit the network timeout and say "Updates are available for your Samsung Smart TV." and then allow you to use the ancient web browser or Netflix or other smart apps. I did try a couple years ago, on a whim, but apparently the update servers have moved and even when plugged into Ethernet it can't actually update.
Everything currently runs through the Roku, the Blu-ray player, or a component-to-HDMI dongle for the Wii, but if I didn't have the Roku I'd have a motivation to update so that Netflix would work without a 30-second delay (and I'd be unsurprised if Netflix wasn't backwards compatible with their 2012 client from a Samsung TV). However, the picture is fine, so it keeps on chugging.
You may want to get an external device (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV, or other media server) and plug that into your HDMI if you use the network from apps on the TV.
What can the apps on your TV do that a $40 Amazon Fire stick ($50 if you want 4K) can't?
I'd rather hook up an old laptop to my TV and use that to watch media than use the apps on my TV and deal with all the bullshit that TV manufacturers are doing when you connect the TV to the network.
Also, as a side note, Vudu is like the one app from that era that still works.
Check what network activity it is engaging in. You'll be disappointed, I am sure. Seems dialling home is the new thing to do on every single device these days. Data vacuuming the entire human population just because they can.
Instead I will recommend Sony or LG now
I have a Philips smart TV, so far it has no ads and just mildly annoying bugs, nothing really disruptive. But mine is an old model, it looks like the new ones aren't like that anymore.
A few years ago I brought some TVs to use as monitors because they were much better fit than the actual thing. Now it looks like the trends reversed, and I'll have to start buying monitors to use as TVs. Is there a good TV receptor that I can plug in a Raspberry Pi?
The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.
- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.
- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.
We all know this, but we ignore it. Branding for brandings sake == lying to customers.
Heck the yoga app I use I saw through a mobile ad. Same deal for the fitness app I use (BodBot, awesome app, check it out!)
I've gotten onboard Kickstarters from ads, and I've bought keto cereal from an ad I saw.
99.999% of most ads I ignore, but sometimes ads are really well targeted and actually show me something I want.
(None of these ads were on a tv in any way...)
This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.
The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.
https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/the-marketers-g...
That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?
It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.
- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)
- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”
This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, then hack it and remove the "special offers".
I don't know how prevalent this is, but wonder if it's a consideration in deciding on the "money to disable ads" strategy.
When I was buying my Paperwhite, I just ordered the ad-free version from amazon (.com or .co.uk, don't remember which). And then a couple co-workers (agreed, computer people, but very much not the type that's into tinkering or cracking software) looked at me with surprise, because it turns out everyone does the "standard" route - order "special offers" from amazon.de, and save money while getting an ad-free Kindle, because AFAIR initially the special offers didn't even display in Poland, and when they did, apparently everyone knew how to jump some hoops to get rid of them.
Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.
American tried. American failed. Nobody was willing to pay more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/04/business/american-air-to-...
Back two jobs ago, we had international customers with somewhat high demand to ship our people all across the world on, sometimes on a moment's notice. I had to fly out 4 or 5 times in the span of two years, but some of my colleagues could do more than that in under a year. Somehow, the flights were almost always the cheapest airline available, and the cheapest seats available. The co-workers who flew frequently, including my boss, were all using the accumulating miles to bump themselves a class up.
United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...
tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.
Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?
If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.
The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.
To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.
Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.
And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.
I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.
I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.
There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
It is really fun to take someone there who has never been in one before, and watch as they get overwhelmed. Just the fact that there are 3 aisles of frozen pizzas... and the cheese coolers run at least half way down the width of the store.
Oh, and the employees are friendly -- I wonder if the fact that it is employee owned helps there (or how the employee ownership works).
Edit: do a video search for Woodman's, someone has posted a video of traveling the store on a scooter, you can get a good idea of the size of it.
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
The loss leader in this scenario is the "milk" family, not a particular brand of milk.
- Sent from my Xperia Compact
well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad
and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.
I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
I don't really follow this line of thinking.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.
But that isn't the case here.
Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.
And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.
Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
—Upton Sinclair
Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.
This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.
Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.
We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: Yes of course I do. If you don't like ads on your TV why are you working here.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A+group: yes of course we all like ads (lying in a meeting is not a crime, and occurs all over the world)
C: ok no objections, we love it! Ship it!
A, C gets a paycheck at the end of the day.
B gets fired if they don't change their mind.
Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.
Yep, sounds about right.
“Why do we need to track users?” “To give them recommendations!” “But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?” “Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind” “Where is the decline button?” “...” “There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!” “Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”
If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.
"We need to think of our devices as small hyper local billboards with untapped potential"
This is not really Sony's fault but rather Google's but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth…
https://9to5google.com/2020/08/18/android-tv-homescreen-ads-...
It's so much better than the "Smart" Samsung TV it is plugged into that it's not even funny.
The remote control has touch. I can use my phone to type text input. It's fast. It's elegant and slick. It has no ads. It has options that I care about. It doesn't waste my time with options I don't care about.
The Samsung TV on the other hand was a flagship model. Top of the line. Best of the best. Just a few years ago.
Now? It is unusable. It is beyond slow. Two to three second response time. Text input is just torture. Netflix crashes. YouTube mangles HDR in some weird way that makes people look like they were drawn by a kid with crayons.
It's shocking to me that you can pay thousands of dollars to Samsung and have them destroy your investment with "updates", whereas you can pay a few hundred dollars to Apple and have a slick product that improves over time.
What I don't understand is the executives at other companies. Companies that aren't the #1 biggest in the world. How do they not get it!? Just copy Apple! Stop fucking over your customers, and maybe they'll give you more money! I know I give Apple more money every year!
It's not that hard. It really isn't.
>Support for the Ambient mode Headlines Service is scheduled to end on September 30, 2020. We thank you for using the service and we look forward to providing an improved alternative in the near future
I'm not going to buy a new TV every year. "Smart" features that are discontinued after ~1 year are worse than worthless, it's just clutter in the menus at this point.
Also crazy are hardcoded "Netflix", "Rakuten" and "Amazon" buttons on the Samsung remote, you just know that they will stop working at some point.
Now you could argue as to whether you want Netflix preinstalled on your TV, but while most smart features of smart TVs are useless, having Netflix is useful for many users.
Text input.
All the letters lined alphabetically with only left-right movement allowed. Takes ages to input anything. Also no corrections allowed. I actually exit appleTV and use the built in TV apps for when I need youtube and the like, because their input mechanism is not insane.
I know there is a remote app for iPhones, but you do provide an actual remote, make it work ffs.
(Even so, what you describe still happens on occasion for me, but it helps)
If they had a 2D text input they wouldn't be able to do momentum in swiping as well as horizontal (side effect of the horrible remote), but more importantly, the primary text input on Apple TV is voice, in the moment just hold the Siri button. It takes in letters over voice too. Worlds faster than any other input on tv. No wonder they prioritized on it.
The last glyph in the row of letters is the delete key.
That could be a movie about absurdity and meaninglessness of life...
But what if I need to input a language that's not supported or I just don't want to yell at my TV to search a video?
Of course, if you don't have your phone nearby it might suck but let's be realistic, how often you don't have your phone close by when watching TV?
P.S.: Yes, I know, if you are an Android user there is no way out and Apple sucks for that, not defending them at all.
There are actually many times I don't have my phone with me while watching TV. I carry it with me everywhere all day, but I try to keep it on the table most of the time when at home.
I don't need a dedicated TV keyboard. As I said, I work around it by using the TV apps, but it's annoying, and the most annoying part is that it's probably annoying on purpose to get people more on their phone.
And, Apple should be better at UI design than this. They were once, and not that long ago, but I think the UI team they've had for the last, oh, let's say seven or eight years -- going back semi-arbitrarily to iOS 7, but steadily infecting all other platforms -- have prioritized aesthetics over usability.
So I would agree with their design decision: make an elegant remote, use voice dictation for search and the like, if you need a keyboard, use your iPhone, and if you are not happy with that, get a dedicated keyboard. If you are not happy with THAT, well ...
But I can understand where you're coming from, I am just very frustrated that this user-interface-design-genius trillion dollar company can not change the input mechanism of one of their most used product from the:
a b c d e [f] g h i j k etc... Backspace
model with only <-> movement and no way to make an input correction other than backspace, to something like:
a b c d Backspace
e f [g] h forward
i j k l backward
m n o p
I have a bunch of aTVs, and while they’re the best boxes I’ve used, there’s definitely some ads baked in, and in prominent placements.
- The TV app started out as a directory + recommendation engine for services you had “connected” to the app; it’s turned into a series of pitches for Apple TV+ and Apple’s “Channels” feature. These placements are below-the-fold, but the default behavior has the “TV” button on the remote bring up that app (although you can change this to display the home screen). - In the top banner, the TV & Music apps will (by default) auto-play trailers and music videos (on mute). You can disable that behavior for the TV app, and it’ll revert to displaying your watch queue.
No one uses the trackpad on their playstation controllers, why did apple run with the same idea?
I'm a big fan of the Roku boxes.
I found the support article from Sony on this:
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00225587
If this is a TV that is used by very young children, ads with blood splatter as shown in their example seem pretty tasteless.
Google's page on the introduction of ads has the same thing - an ad for Sesame Street followed up with the ad containing blood splatter.
https://blog.google/products/android-tv/find-new-faves-faste...
> A3: No, the suggestions cannot be removed.
I keep hoping someone will file a class action over this. These dumbfuck ads just appeared one day on my Bravia X900E, about a year after purchase. I didn't opt in to this and I wouldn't have bought the damn thing if this "feature" existed at the time. Sign me up for the class!
Honestly, that's the thing I hate most about the Fire Stick, and why I don't use it's discovery feature at all... I don't want to see promotions for 4,000 services I don't subscribe to. Sure, if I search for a specific show, I don't mind results from those services ... but as general adverts for shows? No thank you.
- Remove the “TV” app from the top bar. - You can change the behavior from the “Settings” app to show your “TV” app’s watch queue instead of trailers.
You can’t disable the Music app videos, though.
Unless you mean trailers for whatever the cursor is on, inside of an app like Netflix? If so, some of those can be disabled, but I actually like them—they're "ads" for content that I already have access to but may not have known about otherwise.
Also great solution for cheap subsidized TVs where they are banking on your connecting to your network so only charge $100.
Plug in an apple TV and you are set.
https://tidbits.com/2020/01/16/why-is-the-apple-tv-constantl...
Disabling them is also fairly easy, and if you don't use the TV app, they go away entirely.
Smart TV manufacturers are relying on the ongoing revenue from their software side nowadays, so they’ll usually mandate setting up an internet connection as part of the device setup process, and then only give you the option to change networks instead of disabling it outright.
If you’re tech savvy, you can take measures against this, but it’s not going to be simple for most folks.
You also have to worry about ethernet-over-HDMI unintentionally exposing the TV to the wider internet.
I ended up with an AppleTV. So far, if it plays on my phone, it will play on the TV, too.
I plugged in my Apple TV instead.
Every now and then the Android TV pops up when I turn the TV on and asks me to complete the set up. I always tell it to fuck off.
So far, no ads. It'll stay that way till the TV eventually dies - without ever connecting to the internet.
Just don't connect it to the Internet.
The bigger problem is that at some point there will not be any "idiot box" models at all. The TVs will refuse to work if they aren't seeing the Internet. Then we'll be truly fucked.
What if Samsung decides that it will try to connect to open networks for updates or what not? What then? Ask your neighbour to install PiHole on his network? No. This is an example of a game of cat and mouse that shouldn't exist - you pay money for a TV and that's not enough? You giving them your money is not enough and so they decide to shove ads down your throat because profits.
Simple solution would be just not to buy Samsung.
It's definitely not for the consumer's benefit in most cases. No one is going to die because your Smart Keurig or 5G-TV goes unpatched for a month. Hopefully we can avoid the slippery slope and realize that these devices' internet capabilities are not for us - they are primarily for data collection/advertising purposes.
I cannot imagine a worse idea.
IoT devices are the richest source of hosts available for botnet operators to compromise because they are numerous and famously insecure. Today it's lightbulbs and security cameras. Tomorrow you wish it to be pacemakers and Toyotas?
We already know it is functionally impossible to write bug-free code which is also useful. We also know that attackers relentlessly probe systems until (that is a _when_, not an _if_) a weakness is found to exploit to gain control of that device. It is possible to write provably-correct code, but so far only for somewhat trivial applications.
Until this fundamental problem of software security can be solved, an air gap is the _only_ reliable thing that can protect life-critical software from external remote attack.
But critical components should be designed as simple as possible, and be thoroughly tested before device release. Releasing garbage and then patching it OTA doesn't really work for safety critical things. Not so long ago cars didn't have capability to upgrade (firmware on mask ROMs) and I don't think something horribly bad happened.
see https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
My next idea - Faraday cages for smart TVs
(I disconnected the antenna on my OnStar, yet found it still connecting to cell towers successfully from time to time. The resister solved that.)
Real solution is regulation. But that can only happen if the outcry is large enough. Having two revenue streams is always going to be better than one.
The forced login is likely illegal, because there is no mention of a requirement for a Google account in their marketing materials or on their sales pages.
The device stays perfectly functional if the the network connection is cut off within seconds after signing in, and the account can be removed after the setup is complete. The only drawback is that you can't update apps from Google Play, unless you add a Google account again.
It literally just bricked my test iPhone SE.
After the upgrade completed there is an only an option to put in a email/password for icloud and there is no "skip" or "do later" button I could find.
I'm pretty derpy but I can tell you it is true.
That or you put in an iCloud account at some point but it did not get removed successfully.
iOS 14 merges the 'not now' from iOS 13 into a 'forgot my account or don't set up now'.
has this been removed? It might be getting into GDPR violation territory.
Dark patterns... I can see why the older generation is scared of the hardware.
We're closer to that than you think. My Philips Ambilight television (purchased this year) throws a popup every few weeks already complaining that I've not completed setup and connected it to the internet.
As sold as I am on Ambilight (it is actually brilliant), I wont be buying another Philips television.
Also, if you really enjoy Ambilight, there's a (kinda expensive) solution to get it on any TV now: https://www.techradar.com/news/philips-hue-now-lets-you-turn...
Or maybe we (the tech community) just agree on one model and produce an open source firmware. If you look at MagicLantern for Canon, you'll see how amazingly far people will go to control their hardware.
In any case, all you need is one model with a decent screen and broken certificate pinning and I'm good for the 3-5 years that the TV will last.
And until then, I'd assume that Nvidia sees the market demand for big TV-like PC screens and outcompetes the TV manufacturers.
1. Order TV.
2. test if it works without agreeing to anything and without internet.
3. return if that's not the case.
I have yet to accept EULA on samsung on anything and it works...
Right now the ACR is troubling. Telling a remote server what you're watching... Only solution I found - not connected + hdmi to Linux box I control.
It is very hard to win against hostile design.
If it stops working after return period I call under warranty that it stopped working (2 years), they are forced to fix the issue.
Explain the issue, explain you cannot connect to the internet.
If it doesn't work, forward the whole info to the customer protection bureau if you're in the EU.
Edit: I will test this out by setting a date far in the future when I buy new equipment (will also hopefully cause SSL failures due to expired certificates internally in the firmware)
The factory I work at had large one scattered around to show line information. Some of the information is safety critical and so if it is inyeruped with an ad there will be legal issues.
You'll get the first month for free, when you sign up for the 2-year plan for 19.99$/month right now!!
Frankly, we don't miss the TV channels. Streaming works okayish for the public channels, but we rarely bother.
The TV is just a dumb screen connected to a receiver, which has the HTPC as input as well as record player.
So the only thing a 'TV' offers me is its screen. Is that any different from a high end computer monitor these days? Is there a difference based on the viewing distance perhaps?
Using a TV which adjusts the brightness depending on what's displayed can be very unpleasant when trying to do computer work on it. E.g. opening or closing a window may cause other windows to abruptly change brightness. Scrolling through a document may cause the brightness to vary.
Sort of makes sense because a lot of people don't care about or plain don't want speakers on their monitor.
One also has to be cognizant of HDMI Ethernet in case of "unintended" connectivity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...
Also Netflix experience with Chromecast is mostly superior to smart TVs, because it will not play anything while you just try to find something worth watching.
Connecting Chromecast to the soundbar also gives ability to listen to music from Youtube, without running display. It wastes bandwith however.
EDIT: I wrote "beamer" instead of "projector" at first
> Beamer
> Video projector, a pseudo-Anglicism in a number of languages including German, Dutch, Latvian and Swiss French
Haha, just wait until 4g/5g will become so cheap that TVs will have them built in for doing software updates and sending telemetry when offline :)
One of the perks of living in Canada is I am sure this would never happen here in my lifetime.
sure, the monitor was atleast 25% more expensive than a similar screen with a smart-tv function in it, but I think it's worth it.
I did a firmware upgrade and just disconnected from the internet right after. I also don't use the built in apps, because let's be honest, compared to an AppleTV, all SmartTV apps are basically garbage. I understand that the AppleTV is somewhat expensive, but it's my baseline for the quality I'd expect from a SmartTV.
Netflix on the AppleTV, starts instantly, and you're browsing the content endlessly after 20 sec. Start Netflix on the TV it self, that will take a few minutes.
Edit: also, it was a gift.
There was a company that made just a good tv, no smarts, but I can't find it right offhand. It think it was a european company
I've been running a BenQ w1070 since 2013 and couldn't be happier
see https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Wait until they start including a cellular modem that can't be turned off.
I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns server configured via my DHCP. Letting pi-hole block the requests helps prevent errors from dns request timeouts.
I'm just waiting for smart devices to start doing that instead, forcing me to set up full SSL filtering until they start doing encrypted SNI :/
The only complaint is from my wife who sometimes Googles stuff and clicks on the top result, which is often an ad and will end up blocked. She now has to scroll down a bit to the real results.
Upon discovering the ads I was gonna return mine for a comparable LG, until I learned LG also have ads—at least this way I can pretend I'm not being taken for a ride.
At the time I didn't have any external devices capable of 4K Netflix or YouTube; now I do I should factory reset the TV and set it up without network access,
Oh they have. Many times over. Two instances affected me[1][2] and that was enough to swear me off all Sony products for the last 10 years. Only now am I contemplating buying from Sony again (a PS5). I don't think any multinational company is above trading their customers needs for a few extra quid.
[1] Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
[2] Removal of "Other OS" feature from Playstation 3's after users had already bought them: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3088169/sony-agrees-to-pay-m...
https://streamingclarity.com/android-tv-staff-pick-highlight...
No idea if it's full of some sort of baked in ads because, after the initial setup, I've used it exclusively as... a TV. It turns on, shows me things I give it over HDMI, and turns off. I haven't actually seen the menu/apps/whatever after the first day.
It's not optimal, I'd rather it just be a dumb TV obviously, but in a sea of bad options it's been... fine.
I guess we're supposed to think "movie buffs who really know their stuff." When the reality is "[Sales] staff picks."
They have the same contempt for software that they do on their phones.
They NEVER update their firmware. It's amazingly slow and latent.
When they DO occasionally update they usually break things that were working or remote features you used.
About 2 years ago they implemented some weird/stupid popover commercial thing which you could eventually disable but they hid the feature.
I'd be watching Game of Thrones or something and in the middle of the show they'd bring up a popup for a new TV show or something along those lines.
NEVER buy a TV. Even better. They are all horrible. I thought that TVs would be a thing of the past like landline phones, but looks like I was wrong. It's incredible that the gullible are swarming to "smart" TVs.
That screen has no business connecting to the internet.
Even better is a home projector.
The color resolution is also great for movies.
Usually I disagree about niche hardware in this way (for example, usual mentions about a similar approach for phones and laptops), but the dumb screen might just be dumb and cheap enough to make work at this limited scale?
It can be done, I think, but it has to be VERY well funded - you need to send salespeople / lobbyists to the various on- and offline shops selling TVs, you need "SEO experts" to try and beat the competition's "SEO experts" on the internet and e.g. Amazon's search results, and you need a legal team to help with the inevitable heap of lawsuits you'll get (patents, design infringement, etc). And then you'll have to deal with the competition pushing the prices of their devices below yours; Samsung can afford to sell TVs below market value for decades if need be, JUST to push out that shitty newcomer that does ad-free TVs, and they'll make money off of the ads + subscription services they offer in the meantime.
If they can pull it off for more sophisticated integrated solutions like phones, tablets and laptops, I'd have thought that a TV brand would be even easier.
Surely buying a commodity panel off of an existing OEM would negate a lot of the legal issues, and going DTC to the kinds of people who are specifically looking for a dumb TV is quite a decent niche to market to?
They should feel social pressure to backpedal this stupid decision by hurting their marketing for fear to be known as the brand that has ADS in their television sets.
That rarely works. For each consumer that has the time and understanding to not buy the brand there is a thousand that are not aware. The way to go is lobbying for stronger regulations and to limit where Ads and recollection of data can be done.
Day after day we have more and more connected devices. Samsung is the tip of the iceberg, even if there was consumer backslash for one company the problem will still be there.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/displays/4k-uhd...
If I'm not mistaken the LG ones were significantly more expensive than their consumer counterparts, but those Samsung ones don't seem all that much more expensive.
Best part is, the TVs are essentially subsidized by ACR and selling your data so you’re getting a deal by not paying the “data tax.”
The "home screen" of the TV (where it goes when you turn it on) was always the chromecast, which as I'm sure most people have seen, is rather nice; just endless pictures of art and landscapes, like a screensaver.
One day it updated without my consent, and that screen was replaced with Vizio's, I dont know, some piece of shit interface no human being on the planet wants. Ads for Crackle and other Vizio tvs mostly. Its so bad.
So, I'm never buying another Vizio TV.
The last update also broke hardware video decoding for a whole range of h264 videos as well as pushing some kind of weird 3rd party that seems to be something that basically monitor everything you do with your TV. It was advertised as a feature to access the TV guide.
My next TV will not be a so-called "smart" TV and not certainly not a Sony.
You can install it without an account, plug in an antenna and go to town. You can even connect it to wifi then use Youtube or Netflix. Haven't seen any funky ads.
My only peeve is that the controller doesn't have a full number pad which makes it a little derpy for the older generation.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
[1] https://i.rtings.com/images/reviews/tv/tcl/s405/s405-ads-lar...
I retract my statement.
Edit: I purchased a 2019 TCL 50S425 and also don't see any ads...
Solvable by tape, but doing that blocks the IR sensor.
Nice thing about OpenWRT is being able to block homescreen ads when the TV is online with the adblock package since DNS filtering will do the trick fortunately.
This is not a rationalization for garbage design, but at least it isn't as much of a black box as people might think.
That's the difference then. I have a Bravia and use the Android TV functionality. It started showing ads on the home screen earlier this year and I can't figure out a way to disable them and still be able to use the apps I actually want to use. If the ads had been there on day one, I would have been tempted to return the TV.
True, not like this. But they've done worse things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit
After all, most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
Often, despite the ~10% user/activity loss, profit is increased by increasing ad load. And this is in tech contexts like web browser/smartphone/music-streaming where switches and upgrades are pretty easy and often done anyway. The loss from equivalent ad burdens on TVs is probably much less. (People replace their smartphones more often than their TVs!) The ad revenue also lets them discount the upfront price of TVs (I think I saw an article on HN that the discount due to advertising is at least $50/set?). And then there's the time-value of money: $1 up front in exchange for $1.10 of lost sales 10 years from now when they (maybe) buy an alternative brand is a pretty sweet deal for the seller.
Some consumers may hate ads like poison. But most of them are just fine with it, and prefer the micropayments to the macropayments, as it were.
It seems like the smart thing would be to have ads by default but allow the customer to turn them off. Most consumers would leave them on and be fine with it (like you said) and the haters would be happy too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2998251/sony-bmg-rootki...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_roo...
For users it doesn't really matter why an annoying feature hasn't been implemented, they don't have a say in that anyway. Most likely Sony is just lagging behind a few months or years in that regard. Enjoy while it lasts ;)
Sony just pushed an update to the homescreen of android TVs that pushes ads for shows and services on the very top of the screen.
I knew something was fucky when smart TVs started to be sold for less than the dumb ones - all things being even, smart TVs had to cost more to produce, so something had to be subsidizing the prices.
Google is purely Ad company and is worth a trillion. Here is your context and reasoning, combined.
Ads are not shown, when the TV is asked to "reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it". And the TV is sold on its ability to show all sorts of things that are not just the signal passed to it. Like Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the menus related to those services.
The Ads are shown when the TV is asked to show its menu of applications and features.
Still not great, but not at all what you are implying.
I went with the opposite approach- I paid the small bucks to buy an Avera display, and connect it to my own media box. Also, a decent soundbar, because the built-in speakers are terrible. Now I have better sound than any built-in speakers at any price, a decent display, and the best "smart" features (with no ads), all for a price much lower than a "Smart" TV.
Do we have any evidence Samsung TV sales have taken a hit from these measures?
A sad world we live in when you have to fight the devices you paid for.
The sheer amount of content available these days is probably what you are noticing regarding dramas / films; I can remember very few decent Hollywood films recently as utter garbage seems to make billions of dollars, so the studios believe it's what people want.
It isn't a new issue though - "Penny Dreadfuls" were the old poor-quality entertainment of yesteryear where I suspect people were saying the same things that we are saying now. The only difference now is the availability of immense volumes of instantly accessible tripe.
As for political messaging, I am entirely apolitical but do see a lot of ideologies being promoted/pushed in programmes, with an opposing stance on any "modern" issue descending rapidly into a shouting match instead of a reasonable, logical debate; it then turns into a witch hunt regarding the opposing party's behaviour instead of a balanced discussion of the first issue raised. Exercise your free will and turn the rubbish off like I do!
There's absolutely no after thought to this decision - If I paid 1000s of dollars for an "idiot box" that's supposed to reproduce faithfully the signal that I pass it, showing ads is unacceptable, no matter what the context or reasoning is.
This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet, and I don't use smart features on the TV anyway, so I don't plan on updating the software either. Hopefully they face backlash over this stupidity and this doesn't go on to become a norm.
That would be really, really terrible.