I got screwed by Sony for a smart TV that was abandoned within a year. Then none of the streaming sticks worked on it due to HDCP compability issues.

In the end I bought a broken Samsung 32" 1080p mostly dumb TV on ebay for £0.99, fixed it (power supply capacitor problem) and steal all my content and ship it on USB sticks to the TV which will quite happily play h264 / mp3 encoded stuff.

Fuck the whole industry.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I just also know Roku has been around forever, so I trust that if a new service is added, it will be there. I don't know that I can say the same about other manufacturers (not that they _don't_, I just don't have the same level of trust there).

Eventually it should be there. For example, it took a long time for HBOMax to make it to Roku because they couldn't agree on how much of a cut of the subscription fees Roku should get.

This is called ACR and you can disable it in settings. The FTC sued Vizio when they added it to their TVs without a way to turn it off.

You can block them talking back to the mothership using Pi-Hole or PFBlockerNG.

This can be disabled in the setup/settings