For me personally, I have basic privacy concerns with how smart tv companies are selling my viewing habits without any transparency. This issue has nothing to do with the "quality" of the tv and its features, and much more to do with the policies of the companies behind the products.
Don't plug an ethernet cable into it, don't give it your wifi network passcode.
There's (justifiably) privacy and other concerns on HN, but no one else is aware of those concerns or cares too much. The market has spoken.
Markets only speak when meaningful competition exists. Are you really suggesting that people actively prefer to buy TVs that, for example, suddenly start showing them ads months or years after purchase?
Take two competitors selling exact same stuff for the same price. If one adds ads to their product, they can lower the price. If they can ad data collection, the price drops further.
You just can't ethically compete on such market.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true but the buyer making a decision needs to understand the differences between products. IMHO one of the problems right now is that manufacturers using these user-hostile practices don't have to prominently disclose them. Many people probably buy these products completely unaware of aspects they might not like if they knew about them.
If packaging and promotions had to carry prominent warnings about user-hostile practices, that would level the playing field a bit. Better would be if the products themselves had to indicate whenever any sort of monitoring or phone-home system was operating, because that way everyone else using or near them also gets a warning that they might be spied on.
It means the market spoke from ignorance, there isn't much value in that speech, the market was deceived.
As an aside, there is no need for us to talk like heads of the marketing department in casual conversation.
The former 2 are already collecting your viewing habits, and the latter is uncollectable since it's just streaming from your own server.
Except smart TVs take screenshots of what you are watching and send it back for content analysis and correlation. So even if all you're doing is using it as a dumb monitor they are still collecting data about you.
Edit: Before someone calls me a tinfoil hat, it's called automatic content recognition, look it up.
https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
It’s true, I made up my mind in 1984.
Doubleplusgood.
Smart TVs is one of those recurring HN topics where it’s clear that people made up their minds years ago, likely from a single bad experience. Now they can’t imagine that any progress has been made since then. There’s not much reason to buy a new TV these days if your old one still works (with an external TV box)
You can still find terrible smart TVs out there, of course, but the newer models from top tier vendors like LG are actually quite good.
I think it’s going to take many years before the angry HN smart TV comments catch up to modern reality.