I think they may go the easier way first: with online only OOBE where you cannot access all tv features until you acknowledge and accept the "legal" stuff first.

You know, bit like Microsoft forces you to create online account after installation is done

There's always going to be enough of a "dumb TV" market among the elderly / linear-only / no internet crowd to make that an extremely bad idea.

Sure, some (high-end) TVs might do this, but definitely not all of them.

Dumb tvs exist today; they just sell for a premium to make up for the lost adtech sales revenue.

I suspect this will continue. Ads and no privacy for poor people. The wealthy & well educated will have tvs that don’t spy on them.

This idea has been around since at least a decade ago. The truth is, only a fraction of customers care about ads or privacy, and only a fraction of technical people in that group are capable of doing network filtering (VLAN, MITM, DNS blocklist, whatever). The absolute numbers are so small, as long as manufacturers can extract enough value from the remaining 99% of customers, they just don't care.

I have had a lot of friends amazed by the fact that when they connect to my home Wi-Fi they stop seeing ads. Zero of them interested in implementing something similar in their home.

the other thing is that it would not be as effective as presumed because 5G cell service in residential areas in the US is spottier than people realize. A lot of us are relying on WiFi calling.

How do you do it particularly? Pi-Hole or something else like NextDNS with adblock? (or Mullvad adblock DNS)

Or connects to the Samsung TV of your neighbor, who definitely granted all access to the internet.

Soldering your TV in 2026 sounds like real fun ...

I've been reading about that risk since smart TVs came out. It's not worth the cost for the manufacturer.