This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
it definitely started that way, like with radio before it. early programs were directly paid for by advertisers and the adds were right in the middle of the show presented by the hosts! (kinda like how yt does it now sometimes but even more so)
its literally why we call the whole genre of soap operas that. they would all be sponsored by soap and cleaning product companies trying to reach stay at home moms as their target market for the ads.
ads were along for so much of the history of tv... its easy to forget because recently netflix made it seem like we could just directly pay for content as just entertainment (like movies always were).
but those days are gone and we are returning to the roots. i dont think a single streamer doesnt have an ad tier and we are starting to lose the ad free pay more options too (disney, amazon)
That it was ok in the past certainly doesn't mean it's ok now. And TV advertising wasn't as sinister as it is now with targeted ads that require a detailed profile of every viewer. Everyone just got the same ads.
If blocking ads won't be possible anymore then I'll just pirate everything. And jailbreaking TVs and other hardware.
ya agree, a targeted ad is a very different beast, its not so much the targeting thats the issue either. id much rather only see ads for stuff in interested in than stuff i really dont need. its HOW they come up with that targeting. scraping stealing tracking all the other bs that makes that targeted ad feel creepy and gross.
and if you think its not gonna get so much worse with ai able to generate 10x the ad variants... or maybe even personalized ad versions.(one day, probably too expensive now)
good thing its never been easier to hack everything, maybe we can also figure out how to hack the legal system enough to make shady stuff like recording you in your house a felony. i feel like we should start with making it so that terms in a eula cant bind you to take specific actions. inal but in the case of 2p consent states if you go to your friends house and he doesnt tell you that his tv's eula said that it'll be recording all the time then he's in trouble, but the company actually doing the recording.. scott free because they said in the eula it was the responsibility of the owner to tell everyone who comes near the tv it might be recording. ...why would you ever click that agreement that you were forced to click to use the thing that you already bought and setup, what is the actual recourse for not saying yes? go return the tv and pay the restock fee? idk that doesnt sound like a reasonable contract/agreement that should ever be enforcable. which would mean its actually the tv companies doing all the wiretapping in 2p states...
hmm.. i know im wrong in many ways but i can dream that the law could be actually reasonable.
Yes I love it when I see mistargeted ads because it means I've been able to stay outside of the dragnet a bit.
I have been watching a bit of prime video and getting ads for cars, baby diapers and gambling sites, all things I have zero interest in buying lol. I've not had a car in 10 years and I'm single and don't even buy lottery tickets. I keep sites isolated a lot in Firefox containers but Amazon of course has my purchase history there (there aren't many other ecommerce options left around here) so I'm surprised they don't have me figured out. But I'm glad.
I'm not really sure about the legal system but I'm in Europe, it's a lot more restrictive for that kind of stuff.
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
I read of this tactic a few years ago. Some mentioned adding a phony static IP/gateway/DNS to avoid it connecting to open wifi(should this tech permit it).
True, but they're MUCH more expensive. For example, the lowest-end 43" this company sells for a little over $2000; you can find ones on Amazon for a tenth the price. Yes, a lot of that is the industrial quality, but some of it is the spy/adware subsidization.
What? Almost everyone talks about phone addiction, it's an extremely mainstream view. And Meta just got record fines for the addictiveness of their product.
It's true - every current cockup in our custom production system comes from Apple-using developers.
All of our Linux stuff is rock solid and is what we actually use to communicate with our satellites. We will explicitly avoid Microsoft and Apple here.
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