Edit: ok your comments just made me buy a cheap android TV box
That’s a terrible idea; those things all run hacked firmware from China with preinstalled malware. (There’s a fairly recent Linus Tech Tips video about it if you want more info.)
Instead, you need to be buying hardware from a reputable brand and then (ideally) installing a Free Software OS on it yourself, e.g. a Raspberry Pi running LibreELEC.
Unfortunately there’s so many OEM variants of these things that it borderlines on impossible to tell for certain which ones are and which ones aren’t, short of taking the firmware apart. Given the proximity in the naming convention, I suspect it might be.
Much as I dislike Google, the Chromecast with Google TV (4K) variant is probably the closest in price and is reputable.
I got a very cheap 4k Spectre tv from Walmart. I specifically wanted a “dumb” tv because I have an Xbox and I don’t need overly complicated, slow, janky interface. It has this funny issue when I put my router behind it where the volume goes up and down by itself. I moved the router and the issue is gone.
I have been surprised by it. It was so cheap I thought it couldn’t possibly be decent, but I barely watch tv so it was whatever.
4k video is absolutely beautiful on there. I half expected or to be lying on the box.
I don’t see the point in smart tvs (at least for me).
I don’t see the point in smart tvs (at least for me).
Right?! Paying more for a smart TV when you can just get a PS4 or something for cheap and use it for any app you could possibly want on your smart TV is just so much cheaper.
My girlfriend and I have been living together for 3+ years and her father keeps recommending that we set up our TV to watch Netflix on it directly for convenience. Dude, our PS5 is basically running all day anyway. Why would I want to go through the hassle of connecting my TV to our WiFi and then mess around with a shitty remote to search for stuff I want to watch on YouTube or Netflix? Not worth it for me at all. Not everything needs to be a smart device.
If you keep on closing the YouTube app, and clicking on the URL, eventually after 2 or 3 tries the YouTube app won’t have an ad it will go straight to the video. Saves a lot of time especially if there’s 2 ads.
But I don’t mind giving money to Google for using Google Music/YouTube Music. The no ads on YouTube is just a bonus. I’m paying for the convivence of playing any song I want on any device anywhere I am. And I assume a portion of that fee goes to the artists, although I admittedly don’t know how that works.
yeah, when youtubers started complaining that adblock is “theft”, this was a logical continuation. like, the purpose of an ad is to inform me about something i probably wish not to be informed about, and for that you get paid. but what if i don’t watch the ad? the system will still think i watched it, you will still get paid, but the advertiser will not have received the product they paid for. is not looking at an ad “theft” too? are we going to have devices measure attention?
this isn’t a new concept, by the way. spotify had an experiment a while back about pausing ads if you mute them (might actually just be how it works now, idk, i decided not to use spotify back when they did this, and when they banned adblock users). there’s also the “verification can” story, which is yes, satire, but it shows that the technology exists. telly’s “free” tv (that has a second screen for ads, and afaik can’t be turned off, just turned into ad-only mode) also has presence detection in the room, and could trivially implement attention detection as well. qualcomm also proposed always-on cameras for phones a few years back, specifically for eye tracking, “for security”, which certainly won’t be used for punishing banner blindness. not on google’s os! they definitely don’t run the largest online ad network after all.
and if you’re against this, but believe adblock is a problem because people aren’t paid for ads if they can’t display the ads, you don’t really care about theft. specifically, you don’t really care if the product advertisers pay for is stolen from them, as long as they’re forced to pay for a worthless return. and sure, fuck the advertising industry, i’m right there with you – but that’s precisely why i do use adblock. there is no alignment here that’s consistent with insisting on propping up that industry but harming its consumer.
but at the end of the day, what is the product advertisers pay for? is it that the ads is technically delivered to you, even if you cast it aside? if they deliver paper-based junk mail, am i immoral to have a robot throw it out, rather than do it manually? or is the product that i read their junk mail? is there a moral imperative to engage in a fair discussion with them, to honestly consider their point? because, at the end of the day, they pay for all this, so where is the line?
my line, in particular, is that they can try on an individual scale, but i’m keeping the robot around to yeet their junk mail, and on a societal scale i would like to see the advertising industry disbanded for the harm it causes in market manipulation, surveillance, and adverse psychological effects. but i also don’t consider adblock “theft” so it’s pretty clear we’re not talking about my set of principles. i really would like to see what a person who considers adblock theft actually thinks about all these topics, beyond a simplistic view about youtube creators. if you expand your ideology to other situations, where does it take you?
yeah, in my experience it tends to be websites that care about ad blockers. youtube is the latest mainstream example but i’ve ran into some adblock detectors on random backwater sites (although nowadays the firefox + ublock origin combo seems to cut through them with ease). i don’t think advertisers really give a crap, for the exact reason you mentioned, but websites do insist on wasting the advertisers’ money on people who block ads, because that means they get paid. the real theft is happening between those two parties.
i’m not trying to absolve the advertisers of blame either though. i think the most mad i’ve ever gotten at them was when i heard how they oppose pay-to-not-get-ads schemes like youtube premium, because it means the most “valuable” users won’t see their ads. their endgame is cable, where you pay out your ass for a service and still get ads shoved into your face (where they take up 25% of the time). on top of that, advertisers are a massive force behind the corporate morality sanitization of the internet in the name of “advertiser-friendliness”, sometimes in blatantly manipulative ways. for example, don’t you dare have a sex-positive attitude because 1) they want to advertise lots of PG-13 shit and don’t want it showing up next to higher rated content, and 2) when they advertise more mature stuff they don’t want the tits in your content to detract from the tits in their ads.
but yeah, to get back on topic, the anti-adblock technologies are pushed by people who get paid for ads, not by people who pay for ads.
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