> LG wasn't giving their TVs away.

No, but they're selling them at cost, and using monetization tactics to make up for that over the long term.

Pretty much every modern TV manufacturer does this. Don't kid yourself into thinking it's just one company.

I've got bad news for you, it's all of them.

Fortunately, it's not so bad, just run firmware updates after you get the new tv, and then disconnect it from the internet.

> If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away.

This is true, and you transition from customer to eyeballs once you take delivery of the product, but it is also tempered by the fact that they would like to sell you your next TV as well.

Google has the same incentive to consider users. If your eyeballs go away they have no recourse for tomorrow. This is no doubt why they give their services away. If they thought they could achieve similar market share while also charging you they certainly would. (And they do whenever they see the chance.)

Google certainly could charge a very small fee for existing gmail, youtube, etc, accounts and make a bunch of money.

In fact there is a pretty strong argument that they are leaving money on the table by not doing so.

Imagine you like your gmail and you have had it for the past decade. If Google charges only $1 per year across say a billion users that is a billion dollars.

Even if they lose some users at the margin it may makes sense...

According to wikipedia gmail had 1.5 billion active users in 2019.

As internet services mature and stop growing exponentially it makes sense to charge for them.

Yes it is true that some might switch but what makes more sense from the perspective of most users?

While I agree with your premise, once you charge someone for something, even if it is $1/year, then they start expecting something for that money above and beyond what you provided earlier. In other words, now you've got to budget for real customer support and that will undoubtedly cost you more than the $1/year you're receiving as payment from that customer.

$1 a year would probably barely cover the administrative and payment processing costs. $2 a year would do the trick though. :)

Charge for the service and show you ads and sell your data like cable. It’s a win, win, win!

I long for a post advertising world. What cataclysmic event or human evolutionary change could cause that, I wonder.

Is there any sci-fi that has a world without advertising or is that so far-fetched it’s unimaginable to even futurists?

Funny enough advertising was relatively small part of the economy until the last several decades. Now it is an "industry" in the multi-trillion dollar range.

Even funnier, if Google search worked effectively for product discovery the vast majority of advertising would not be necessary.

Good point. Maybe the death of advertising comes when some entity knows us so perfectly well it automagically provides the exact thing we want/need exactly when we want/need it.

Google used to for me at least from around 2010-2015 +/- a few years. It was incredible. Now it is usually very hard to find anything I want via search. I suppose a certain amount of defect in search results is optimal for the ad business.

Why not a projector connected to NAS or RPi as media center that is free of ad craps?

The amount of nonsense on my LG C1 is nonsense given what I paid for it. Seriously considering getting an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield to run all my stuff on. Their UI is so bloated with crap.

Have you looked into displays built around the raspberry pi compute module? I don't have experience with them but I've heard them mentioned (here iirc but it's been some time). I don't know much about them so I'm sure the implementation varies between manufacturers. An example from Sharp: https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/system-on-a-chip

I got a Sony Bravia, but made sure never to enter the wifi password into the TV directly, but rather hook up an Apple TV and only use that.

This way I still have a "dumb TV" (apparently impossible to get now).

Second option would have been to get a projector.

I have a Sony Bravia, configured it on WiFi, and created a new gmail account to use with the built-in Android TV system.

It seems fine: no ads, nothing spamming, and it has an option to not share any data, which presumably (!) it pays attention to.

I started with the no wifi plan for my Sony. They would put popups on screen warning me that I wasn't connected to the internet, even when using a streaming device or blu-ray just often enough that they got me to connect it to the internet. I don't use their apps and turned off the data sharing. I haven't noticed an uptick in personalized ads anywhere. If anything, my Facebook ads are worse than they were before. Just a bunch of crap I'm not actually interested in.

Unfortunately, the Nvidia Shield hasn't been the community darling for some time. Ever since there was an OS update that started putting ads on the homescreen.

I stopped using the Shield when I realized that my LG C9 runs the streaming applications much better than the Shield. The Shield has always been slow for me and Hulu on it never worked right. Every time it went to the next episode of a TV show, the screen would be black while the audio played. I don't think it was consistent how long it stayed like that for but it could be up to a few minutes.

I'll just let LG collect my viewing habits if that's what it takes for a good experience. But I did decline all of the agreements that have anything to do with data collection, so hopefully they're not being overly intrusive anyway.

I just hate that I can only download a few apps unless I make an LG account. I don't want an account to log into my tv so I can access my accounts I log in to. That's some Xzibit nonsense.

These days I get better performance out of my $25 Fire stick than the Shield. The ads are a bit worse, especially since I don't even have Prime anymore but I'll stick with it until it gets to be too much or too slow and then probably buy an AppleTV.

Gross. Good to know!