This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I’m not subjected to ads.
It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there’s no way to opt out of those ads.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.
I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn’t have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don’t have basic features like multiple inputs.
If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.
And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can’t get around that either, because either they’re designed to stop working if they don’t a recent update, or there’s a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that’s even possible) won’t help you.
I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I recently bought a 55” Hisense and I just plug my old-school Roku USB stick into it. The UI is super basic and ad-free. It’s not 4k or anything, but for streaming shows and playing PS5 it works like a charm.
Here’s what RTINGS says about one of the Hisense TVs:
And someone on another site has a video showing an ad playing as soon as their Hisense TV is turned on. The person posting says it doesn’t happen every time. And, maybe it’s disabled if you have it set to turn on using “input 2” or whatever your USB stick is connected to. But, an unskippable ad on start-up means I’m not going to risk buying a Hisense TV.