Television sets

Posted Feb 18, 2019 18:11 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Television sets by excors
Parent article: Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

In the context of a smart TV, I don't think telling customers "you can replace the firmware, as long as you don't want to watch Netflix or any subscription channels" is much good.

I think a lot of people would be OK with that. My personal experience is that the "smart" TV is pretty useless, and I'm much more likely to use features through an add-on device than through the TV. Popular ways of getting smart features not through the TV include dedicated devices like Roku or Chromecast, video game consoles, home media PCs, and smart DVRs. In my experience, all of those things have better UIs than smart TVs, and many people are going to get them for the convenience and added features without even considering the issue of TVs spying on them.

Television sets

Posted Feb 18, 2019 18:19 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

Why replace TV's firmware then? It's a dumb display.

Television sets

Posted Feb 21, 2019 22:47 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Because the firmware's broken, maybe?

Now binned because it broke, but I had a Logik / JVC TV that used to crash when you tried to record to USB. It did it somewhat at random but that's obviously very annoying.

My car stereo now seems to spend an inordinate amount of time "scanning USB" which impacts quite seriously on its usability - I think that's a bug ...

And trying to get this sort of stuff fixed is a nightmare, as it's almost impossible to contact the manufacturer, and the retailer's attitude is "well almost everything works". The fact that the bit that doesn't is very important to you, isn't important to them.

Cheers,
Wol

Television sets

Posted Feb 18, 2019 18:49 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> My personal experience is that the "smart" TV is pretty useless, and I'm much more likely to use features through an add-on device than through the TV.

The same issues apply to the add-on device. I don't think telling customers of a Roku streaming stick "you can freely replace the firmware, as long as you don't want to stream anything from Netflix" would be useful. There's nothing particularly special about the hardware; if you just wanted a small programmable box with HDMI output, you could run your code on a Raspberry Pi instead. The interesting part is the device's original fully-functioning firmware; that's the thing you'd want to modify out of curiosity or for security.

> without even considering the issue of TVs spying on them

If you're concerned about that, the streaming sticks could spy on you just as easily as your TV could - there's often a microphone in the remote control (for voice search).