Edit: I'm a big fan of the Cooler Master GP27Q and GP27U. They both have eye-bleedingly gorgeous HDR and won't break the bank. You can get the Q for about $550 and the U for under $900; the difference is that the Q is 1440p and the U is 4K.
The only criticism I have at all with them is that the firmware is kinda fucky (you will be spending your first few days with it constantly messing with settings, I guarantee) and doing computer stuff can be aggravating with FALD active; for example, I can scroll through a reddit post and watch the background color change between white and various shades of gray as I scroll, depending on the density of the text. But this is a complete non-issue if you're buying it as a TV replacement, and even if you are using it as a regular computer monitor, you get used to it real fast (and you can always turn off FALD when you're not watching something).
But a 27" screen does not really cut it in a large or even medium living room. Moving closer is not that easy if you also want to have a couch. Even if you cut down on your viewing amenities, watching something with more than two people isn't going to be fun.
"Smart" computer monitors are starting to arrive, and soon will probably be the only mainstream option. It is just too easy to tell investors "we are not a commodity display manufacturer; we are an ad platform with X% YoY growth, our customers have desirable demographics, and our impressions are available in unique business, academic, and gaming contexts".
I’m a liberal, I live in North America, my cheap flights have ads, my cheap TVs has ads, my cheap coffee has ads. My cheap inkjet printer is too expensive.
I want everything for free or cheap, I’m surprised it sucks, I have no choice. I have no money because I pay too much taxes and my cheap house is too expensive.
There’s a whole world of non shitty products out there that you could buy if you weren’t cheap. Most of them are less expensive than the products you DO buy.
My barista trained in Italy, and doesn’t have a liberal arts degree. I pay less for cappuccino than a drip coffee in Starbucks it doesn’t have any ads on the cup.
Google, Tizen, and WebOS are the major TV players, with Roku also somewhere in the mix.
All three of these companies do some level of surveillance, and yet they, or another proprietary device, are often required to watch streaming services.
You can argue that streaming services are unnecessary, but that means both spending a lot of time and money on physical media, or simply missing out, as many shows are now only showing on streaming, and not broadcast anymore.
b) most annoyingly, some android TV devices (e.g., nvidia shield, ccwgtv) use renegotiation instead of VRR for framerate matching. The FO48U supports VRR from 48 to 120Hz, which is more than enough to do framerate matching even with blackframe insertion for all desired framerates, but many android TV devices renegotiate instead. That means pressing play on Netflix takes 7 seconds until it starts. Quite annoying.
Still, it's preferable over TVs with shitty built-in OSes.
Apparently 55" monitors do exist, a quick search yields Dell and Samsung for $2~3K. I don't know about TVs, but similarly sized ones seem available for half or even quarter of that price.
I own a Bravia, it has all the usual bells and whistles but was made in Japan for the Japanese market. We've had it connected to the internet for the year since we bought it and haven't had any trouble with ads.
Every single inkjet printer is trash because they all adopted the same tactics.
All the TV makers went to selling your advertising data. What makes you think they won’t all do this?