[FiniteLooper]

I've still got a 55" Sony HDTV from around 2008. Zero network or smart features at all. Just a way to display images from another box. It's been so good and still is. I kind of of want to upgrade to something larger and in 4K, but every time I see an article like this I remember what is actually available in the market I feel like I'd rather just save my money and keep what I have that works how I like it

[andrewla]

I have a 56" Panasonic plasma TV of the same vintage. It's great -- dumb as hell and displays images and turns on right away (not as fast as an old CRT, but compared to a modern TV fuggetaboutit). Its internal input switching is janky so I bought an external HDMI switch and I couldn't be happier with the setup.

It's mounted on a wall and weighs a ton. Every time I think of upgrading I see the mess of software that they shove on a TV and it's horrifying. I would love to see a dumb TV but I think the best I can do is to have a smart TV that I don't connect to the network, lock on to HDMI1 and never touch the TV remote ever again.

[nprateem]

Or just use pihole to block all ads

[munk-a]

Youtube is now embedding ads midstream - I think it's just a matter of time before other providers adopt similar approaches. When adblockers were tools exclusive to nerds it didn't make sense to build countermeasures - as advertising has grown more pervasive and obnoxious adblockers have gone mainstream and there is now an arms race that adblockers are currently on the losing side of.

[bookaway]

With adblockers disabled, I was seeing ads midstream ages ago. Ads that I don't see with an adblocker. Anecdotally, my subjective experience when adblockers are disabled seems to get exponentially worse whereas my adblocker experience seems to degrade at a much slower rate (e.g. manually skipping author recited ads on a podcast). Currently the TV is the weakest link, and people should be publishing layman's guides to pihole, or as others elsewhere have mentioned, refer them to a adblocking DNS redirect from an adblocker company. Midstream ads are especially obnoxious with music streams and I hope the majority's intolerance tips them over the edge.

[dbspin]

Em... Adblockers still work perfectly? It's an annoyance to keep uBlock Origin updated, but it still blocks all ads on youtube. So it seems they're keeping up just fine.