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How to get my senior citz. parents TV without cable? 255$ month cable bill!
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BrokenYugo:
Just buy the cheaper smart TV and block it's MAC in your router?

 Or have we already reached full cyberpunk dystopia where will it get pissy and not act as a monitor without a connection?
james_s:
So far anyway, every one that I've seen you can just not connect it to your wifi. Seems like I read somewhere that a majority of smart TVs never gets connected.
bson:
I don't think my Cable bill was ever much over $100, but I didn't have any premium sports packages, but did have Showtime and HBO.  I had a DVR in the living room and a dumb unit in the bedroom.  I switched to Sling on a Roku maybe 6-7 years ago, then to Youtube TV on the Roku, and currently YTV with Apple TV 4K.  The ATV4K is mainly for other apps and services though that weren't available on Roku (such as Zwift).  I rotate between Netflix, HBO Max (though I get that free with my AT&T mobile service), Disney+, and CBS All Access.  Apple TV+ (their VOD service; it doesn't have live TV at all) has nothing I'm interested in, so I don't watch it though I currently have it for free for a year with the ATV4K.  (I also get HBO Max free with my AT&T phone service, and one more year of Apple TV+ came with my iPhone.)
cdev:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 08, 2021, 04:57:22 am ---So far anyway, every one that I've seen you can just not connect it to your wifi. Seems like I read somewhere that a majority of smart TVs never gets connected.

--- End quote ---

Thats what people think..

They may look for a local big cable company AP (not yours) and connect anyway, via that. As long as the TV is plugged in/has power.

And soon with 5G that will be everywhere and it provides enough power to power a small micro and transceiver. This allows devices to phone home without any network or user intervention at all. Unless you gave your entire home an aluminum foil hat so to speak. :)
cdev:
Smart TV is dumb, IMHO.


I wouldn't ever buy one. They should pay you.

They may have to register themselves via DHCP or similar with their mother ship, so to speak. Maybe establish a VPN tunnel to upload their proprietary data.

That is a money stream for the company that sells it. Probably lowers the price of the hardware somewhat.

ATSC version 2 I think is two way. Wonder what happens if you dont connect it to the net? Does it use radio?


--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 03, 2021, 01:37:14 am ---
--- Quote from: rsjsouza on April 02, 2021, 10:13:12 pm ---We did come full circle. Any solid state analog TV at power on shows an image faster than the latest models of a digital one. Shameful, really.

--- End quote ---
Some (not so) "smart" ones, perhaps. Last year, my dad got a 27" Acer for working from home and that takes about a second to show the image. It was a modern version of what used to be called "HD ready" displays, no capability to play stuff on its own, just a Displayport input and a HDMI input.

Not sure why so many smart TVs take forever to boot, they're pretty much very large tablets and a few milliwatts to keep the RAM contents is no big deal.

--- End quote ---
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