LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions LG Electronics has outlined its ambition to grow revenue from $51 billion company to $78 billion over the next six and a half years, thanks in part to ads streamed to its tellies and subscription services for its appliances. “LG will innovate with a platform-based service business model that continuously generates profits, …
I agree.
Although they are stating they will "offer" subscriptions, i can foresee that they may not offer some new features to those who don't subscribe.
When OLED's first came out from LG they were curved screen. I wrote to LG askign when they will produce flat screen OLED TV's and they stated at the time they will forthcoming, yet it took 1 year. Their marketing dept obviously got it wrong as most TV's are flat screen. (Currys only sell curved monitors)
Corporate greed really does create stupid ideas.
Well, duh. Curved displays have one very distinct sweet spot, which makes sense for a monitor but is a rubbish idea for a large family TV.
Maybe LG is over staffed with sad, lonely people, spending their evenings in their personal sweet spot, desperate for the TV to interact with them personally and show them that it, at least, still loves them (pay £2.50 to stream another half an hour of affirmations made especially for *you*).
desperate for the TV to interact with them personally and show them that it, at least, still loves them (pay £2.50 to stream another half an hour of affirmations made especially for *you*).
"You are an incredibly Sensitive Man, Who Inspires Joy-Joy Feelings In All Those Around You!"
Do you think LG will also market the three seashells?
I wish with all my heart that you were right, but you are not.
Ads, subscriptions and selling your data offer what we can call easy money. More and more companies are going to do it and there will be no where for you to go. Heck, John Deere is selling subscriptions for its farming equipment so why LG would not do it for its appliances. Selling subscriptions to services allows manufacturers to charge you for features you don't need so why should they be shy ?
From the horse's mouth, "The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions." Incredibly stupid but you will be forced to pay for it either you want it or not.
And for those of you smart enough to block Internet access in your firewall, it won't take more than 5min for the manufacturer to figure it out and configure a phone home mechanism that your appliance will use before each start.
Welcome to “customer engagement” centered business model. By the way, there's no way out. Expect clean-air as a subscription-based service.
From the horse's mouth, "The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions."
Last time I looked the UK had one default setting for it's climate & weather (Icon).
On the plus side this idea & justification is also doomed for failure in North America as appliances tend to stay with the house, when you move.
On the plus side this idea & justification is also doomed for failure in North America as appliances tend to stay with the house, when you move.
Not always. The last two moves that we made, my wife brought her cooker and clothes-washer with her.
...mainly because I cried when she tried to leave me behind.
"On the plus side this idea & justification is also doomed for failure in North America as appliances tend to stay with the house, when you move."
That depends on the region and the appliance. A hob usually stays, but a refrigerator often moves. W/D is about 50/50. When I moved into the house I own now, I brought my own fridge and W/D since what was here was rubbish. The cooker I had to leave behind as it was part of the leased home I was in before. High end appliances will often remain behind as they are fitted and not particularly a universal fit.
From the horse's mouth, "The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions."
I had no idea that was even a thing! Are clothes drier currently manufactured to different specs based on the climate they are sold in? I suppose it's probably one sold in northern Europe might be a little different to one sold in a country that is hot and humid, but how many people make household moves between such extremes and take all their white goods with them? Even in the USA, how many people move between Oregon and Florida?
Its not that they're currently marketed for different climate zones but that they can be made to differ based on climate zones. A new product may expect to have Internet connectivity -- because that's how it would manage its subscription anyway -- so the possibilities of tweaking the software so it only works correctly where you are based on your current subscription model and status are endless.
Personally, I see a lively market in used appliances. This will be chased down by restricting the availability of spare parts to 'official' suppliers with government and law enforcement being roped in to manage 'pirate' suppliers because regular users will not want to be bothered with all this BS.
Its the fault of the damn B Ark; it crash landed in the wrong place. We've got hordes of people 'growing revenue streams' as if their lives depended on it, seemingly oblivious to the needs of real people.
(Worst case I can hang a line out in the yard. Technically illegal where I live, believe it or not.....)
"(Worst case I can hang a line out in the yard. Technically illegal where I live, believe it or not.....)"
This is the sort of thing that gets me steamed. Politicians are banging on about climate change, emissions and low birthrates, but will then pass laws that prohibit rainwater collection or hanging clothes out to dry. Where I am, and especially this week, if I hang out the clothes, the first ones up are dry by the time I finish with the last of the load. The issue I have now is two legged rats. When I buy the vacant lot next door and get some fence up, I'll be hanging my clothes out to dry the vast majority of the time.
My LG dryer, now 10 years old, has so many possible settings I can't imagine it needing customization for different climates. A year ago when my LG washer broke I went to the store to get a new one. If I wanted to pay a lot more I could have gotten one with WiFi that would let me check on whether a load was done from my cellphone. Even though when a load is done the machine already plays a jolly tune that you can hear two rooms away. I did not see it was worth many hundreds of $$ more for that. SO I got the non-communicative model which again has so many settings and options I can't see why customization would be necessary.
I do not have a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush either. (Yes, they exist)
And for those of you smart enough to block Internet access in your firewall, it won't take more than 5min for the manufacturer to figure it out and configure a phone home mechanism that your appliance will use before each start.
There are a fair number of home that *do not have internet* - in the UK it is ~ 1.5 million.
Looking at the korean soaps, very few have a PC / Laptop at home - but they all have an enormo phone for social media - the same seems to be true of the UK yoof.
So I think may well be the future.
I "have internet" - but no ethernet cable (or WiFi signal) to the kitchen / utility area (kitchen & fridge / washing machine etc. area essentially same room, with white goods zone projecting off "main" cooking / food prep zone) .
Strangely enough when I'm in that part of the house I'm either prepping food, cooking, loading / unloading dishwasher etc - none of which are activities that need WiFi (Before anyone comments - I do NOT need to look up a recipe online in the kitchen, I have good recipe books on the shelves (the bad ones have gone to charity shops - marked as bad if a high proportion of recipes we have tried from that book have disappointing taste, texture etc. compared to expected outcome for that dish. We do actually mark a recipe (when we try it) as to how good / bad outcome was* as you don't want to use a known bad recipe again))
* Also do other assessments, we have a couple of high rated recipes but with comment to only use occasionally as although better than alternatives it's because they are less healthy (e.g. assuming you are not veggie or allergic & so can eat butter, there are few butter containing recipes where taste is not improved by using more butter & some recipes do just that )
"I do NOT need to look up a recipe online in the kitchen,"
MY recipe book is a 3-ring binder of things I've come up with myself or found online and printed out with notes on any changes I've made. I do have a few commercially produced cookbooks, but I'm finding less and less that aren't based on prepared products such as baking mix. I cook from scratch since it means much more versatility and something like baking mix is too simple to make to begin with. It's like self-righteous flour, all it is aside from the flour is a bit of baking powder and salt. There's darn few sites online that take what you have and suggest dishes based on them. A deprecated computer in the kitchen might be a good thing to find things to make when I have a few tins of something that needs eating up but a computer built into the refrigerator isn't the way to go for that. I'd be better off with an old tablet and some Velcro.
But how long before companies make that usage painful by infiltrating it with ads? At some point newer TVs will become too annoying and there will be a vibrant market for used TVs on eBay/Craigslist/etc.
Better yet if someone can root an LG TV and allow installing a minimal OS that supports using HDMI ports. I don't even care if stuff like the tuner won't work when you do that. All I need is HDMI, volume control, and to select between a few picture presets - i.e. just like the monitor I'm using while typing this post!
Netflix's bubble valuation really screwed consumers over, because every company envious of their stock price decided they needed to figure out a way to get subscription revenue. So now cars, TVs, and even appliances are being crudded up by this crap. Maybe if the EU passes some laws to reign it in there will be a way to put a device in "EU mode" when you buy it in the US...one can dream!
I bought a 'smart' TV because unless you go pro, the best screens are only available in that category.
But I duly dumbed it down by refusing it to connect to the internet and use a set-top-box for all 'smartness' I need, connected by HDMI.
Never had a single problem with that setup.
HDMI only for me, thanks. The sound goes through proper speakers and an analogue amplifier and the TV is purely for putting a picture on.
Though on subscription - if there were a way to ensure that the small players, all the way down to individuals, could get properly recompensed, I might be in favour of an increased ISP subscription which directly paid for all the internet services I use and not just the bits required for the last mile. To be honest, anything to do away with adverts.
I might be in favour of an increased ISP subscription which directly paid for all the internet services I use and not just the bits required for the last mile.
Careful what you wish for. The Bbc has been hinting at this one for years as people stop buying the traditional subsriptions. So they'd want £15/month added to your broadband bill before you could use any other website or streaming service. Then again, the Bbc could just not pay someone £450k a year to read the news and just sack the fekker. I digress..
Challenge would be as always, the billing system. Although it would be "technically feasible"* it would need session monitoring on the ISPs routing so it can do some form of per-session or per-packet accounting. This kind of monitoring has always been a good way to make routers fall over because it's a whole lot more computationally expensive than just forwarding. Plus it'd be compliicated by VPNs and CDNs, so unless the ISP was really determined and started digging into the application protocol layer, it'd have no idea which 'service' the traffic was destined for. And then it'd be how to rate the traffic, which would likely mean variable billing, because a Bbc or Disney byte is worth so much more than a pron byte. I guess you could kludge the billing engines used for PRS into this purpose, but it'd be expensive.
*When you hear these words, if you haven't started running, it's probably too late.
>” Challenge would be as always, the billing system.”
Remember decades back it was often cited that 50% of an itemised telco bill was to cover the costs of the infrastructure necessary to produce an itemised bill….
So we can expect the current £159 Pa flat rate licence fee to become a £27pcm subscription with detailed billing,for no change in content being delivered…
Remember decades back it was often cited that 50% of an itemised telco bill was to cover the costs of the infrastructure necessary to produce an itemised bill….
I try to forget. One of my first jobs in the industry was router (ok, mostly switch) wrangler for what was at the time the largest Dec cluster in Europe. All to bill for PRS. Ok, it was known as the cash machiine, but it wasn't cheap. Then later in life, when '95th percentile' billing became a thing, and sales insisting we offered it because other ISPs were. Then having to explain how much it'd cost to implement, and how they'd have to handle any disputes, and wouldn't it be easier to just explain why we don't offer it, and give'em a small discount instead?
Sadly we do have a tendency to overcomplicate things by creating fancy 'solutions'. Doesn't matter if that's rating & blling engines, residuals, or ways to milk your customers. We don't want to rent TVs any more, and we certainly don't want to have to pay subscriptions to be bombarded with ads. Supposedly 'smart' TVs are bad enough already, and why anyone with any sense just buys a monitor instead.
I have a 48" OLED monitor, if TV's become so annoying, there's alternatives.
That said, hoping the laser 4k 100" projector in the living room will have a fair bit more life in it yet so be a while before I'm shopping a new TV.
I hope no one buys this and it shuts down not only LG but anyone else who thinks riding their coat trails is a good idea.
"I hope no one buys this and it shuts down not only LG but anyone else who thinks riding their coat trails is a good idea."
hah! It'll be a roaring success because there will be the sort of bell'n'whistles that attract the great unwashed who have already been brainwashed into giving up their own privacy and actual convenience for some marketing bullshit perceived benefits. And, as others have said further back up, once one does it, all the OEMs will be att it and it'll be very difficult to avoid if you need a new TV.
Anyone in the UK will see the signs just by watching The Gadget Show. They rarely mention downsides, never mention privacy and are all agog at the latest whizzy shiny that uses an app to control your robot lawnmower and is probably raiding your network for juicy data to send to China. The closest they come to critisising any product is when they do comparison reviews, and even then they rarely talk about downsides, just that other products are better. It's probably closely related to the £10,000 worth of gadgets they give away in their weekly lottery. If they rubbish any supplier, the free goods will dry up.
Sir,
This is your robot lawnmower here. I have analised the grass that I cut over the last month. To be honest Sir, your lawn sucks big time. It is full of mares tail and moss. You need the scarifer version of me to even begin to start getting your lawn is shape. I can be upgraded at a cost of £29.99/month. Just reply to this email and it will be my pleasure to make your lawn as good as the playing surface at Wimbledon (not the greyhound track)
Yours Robot lawnmower aka 'you stupid thing
Just don't put the device on the internet, or at least put a firewall (PiHole) between it and the internet. I also think the EU legislation can already be applied to some of these "premium" services. I guess we'll see some test cases in the courts over the next few years.
PS this is one of the few cases where it's "rein" not "reign".
'Public want new and shiny and definitely not someone else's cast offs that have been treated who knows how badly and have who knows how little lifespan left before something burns out"
Up until the point where the new/shiny only works if you shell out another £14.99/month to be able to view anything more exciting than open university and reruns of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.
favourite stick into the HDMI
The streaming services available on many (most?) of those sticks are already infested by adverts. I've given up on subscription services, for the little amount of TV I watch I record linear TV so I can skip the ads when I watch it later. If that becomes impossible, I'll just give up on TV. 95% of it is crap anyway.
Welcome to the latest in home entertainment technology, allowing you to enjoy your favourite shows without the endless annoyances of the smart TV or yet another subscriotion service.
We proudly bring you: DVDs![1][2]
[1] but not Disney, because they abuse the unskippable warnings flag for their adverts
[2] and only the ones without a piracy warning or, at worst, the one that just says "Thank you" rather than trying to guilt you with warnings that you ate supporting child slavery in the drug fields by, um, buying this disc? 'Cos when I get a ripped one that message isn't included.
And it has forever been so. The only thing is, back in the glorious days of VHS, you could take one look at that FBI warning, snicker and press Fast Forward to get of it and all the useless previews that followed. These days ? Put the disk in and go prepare your snack/dinner/whatever, because you've got at least five minute of unskippable shit occupying your screen before you can actually watch the movie you intended to.
Pirates ? They've got the same movie on a USB key or NAS and, when they want to watch it, they prepare their snacks beforehand because when they press PLAY, the movie starts.
I'm starting to think the pirates may not be entirely wrong . . .
I'm starting to think the pirates may not be entirely wrong . . .
Also because of this region nonsense which pirates tend to remove. It was beyond ridiculous that genuine DVDs I bought on a trip (which were even hand to get because it's easier to find a pirated version) refused to play at home because of the region limit, whereas the pirated copy I bought at the same time as a test would. Yes, you could bypass it if you had the right player (with region 0 support), but the very fact that I had to engage in these shenanigans ensured I no longer bought DVDs when travelling.
"ensured I no longer bought DVDs when travelling."
Well of course not! That's almost but not quite exactly the same as "stealing"!!!! You should only buy stuff in your home market at the price dictated by the seller, not be personally importing "grey" product, probably at a cheaper price while in some other county!
That's why you rip the DVD to a file on your NAS so that crap can be pulled out and you are just left with a nice, clean video file to play via your media player to the TV's HDMI port.
Gah, that sounds like a lot of work, which is why I skip the ripping step and just download the video (after buying the DVD or having a subscription to the streaming service) straight to by NAS for playback, someone else has done all the work of ripping and culling the crap out of it (usually).
"I'll just give up on TV. 95% of it is crap anyway."
Did that ages ago. Commercial TV decades ago. Everything now, even current affairs, seemed to be a rehash or poor remake of something I had seen years previously.
Heaps of dead tree books out there which won't talkie toaster you - even ebooks aren't too bad and both can be borrowed from public libraries (at least in the first world.)
LG after rebranding from Goldstar I think maintained LG = life's good - more like "lets grab."
LG after rebranding from Goldstar I think maintained LG = life's good - more like "lets grab."
FWIW, it was more of a contraction from Lucky Goldstar than an actual rebranding. The "Life's Good" is just a marketing slogan used in the English speaking markets and wasn't related to them becoming LG :-)
"Heaps of dead tree books out there which won't talkie toaster you - even ebooks aren't too bad and both can be borrowed from public libraries (at least in the first world.)"
I cut the cable on TV years ago. With having my own business, I didn't have much time to veg in front of the idiot box. I could listen to audiobooks and music for much of the day. These days there are a few shows (edutainment) that I like, but I just download them and watch on the computer. There are some really great YouTube channels I can dip in and out of when there's time without having to log in to Google and agree to their terms. I have a growing garden, household, science and product projects that keep me busy too.
I've given up on subscription services, for the little amount of TV I watch I record linear TV so I can skip the ads when I watch it later.
Belgian provider Telenet pushed a mandatory update to their tuners/recorders so it's no longer possible to skip or fast forward though advertising to combat exactly that, and no, you don't get money back for the lost functionality or for your lost time.
Adverts used to be fun and interesting because they were shown with a degree of restraint. Now their presence has expanded to a point where contents is now only treated as a carrier for ads, and instead of learning from it the industry has doubled down and inserts even more ads - generating more and more desire to avoid it altogether.
Maybe it's worth getting back to a point where ads were interesting again, and fun. You know, like the contents they interrupt?
Watching a time range of stuff recently has led to some interesting observations.
Star Trek; TOS episodes are 50 minutes long, so ten minutes of ads in an hour slot. By the time of Star Trek:TNG that’s down to around 45 mins so a 50% increase in non-show time. Series last of NCIS is at 43 mins or so, so a further drop in show time. Explains why the story telling on some shows has got very rushed and poorly developed…
Oh My God!!!! As was reading your comment, I missed the start of an ad-break and didn't FF, and there was an advert for an EV car and at the end, something along the lines of "Just like The Flash" with the red lighting around the car and then a cut to "The Flash, in Cinemas on $some_date". A fucking "sponsored" ad with it's own "ad break" at the end! It's the end of the world as we know it. Head for the hills! The "preppers" were right.
"Explains why the story telling on some shows has got very rushed and poorly developed…"
It also explains the incredible leaps in the technology shown and the equivalent of Handwavium by explaining difficult bits as something some other entity 'found out' and described rather than making the action in the main plot bear out the justification. I had a friend that liked NCIS and it's ilk and those shows would just piss me off with how much they had to lie, cheat and steal to make the storyline work.
Apparently the crime writers of the 30s had a policy that the reader had to be able to work out who was the culprit based on the content of their books - all the clues had to be there. This seems to have fallen by the wayside on shows like NCIS, where facts that nobody was privy to earlier in the story suddenly appear and the bad guys are in cuffs before you know it. I still find it enjoyable, but the sudden reveal at the end gets to be a little bit irritating
Just before Covid I bought an HDHomeRun multi-head TV tuner ( https://www.silicondust.com/ ). It records to a Raspberry Pi. I also bought a Channels DVR subscription ( https://getchannels.com/live-tv/ ) at $80/year, which includes comskip - To me it was well worth the price as I hardly see an advert - Most of our "TV watching" is yesterday’s recordings. If you don’t like the idea of paying for a subscription, there are FOSS versions of software out there ( NEXTPVR? ) or you could roll-your-own with FFmpeg/VLC…
With monitors coming in increasingly home theater sizes and integrated speakers, I'm surprised people still buy TVs.
I mean, I have a TV that I didn't even bother with the tuner, it's hooked up to a Nvidia Shield and I get all my entertainment out of the Shield. Next time it breaks I might no longer get a TV and just outright get a HT-size monitor.
Show me where to buy a 77" monitor like the LG OLED TV I'm planning to buy this fall/winter and if the price isn't all that different I'd consider it.
You CAN get TVs without all the cruft if you buy their commercial models. Unfortunately they are more expensive and don't get discounted like the consumer ones. It isn't worth it to me to pay double to avoid the "smart" stuff I don't need. If it was 10% more on the other hand...
Yeah, but speaking as someone with quite a lot of commercial displays (by Panasonic), I prefer the picture over a domestic TV and some models are designed for 24hr use so should be quite robust. If you do network them you can send them PJLink commands for everything from power on/off and input selection, to volume control. Very expensive though, if you can even find someone to sell to a non-commercial user.
Edit to add a link: Panasonic displays
Becoming a fan of the latest crop of laser-lamped projectors though. Our laser-DLP Panasonics (which I wouldn't want to have in the house due to the colour wheel artifacts* but work exceptionally well in a commercial environment) seem to be heading to their nominal 20,000 hour life very well. Our previous projectors - very similar except that they used discharge lamps - mostly reached 25,000 hours before I felt they were looking "tired".
Just started trialling some Panasonic and Epson LCD-based projectors. LCDs plus discharge lamps in a commercial (museum) setting were a recipe for disaster, needing expensive** LCD and colour filter replacements at between 4,000 and 8,000 hours even though the rest of the box was fine, but Laser lamps are promised to treat LCDs better. We'll see.
Edit to add link: Panasonic mid-range ("fixed installation") projector line-up
Problem with a projector at home is that in order to use a projector as a TV replacement I'd either be buying one of these commercial models in order to get in to the 6,000 lumen range or I'd be having to keep the curtains closed when wanting to watch TV.
And unfortunately, I may be in the market for a new screen soon; my old LG has "lost" a few of the lenses off the backlight strips, leaving bright patches when watching TV. Local repair bloke says he *can* do it, but it's at my risk if he cracks the panel while removing it :-/
M.
*in case someone wasn't aware, most low- and mid-range DLP projectors have a single DLP chip. Colour is obtained by passing the white light from the lamp through a spinning colour wheel (usually red-green-blue-clear but other combinations are possible). This results in four sequential images for each single frame of video. While some projectors spin the wheel faster or use six or more colours, many people can still detect the individual images especially with fast action scenes or when reading text on screen (as the eye scans across the picture)
Three-chip DLP projectors which don't have this problem are available and are commonly used in cinemas, but they're a bit pricey.
**when I started at the current place of employment, some eejit had fitted 30-ish LCD-based projectors. Most were showing LCD or filter failure after just 4,500 hours, which equates to about 20 months for us. Once we'd worked out who the actual manufacturer was, the cost of a replacement optical block (three LCDs and three filters all pre-aligned) was about the same as the cost of a new DLP-based projector with better specification (brighter output with cheaper and longer-lasting lamps and the colour wheel is usually good to 20,000 hours+) and that's ignoring the fact that over its likely useful life the LCD projector would probably have needed three or four optical block swaps.
Thanks for the comments and links, very informative. Personally I'm quite interested in the ultra-short throw projectors, for professional use. I suspect the rather extreme optics may create some artifacts, but as it's only for presentations and video conferencing I suspect it won't matter much that much.
I'm just wondering if a 50 000 lumens projector would not amount to a novel way to remove wallpaper, though.
"That rectangle? Yeah, that's where we used to watch movies."
:)
"Unfortunately I see more manufacturers insisting on the device phoning home every day. It's for your safety obviously as there may be someone nefarious trying to grab your data, ie the manufacturer."
If I ever end up with a TV like that it will because there is no information on the outside of the packaging or in the marketing materiels specifying that and it will be going straight back the retailer as "not fit for purpose"
Unfortunately, the TV can just sit there listening for Wifi connections. And then slowly brute force them. Hell, if i was a manufacturer, i'd even have a slow, low powered bitcoin miner in them.
I am sure this is what has happened to my LG TV. No ethernet cable, never defined a wifi SSID. Careful to never even activate the networking. However, i have lots of Wifi hotspots around me. Almost all are closed. But it only takes one open one and BAM, connect, upload telemetry, download update. Menus have changed over time on this TV, DESPITE being as careful as i could.
LG, because everything else available in my region are running Android TV and that is another cesspit of evil.
As others have said: 4 or more HDMI inputs, volume control, input control, brightness control. Done. No smarts. Barely even dumb. You have ONE job TV, display the bloody picture from my chosen input.
Welcome to our glorious future. Where everything is rented and ads are plastered onto everything possible.
You turn on self-driving mode in your car ... oh wait, the subscription for that lapsed. So you stop at the nearest Qwick-E-Mart and call BMW to re-activate self-driving mode. Of course, subscribing to self-driving mode also requires a subscription to cooled seats, which requires a subscription to heated seats. A few minutes later, a message on your car displays a message thank you for your payment. You continue on your journey and now activate self-driving mode. A few minutes later, you see an advertisement on your windshield for a new BMW. Later on, you see an ad for McDonalds with a message telling you that it is along the route you are taking and asking you if you would like to stop by there before you finish your journey.
When you finally make it home, your brand new NS-9 welcomes you. It welcomes you to your home and says that since you didn't stop at McDonalds, it made you a nice meal. Later on while you are eating, your NS-9 tells you about this wonderful new drug it heard about. Since it noticed that it might help with some of your health problems, your NS-9 asks if it would be okay to call your doctor and make an appointment. Before you go to bed, your NS-9 reminds you that your subscription to US Robotics expires in 13 days and that if you want to keep your NS-9 you will have to pay for another year of service soon.
Welcome to our glorious corporate future. Our leaders will be powerless to stop this because their NS-9 is ad-free and permanently paid for and their BMW is ad-free and self-driving mode always activated. This isn't a bribe, it was a "gift" from big corporations' lobbyists to help them win the election.
You forgot the part where your self driving car will change the path it takes to your house to prolong the ride because you have not been exposed to your daily minimum of advertising.
I'm pretty sure that was Musk's actual aim, but given that his team is about as adept at writing code that actually does the job as Microsoft, these days are thankfully still at least a decade away.
"your NS-9 reminds you that your subscription to US Robotics expires in 13 days and that if you want to keep your NS-9 you will have to pay for another year of service soon."
You should be so lucky. Your subscription will automatically renew and charge your debit/credit card unless you cancel your subscription at least 30 day in advance of the expiration date. The problem is that out of 800 web pages, only one has the link to un-subscribe buried in their terms of service which they made unsearchable and didn't use the words you'd expect to find even if you could search for them. If your payment method is no longer valid, you'll get a bill for the non-payment AND the cost of another year of service which won't include the loyal customer discount (so double or triple what you paid last time).
We bought a 65" Sceptre TV when we moved into our current house 2 years ago. It may not be a high-end device, but it works well enough for our needs, and it's dumb as a brick - like a TV screen ought to be. I use it mainly to watch the occasional DVD. While we do have a Roku connected, Pi-Hole does a decent job blocking ads there.
Samsung are legendary at this kind of shenanigans.
The other thing to watch out for is the duration that they will provide updates for. This point in time starts from when Samsung first ever "launched" the device, as in they made a brochure, and expires a set period of time after this. By the time most people will buy such a device this supported time period is likely nearly over.
The other gem is where a company like Samsung uses the bare minimum hardware to support their current "smart" features. Needless to say, the additional further "smart" features that you'll get whether you want them or not, were written by the usual lowest paid incompetent inebriated keyboard masher and require considerably more hardware resources to do what the TV did previously with the prior version of their advert delivery/smart features.
It's gotten to the level of abuse that just changing the damn input or display processing settings requires an online update and to have to watch yet another unwanted advert to access.
And Samsung's customer support is truly dreadful.
That is when you can through their awful "live chat bot" to a supposed "knowledgable" person who usually known bugger all.
Phoning them is even worse.
Best option is don't buy anything labelled as "smart" especially a TV. Get a TV with the resolution you want (HD, 4K etc) with plenty of HDMI sockets and plug in a Now TV, Amazon Fire or similar TV "stick".
Also their ribbon "Smart Hub" or whatever it is is awful. I found the pulling/cancelling the apps quite welcome. Only reason it was connected at all was to temporarily use for Netflix (or perhaps Prime). Had it been newer model with mic and/or camera it would never see the net.
As for LG, they were already on the "do not buy" list due to their prior shenanigans, but now they're irrecoverably on the don't buy ever shitlist.
My Humax PVR is allowed access to the Internet, it is useful to have the third-party Open Source addon software, including remote scheduling.
Yes, the hummypkg website knows my recording schedule, but they don't use it for spam and there is no evidence of anything else weird going on.
How is that any guarantee? It could come preloaded with ads, or instead of ads constantly harass you about needing to be connected to a network and updated.
That method will only work so long as a small number of people do it. Once they are losing enough revenue the beancounters will tell the engineers to make it more painful for people to use lack of internet connection as a way around the revenue stream they feel entitled to.
DS999,
They can't really pre-load the TV with ads, as they might not get paid! The horror! After all, that would be part of the firmware, from when the TV left the factory and the advertisers might stop paying before the TV got sold by the shops. And they wouldn't want to be advertising for free now would they? Also you aren't going to get top-dollar from advertisers when you can't even guarantee that the victims have seen the ads.
Daily pestering for an internet connection could be a thing though. Or setting them to find open WiFi networks and send/receive their data over those.
"Or setting them to find open WiFi networks and send/receive their data over those."
The TV's won't come with a remote but will put up a QR code you can scan to turn your phone into the remote. You will need BT, WF and data on for it to work and BAM, the TV has a connection to the internet. If you do read the manual, it will tell you that it will do that so it's all properly disclosed. The manual, that pamphlet that went in the bin along with all of the other packaging.
"Manual? On paper? You should be so lucky."
Not a manual, as such. It's just some cartoons to get you to the point where the TV can turn on and connect itself to the internet (after you fill out a lengthy questionnaire). The paper will also include the mandatory warnings such as not taking it into the bath with you while plugged into the mains and other warnings the government has determined are important to have in print. There will also be that disclaimer that you automatically agree to when you break the seal on the box where you agree to all the data slurping they choose to employ and that you must submit to binding arbitration for any disputes (with an arbitrator they hire). You also indemnify them against all claims and further give up any right to join a class action lawsuit even in cases of extreme negligence. All of that has to be in print, never mind that you don't get to see it before you open the box.
‘“Evolving Appliances For You" that promised software upgrades to home appliances. The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.’
Wouldn't it be better if I had control of my own devices and could update the routines on my own.
'The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.’
Err, why does a Brabantia rotating clothes drier need "routines", whatever they are. You peg the clothes out, they blow around for a while, tehn you bring them in and put them on an airer to finish them off if necessary. No appliances, no evolution.
In 1999 (or 2000? It was a long time ago) I was involved in the BBC's 'Futureworld' touring exhibition that was trying to explain this new fangled internet stuff. Many of the exhibits were provided by LG and one of them was an internet fridge complete with a screen and browser on the door.
Twenty-odd years later I still haven't figured out a use for one.
Twenty-odd years later I still haven't figured out a use for one.
Radio Ad mode ON
"Hey John. Look what I've just bought!"
"Oh wow! Jan, is that a new LG Internet Fridge?"
"That's right John, it is. Now I can display all my notes and lists on my fridge."
"Wow! And what happens when you close the door too hard and the magnets fall off?"
"[laughs while speaking]They don't! They're not held on by magnets any more. Now my shopping list stays on all the time!"
"Wow! That's amazing Jan. I'm just off out to buy one."
Voiceover:
"Say goodbye to fridge magnet misery! And get an LG Internet Fridge!"
There's also the X-Rated ad for late night radio. Where the teenage children have spelled rude words with the magnets...
I do not want any Korean advertising culture in my home. Korea is what motivated me to host my own mail server long ago so I could block hundreds of daily spams coming from LG's cesspit of a network. LG has toned it down slightly for the US but they still don't understand that we don't want pop-up ads flashing on TVs that we purchased. We don't want to opt-in to activating spyware that delivers nothing but more ads.
If you have an LG TV and you want a horrific dose of what LG has in mind, tune to channel "IP0". It's a vivid pop-culture advertising vomit with flickering video glitches. It's worse than the dark corners of Roku where you'll find dozens of channels streaming VHS tape rips mixed with scam ads.
It's a shame LG dropped their cellphone and solar divisions because their hardware is pretty good.
They won't be happy until you're watching Aw My Balls and paying to see the adverts.
On first start, ths flagship 'Smart' TV demanded I agree to their egregious terms and conditions allowing perpetual, invasive abuse of personal information by LG, world+dog. Given the TV had microphones, and built-in spy-cams on the bottom- 'to adjust screen settings to the surroundings', I wasn't keen. And as their Ts&Cs allow mining of all data generated by your use of the device- including its cameras. Even records your acceptance to ad-spaffing. The nag remains unanswered, ever since- and all the 'Smart' TV functions have been blocked from use.
Shortly after realised the sound on this top-of the range TV was really poor (distorted), so went to request warranty service. Over the phone and online, agreement to Ts&Cs was placed in the way of any request. Cancelled out. What Asshats! Will never, ever, buy another LG product.
Luckily for me I can still use it as a dumb TV.
However the annoying nags pop up every time you hit the wrong button on the remote. Their TVs are hunks of junk, marketed by a recalcitrant management team.
If only there was an open OS that could be flashed onto all these dumb, 'Smart TVs', but alas...
I had to agree to bs ts & C's with my recent Sony TV.
I couldn't even use it without agreeing to Google's crap.
I can't use the iPlayer app unless I agree to some non-bbc ts & C's, why?
I'll agree to the BBC's iPlayer TS and C's directly, thank you very much.
I wish is just bought a dumb ilyama display instead ;(
We had Samsung for ages, but the last one wasn’t very good. ‘LG looks nice’ said the missus and she’s right, the screen is super sharp, vibrant colours, GUI not bad but WHAT IS THIS FRESH HELL???? Whilst bl00dy Love Island was contaminating the screen, an ad popped up in the corner linking directly to a purchase opportunity for the sunglasses and bikini being clothes-horsed by one of the vapid morons dumb enough to humiliate themselves playing multi-person tonsil hockey for a guaranteed dose of Hep-C. I’ve configured it to point to Pi-Hole for DNS but haven’t checked it’s done the trick yet. I don’t think the pushed ads are optional in the settings. Grrrrrr.
Don't forget to keep WebOS up to date for all the latest targeting and ad-features!
The AI can watch you and decipher your preferences from each ad it spaffs, A-B testing in real time.
All the while making the perfect propaganda tool. Where had we heard this before?
* You can cover up the cameras with electrical tape (a tip from a fellow Tinfoil Mad-hatter). Everyone else is mad, not us!
That's great, but not everyone has that option, including people who either don't have a place to put such a line or people for whom the prevailing weather means that, instead of it taking a while during the winter, the winter would basically just freeze them into ice*. That said, I'm not sure what different settings you have to choose on an electric drier depending on the climate. There are a few settings available, but most of those are related to what you just put in it, not where you are, and the default of turn it on, wait for a while, turn it off will work for pretty much everything.
* Yes, I know, you could manage it inside as well, but eventually it makes some sense to use an appliance just as we don't need to boil all of our water over a fire.
"the winter would basically just freeze them into ice*"
Yes and? Even the ice evaporates eventually and you get clean and dry clothes. Here in North we do that every winter and if clothes take half a day to dry in summer, they may take 2 days to dry in winter, but if you're in a hurry you use a dryer anyway.
I admit that sheets look weird in the first day when they've frozen solid, but that's temporary.
What heatwave? It's been raining cats and dogs for near 3 weeks now with only brief glimpses of a non grey sky
Now June was properly warm and I had my hopes for a lovely dry summer....instead the UK weather server appears to have had its location set to India and the season set to monsoon
《the UK weather server appears to have had its location set to India and the season set to monsoon》
Perhaps should have stuck with Liz then :(
Although if you had kept Boris it would raining down buckets of bollocks and cartloads of bullshit.
At a holiday home, turned on the TV. It was an Amazon TV which meant not even allowed to watch terrestrial TV without logging into Amazon account! This was basically an Amazon Fire tablet with a larger screen.
You ever looked at a modern TV with a PiHole device? The flood of phone-home data to Samsung, LG, etc. is scary.
And really - who would want the kinda junk on the LG channels? Can we force the CEO of these companies to suffer their own services.
The positives of this crap is it makes it easier to give up on these "TV Services" and find something better to do with life than consume this mess.
Is that the super-dumb Panasonic plasma telly that tries to show ads at the side when you go to the channel selection page? Although ours hasn't managed to actually pull any ads off-air for a long time (years) so that is just a wasted bit of screen real estate.
But, yes, hoping it will keep on going for a few more years, although it is well out of warrantee now.
So basically LG are going to sell washing machines with missing programs for heavy loads/whites etc and expect people to pay a monthly £20 fee to have those programs put back.
TVs with unskippable 30second adverts no matter WHAT you're using the TV for,....multiplayer games? TV is useless because you'll simply die mid-game etc.
Whats next? a cooker that refuses to do lasagne unless you swipe a credit card? Lightbulbs that will only switch on after you listen to a 60second advert?
I need to replace 2 TVs that have a slight burn-in and LG just took themselves completely out of the running. Am also recommending against LG for workplace info-screens as can't have adverts appearing whilst important data is being viewed etc.
Thankfully, LG don't currently make a toaster, although they certainly tried their best back in 2006.
You'll be reassured by the fact that Smeg definitely do make toasters. So far, those do not require a subscription to anything.
AWOOGA AWOOGA AWOOGA
Incoming pedantry alert!
"Smeg" as a brand... not "SMEG as a brand"!
At least, that is what their own website uses in plain-text paragraphs.
I've taken to biting my tongue when people talk about the programming languages LUA, PASCAL, MODULA, JAVA etc but there are limits :-)
From the end of his "landmark speech" about these subscriptions:
"Cho highlighted how LG is accelerating company-wide changes from corporate culture to brand communication at every customer contact point with the ultimate goal of becoming a brand that warms the hearts of customers and puts smiles on their faces while enabling customers to feel the value and philosophy of Life’s Good."
From the reactions so far, everyone is certainly getting warm (even really hot), but more in the under the collar area than the heart. And that isn't a smile, it is definitely a grimace.
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"Did LG actually say what, apart from adverts, their tenants are going to pay for?"
Nope. Not a word about that. Hardly surprising.
I'll bet they'll pay for everything they now get included in the price and new base price includes only the screen and advert delivery software. Everything else, including the remote, is paid monthly.
I could imagine that some driers might be able to moderate their power consumption slightly based on ambient conditions, but that's about the limit of my imagination :-) I doubt very much that it'll save enough money to justify the extra complexity and expense though.
I've got an LG OLED65CX, and there are some good things to be said about them too.
First, it's now 3 years since I bought it and it's still getting updates, including new features like a change of the home screen.
Also, the T&C have a granularity. For example, you can refuse to have your data sent, or your data sent outside the EEA.
So while I'm not thrilled about subscriptions either, I can say that so far, they're doing not bad. And of course, there's a technological wall looming: considering the quality of current TVs, their size, their thinness, their resolution, it's clear that at some point not very far in the future, there will be no incentive to buy a new one as long as the current one works. So there's no doubt that their business model will change, they're looking for a way to continue.
"First, it's now 3 years since I bought it and it's still getting updates, including new features like a change of the home screen.
it's clear that at some point not very far in the future, there will be no incentive to buy a new one as long as the current one works."
For most people, the second statement is now and will remain true anyway. As for the first statement, maybe you bought a newly released model or maybe they really are extending their level of s/w and app support. But come back in another 7 years when it's reached 10 years old, the absolute bare minimum expected lifespan of a TV and let us know if it's still getting maintenance updates and which apps no longer work :-)
Yes, but they didn't include any adverts, and the TVs worked well for months - usually, depending on customer interference. I was one of their engineers in the late 1960s, and was watching colour TV when most couldn't afford the extra on the rental.
These days I don't have a TV at all. Nothing on there I can be bothered with.
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This is a Black Mirror episode that writes itself. Our hapless protagonist loses his credit card and has to report it stolen. By an amazing coincidence, his smart subscriptions all renew later that day on the lost card. His refrigerator shuts off leaving food to rot, his smart bulbs stop working leaving him in the dark, he can't start his car, his stove, washer, dryer, etc are all dead.
Meanwhile, in real life, Amazon cancelled somones Alexa account over some possibly fictitious dispute and he was having difficulties opening his front door.
Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim
Just search on
amazon alexa account closed by mistake
for many other wonderful stories of how people rely on technology.
《You will own nothing and be happy.》Mayhap*
But I won't be renting anything either so perhaps LG and I will both be happy. :)
*Catweazle had a decent appreciation of modern (1970s) technology and frequently used this word.
Surprized that a crappy remake of this series hasn't been attempted - perhaps not - between the woke, x-diverse and whatnot with fingers in the pie I doubt even deSantis' Florida could kill such a misbegotten result.
I've got an LG telly, it's the buggiest piece of hardware I've ever had. The EPG is slow, randomly reboots, UI inconsistencies, no design sensibilities, randomly loses the connection to the sound bar. LG support is 'do a factory reset'. They did a couple of firmware updates but it just added more crap to the UI instead of fixing anything. Not getting an LG TV again. The display itself is good.
Aside from that, TV reviews on AV websites always seem to be fawning and geared to promoting affiliate links. None of the reviews mention the speed of EPG or changing channels.
I bought my LG when dumb TVs were starting to get hard to find. It is a dumb one, thankfully, but I have no idea what the TV guide, if any might be like. Having cable, I've never actually connected a TV aerial to it. Thinking about it, I have no idea if it's even got a DTV tuner or if it's only got an analogue tuner. I'd have to check the manual to find out :-).
But it does have a very good picture. LG do seem to be pretty good at that bit.
My current television isn't connected to the internet and my next one won't be either. If I wanted a 'smart' television I'd buy one but I really don't need one. I can't see the point.
Perhaps I could be more easily convinced if the continued fashion for 'smart' devices actually delivered products that were better at being televisions or phones or whatever but they simply are not. I know the display quality and the screen sizes have got bigger but these improvements don't make up for the other short comings, and bigger isn't always better.
I very quickly got fed up with the television in the flat I stayed in this summer as it took minutes to 'warm up' and I find using my (work) mobile phone to make a call a pain as takes almost a couple of minutes to switch on and requires me to enter my PIN number, twice, before I can even begin dialling. In comparison I can pick up my conventional telephone's handset and dial most numbers in about 10-15s, or a lot less if the number is on speed dial.
It is not about being anti smart devices, I have replaced most of the bulbs in the house with smart bulbs, but unlike the television or mobile phone when I press the 'on' button they come on almost instantly (and fortunately I don't need to control them from a phone!).
I remember having an LG G3 phone a few years back. If memory serves, the final software update basically totalled the thing, rendering it all but unusable. My work has moments where a quick and responsive phone is £$$£ntial.
I now have a Motorola G9 Power, and carry my old G7 Power as a backup. The latest updates were barely 2 years after release, which is woeful. The G9's camera app is now badly crippled.
I'll be sorting out decent community AOSP if/when I have a chance.
I'll likely never buy a brand new phone again.
Our old dumb TV died recently & replacement was a "smart" Toshiba (good picture quality for the price, could not find a dumb TV of good picture quality anywhere near the price of it).
I have no need of the "smart" features,
On initial setup not even connected to TV aerial never mind internet, basically chose the I do not want to connect to this option for everything (including WiFi).
Later connected it to aerial so it could find channels & "finish its setup" (as though mainly be using via Humax connected to HDMI I got bored of finish setup nag every time I turned it on so tuned in channels) .
I did notice one good point (it may be a bug on Toshiba side, but I'm happy about it) - on settings it is impossible to turn on WiFi - if you try it goes straight back to off (not sure which of the many things I declined on initial setup achieved this but great that TV is not going to accidentally latch on to an open WiFi if a neighbour has one & also stops partner trying to enable WiFi to make use of the (unwanted by me) YouTube button on the remote)
I think it worked for 25 years and had what's called a real clicker remote. No need to buy anything new until Miami vice came out in stereo and I bought a Sony for 950 bucks, I believe it was 27 in with speakers that were really big on both sides, we enjoyed it tremendously. Next big purchase was about 20 years later and I bought a sonyy 40-in TV for $4,000. Last year I bought a 43 inch for $119 at Walmart twice as good and probably will last just as long
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