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Comment by g42gregory | Hacker News Reader

Does using Roku solve the problem? He should be able to watch online TV without Ads then. Am I missing something? Of course, terrible product by Samsung. Hopefully, consumers will vote with their feet.

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I honestly don't know. But it's incredible that they can just agree on behalf of the customers that ads are okay. That's why I never buy Samsung phones either. They're full of bloatware. There should be a setting to disable these ads.

One of the reasons TVs are so cheap these days is because they sell advertising and harvest viewing data.

Are those cheap? Not being sarcastic. I honestly don't know if they're selling those at a loss. I bought my Sony Smart TV 4 years ago. I don't get any ads. It's got some apps like Youtube, Netflix, Stan etc. and that's it. No ads whatsoever.

Probably 4 years ago was when they made money just by collecting telemetry on TV usage. Also, 4 years ago was roughly when Windows 10 became widespread surpassing Windows 7, and forced many users to adapt to advertising in non-phone products, therefore manufacturers may have interpreted this as less resistance to ads.

This is the problem (at least for me). It's the same as so many products (free ones especially), people care more about price than anything else, so businesses are incentivized to produce cheaper, ad supported lineups, and inevitably nobody buys a more expensive, ad-free version. It's the same for airfares (people would rather pay less and be treated like crap than get to be a human for a bit more), shopping (get treated like cattle at walmart but save $.5 on hotdogs or whatever).

With ads there is also the idea that the rates you can charge for ads are much lower if you let people pay to opt out, because basically you've pre-segmented for the cheapskates, when advertisers would like to advertise to those with money.

Bottom line, we're screwed

Why should it necessarily have anything to do with customer price sensitivity? No matter what the price point is and what the manufacturer’s margin is, the manufacturer will increase their margin by putting in ads. It doesn’t matter if it’s a $200 TV or a $10,000 TV.

yeah, the last line is quite true. I saw somebody posted a screenshot of their lockscreen with an ad. I've never seen that on my iPhone. But then with the new IOS, I've stopped all kinds of tracking and notifications.

> people care more about price than anything else, so businesses are incentivized to produce cheaper, ad supported lineups, and inevitably nobody buys a more expensive, ad-free version

We know this because "contains large ads and spies on the user, and this cannot be disabled" is advertised as prominently as the price, right?

Their most expensive tv also has ads. That’s such a poor excuse. They do it because they can and because literally every tv company does it consumers don’t have a choice except buying computer monitors or very expensive industrial grade displays.

> That’s such a poor excuse.

More specifically, it is misinformation.

I just spent $3k on a fancy TV and I was presented ads when I powered it on for the first time. I wanted to rage return the product but the sheer size makes it a hassle to take back to the store. I am beyond angry everytime I turn it on (which quickly dissipates when the video turns on and ads go away leaving me in awe of the image quality).

How was it able to get the ads from the internet when you powered it on for the first time?

Preloaded from the factory maybe?

Oh, OK. That didn't occur to me, as I thought to be timely ads would need to come from a server.

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