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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

It was very underhanded of Google to add advertising after the fact. When I have to factory reset the TV I'm reminded of how it used to be before it upgrades. Years later they still haven't [1] updated the screenshots in their Play store page to show the giant 1/3 full screen ads you get now.

Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.

Not only does Google show auto playing video ads for streaming services you don't subscribe to, it also shows pure auto playing video ads for things like fast food. It really lags while it tries to start up to show the ads.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes the ADB backdoor when they realise all the sweet ad dollars they're losing.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

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We seriously need some "you own your hardware" laws - before the likes of Google tighten every bolt and implement enough "security" to firmly lock the users out of their own devices.

It's dead obvious that companies like Apple and Google and Sony and John Deere lock their hardware down to protect their revenue streams - not to help the users in any way. And yet, they're peddling the lie of "security" - and have been getting away with it for decades.

Now that AI is there to give even an average user a leg up when it comes to things like "I don't want to see ads in my TV's menus, can you do something about it", the companies will see more and more reasons to implement more "security" to stop it. And modern "security" measures are hard to defeat with technical measures - so this has to be curbed with legal action instead.

Stockholder value is now predicated entirely on things like recurring revenue, growth, and MBA short-term profit seeking. Enshittification of existing SaaS and 'smart' products is a feature, not a bug.

Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.

Stockholder value isn't the only metric that matters.

A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.

Ever hear of Farming-as-a-service?

https://agroinformacion.com/en/agtechmachinery/john-deere-su...

Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...

https://consumerrights.wiki/

> Ever hear of Farming-as-a-service?

You mean sharecropping? It's been around, in various forms, since pre-Roman times.

It’s a tv box.

Which will all have things like reprogrammable firmware and FPGA aspects to support paywalled proprietary features.

We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.

I’ve just realised: could shareholders sue for this? E.g. if I’ve bought the stock pre-enshittification, then the conpany decided to prioritize short-term profit, and then some time after the stock price falls (and that’s a big “if”, sure).

I don't think AI will save us from the ads. Eventually they will monetize AI by mixing ads into them if they aren't doing that already. Just like streaming got ads added into after being the escape from cable tv ads. And cable tv got ads added in after being the escape from broadcast tv ads. Its a cycle.

What's stopping you from reverse engineering then whole thing with AI?

Read to the end of the comment.

They (Android TV devices, mine was a FireStick 4K Max) also don't give a fuck about displaying things that are inappropriate; ours showed banners for horror films on several occasions, during the day when my children are about and scaring them.

It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.

I have a Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen (who comes up with these names?) While the setup can be a little tricky, I've got mine on Projectivity Launcher which has no ads and I still have access to all the streaming apps and the Amazon app store (if I ever need it). There are good guides online so, if you still care, you should be able to recover your device.

It's not recoverable unfortunately, seems either the firmware is broken or a hardware issue. The last time it worked I factory reset it to see if that would stabilise it, but it never booted again. I contacted Amazon about replacing it, but they won't do anything because it's not registered to my account (because it was removed when I reset it).

I was also running Projectivy [sic] Launcher, but it launched a minute after the stick started which wasn't a great UX so I ended up disabling it because it annoyed the family.

Either way, I'm not worried about recovering it now; it would have been nice to use it for a few thing, but when it stopped working I just went out and bought a new TV.

SmartTube is excellent for ad-free YouTube. I've seen others recommend TizenTube, which more closely follows the official YouTube app aesthetic, but to be honest, I prefer the more minimalist look of SmartTube. The fact that it can also play Shorts (where the official YT app tries to push them to your phone) is a nice bonus.

One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.

You could just pay for premium as it gives 60% to creators, which is pretty generous.

You can do both and have a better youtube ui as well as direct sponsor block integration.

Advertising company in shows ads shock!

But if the product originally did not do that, it's a bit of a rug pull to push a software update that includes them.

Google PR is so good that people tend to forget that the vast majority of Google's income is from ads.

Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.

You might be giving Google's PR a bit too much credit there, at least its current PR. A large part of their reputation in the minds of the general public (who don't keep an eye on the machinations of the ad tech world) comes from inertia from their useful products particularly from times when “do no evil” was still a goal for them, and the fact that people just don't think the extra step “if this is free, how is it being paid for?” and might not even care if they did. Most people who are not into tech/business/both never even knew or cared that Google's income is mostly ad based, so they had nothing to forget in that regard.

I think you need look no further than the fact that they removed “don’t be evil” from the top of their code of conduct for evidence that their PR isn’t great. It was an essentially meaningless move and the headlines wrote themselves.

Yeah I'm just surprised that anyone is surprised.

It’s incredible that you can’t sue them over this.

Sony are even more egregious - unless you opt out within 30 days, you are subject to Binding Arbitration via the Sony EULA for example.

This means you have to settle Disputes between you and Sony through a neutral private arbitrator rather than a judge or jury in a public courtroom, and you give up the right to participate in any class-action tort.

Seems like that should be a right you can’t waive no matter what a contract says

EU protects it at a federated level, and no contract terms can override mandatory local statutory rights. Indeed most US-centric EULA clauses are considered invalid or unenforceable in the EU.

It doesn't mean organizations might not try to convince consumer otherwise.

Oh boy just wait until you read the fine print on… everything you touch!

Loans, banks, phones, walking into Walmart. It’s all binding arbitration.

Doesn't sound neutral at all.

Third party and independent means an arbritartor who isn't vastly paid by one industry.

It gets worse - they only introduced this EULA after losing their subscriber database on multiple ocassions.

IANAL but apparently also opting out gives you less power in a mass-tort as your class will consist entirely of a contextually miniscule group.

"Sony's EULA, however, eliminates anyone from a potential class except for individuals who specifically opt out. If a person who opted out later chooses to pursue a claim, the class will, at most, consist of those persons who opted out. Nt enough people will opt out. The class is virtually guaranteed to be too small to make it worth any lawyer undertaking representation. So by opting out, you are registering yourself into a group that has no power and no meaning."

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kk36d/lawyers_thoug...

In the case of gaming console manufacturers, those who swear by PC gaming being superior may have a point in some ways.

For Indies, sure. For AAA you've got egregious DRM that can compromise your system to an unimaginable degree. These flaws were so structurally dangerous that Microsoft permanently blocked SafeDisc and older versions of SecuROM from executing in Windows 10 onwards.

Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...

The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.

Somebody needs to tell right-wing libertarians that this is literally a way to institute Sharia law. Maybe start a IoT company, and change the EULA to force things to be settled through Islamic courts.

This is not an exaggeration. Right now Valerie Haney has begun her fourth year of court-ordered Scientology arbitration over the billion year contract she signed to work for sub-minimum wage as a Sea Org member.

https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/val-haney-now-up-to-17-day...

> When I have to factory reset the TV I'm reminded of how it used to be before it upgrades.

Even the idea of needing or being able to factory resetting a TV seems like such a downgrade. I haven’t regularly watched TV in some quarter of a century, and I remember channel switching being effectively instant. Nowadays when I’m at someone’s home and have to mess with the TV, it takes so long to even go up or down one channel.

There’s a non-bloat explanation for channel switching taking time at least.

Now that all TV is digital (even OTA), it’s subject to the same quirks as streaming video on the web, and that includes how the picture will become garbled if you render it before gathering a sufficient amount of data. To prevent that, TVs and cable boxes take a moment or two to pull in enough data to render a clean picture when switching channels, which is where the delay comes from.

this is a telephone-game explanation of keyframes. Each video stream periodically includes a keyframe or I-frame (independent frame) which is a complete encoded picture in its own right. Other frames are P-frames which are diffs from the previous frame. A stream typically includes a keyframe every few seconds. If you want to accurately decode a stream starting in the middle of it, you need to start at the next keyframe.

Some players will take an initial placeholder image such as a grey screen and start applying P-frames on top of it anyway, which gives a corrupted image that still has some information (shapes of moving characters are often recognisable) until the keyframe comes. Others wait for the keyframe and display a black screen, a frozen screen or a loading spinner until then.

Related, if you've ever seen a low-bitrate stream whose quality seems to get really bad, then slowly fill in, then get really bad again, then slowly fill in again, repeating forever, that comes from a poorly tuned encoder that's not allocating enough bits to each keyframe (so the quality is bad) and then making up the difference in subsequent P-frames.

> Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.

I use Projectivy for the same reason. Sucks, because Android TV still has some of the best flexibility in a TV-appropriate OS (compared with other options I could find at least) but their priorities don't line up with mine regarding the ads.

I got so much frustrated with ads I have replaced it with open-source FLauncher. Experience is so much better.

I don't know why one would assume Google wouldn't add advertising...

If it wasn't there when you bought it, it is a change.

And, your point is? Google explicitly stated the would be pushing updates. They never said they wouldn't change things. Also, just look at the history of their products. They inject ads into everything they make. They are an ad company, that's where their revenue comes from.

Hmm, seems to have hit a nerve.

TV seems like a minor product for Google.

Android regularly was originally packaged as part of Google’s advertised “ Google Experience Devices” and “Android One”, where they advertised no bloatware and adware unlike other Android manufacturers.

Specifically for the Nvidia shield it was advertised as having updates forever. Nvidia held the promise for 10 years: https://hothardware.com/news/shield-tv-hits-decade-android-u...

The Nvidia shield outlasted every android tv device from Google and maintained a near pure experience as promised, for a higher upfront price.

I understand the history of Google and their products. Where they change what is offered is still not ok because you’ll never really know what you’re getting into, nor what Google may launch and cancel next.s

Lots of people have a graveyard of cancelled Google devices.

But Nvidia was able to be one of the first 4K certified Android tv devices for Netflix and keep it that way.

You're just making my point for me. Why would you ever buy a device running Google's software and expect it not to change unless it never recieves updates?

Why is the rating for ATV Launcher Pro so bad?

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