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...
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.
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.
A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.
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...
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.
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 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.
One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.
Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.
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.
Loans, banks, phones, walking into Walmart. It’s all binding arbitration.
Third party and independent means an arbritartor who isn't vastly paid by one industry.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every smart TV I own never gets internet access, ever. I just plug a real device that connects to the internet instead, they're a much faster and better experience.
I'm doing what you are - just don't connect it and you can enjoy ridiculously low prices on TVs.
Anything you own could also have a secret 5G radio built in spying on you, but that's reasoning via Russell's Teapot and pointless except to baselessly spread paranoia.
Try getting a display panel, like one of those used in restaurants to display menus.
I think to be considered a television, you still need to be able to receive OTA broadcasts. With modern digital television, that now means you need a H264 (H265, soon maybe) decoder.
I don't know if you can do that cheaper than a SoC, which makes adding "smartness" (even if it's bad) not that much more expensive.
There are some TVs that eventually pop-up a “please connect” or similar message over any display (even if just using it to display content from another device via HDMI) if they have not been connected for some time, so that you can't permanently use them disconnected. I forget which brand(s)/models are involved, it was talked about in at least one of Louis Rossman's rants so you might find some details in the consumer rights wiki he is associated with.
There will be ways around this of course, though they might involve mucking about in a way the average TV user will not want to risk playing aroud with (rooting the device so you can alter an internal clock that is not affected by any clock you can modify on the UI, or pulling a battery backup out so everything resets (assuming the clock's state is not stored in solid state memory than needs no powered at all to maintain)).
I bought a Vizio TV which has this evil, undocumented "feature". It would pop-up a message after every dozen or so boots. The message can be manually dismissed with three clicks on the remote.
The TV also will not turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work with any internal streaming source but external sources must first be manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after power on it correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until the remote re-selects the same source (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only viewing external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly deliver the basic functionality it claims on the box.
So, I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and re-select the already-selected external HDMI. Very annoying to be forced to figure this out but now it works fine and no one even sees the stupid messages as they're already gone before they see the screen. Fuck Vizio :-).
I have an Android based TV that is connected for the purposes of iPlayer/NetFlix/other, but is mainly used to play off my local media array via a Pi4 running LibreELEC (Kodi) as even though I subscribe to a couple of streaming services I still find getting things otherwise more convenient. Until a recent update it happily stayed on the HDMI source the Pi is hooked up to unless I switched it, now it (almost) always reverts to its own homepage (with the auto-playing video adverts for shows/games/services) when waking from standby.
This seems to be supported by the below link. It isn't a "please connect," but initial setup requires a Roku account. So the conclusion is do not buy a Roku TV, or Roku anything.
https://support.roku.com/en-us/article/how-do-i-use-my-tv-in...
Things being too much hassle to fight is what a lot of the invasions of our privacy and other rights are based upon, hence 80-page click-through licences, difficult cancellation processes, labyrinthine stalking preference pop-overs on web sites/apps, etc.
You definitely want to turn "Samba Interactive TV" off.
Android TV has this. It didn't have ads for less than a year. Now the ads banner is there regardless.
It just goes to show how much taste is learned. Not even to say it's subjective (which of course it is at least in part), just that it's a skill that needs to be developed, and, at least in part, a curse. I remember thinking 480p was quite crisp quality, now I find 720p DVDs charmingly rustic.
My 2018 Samsung TV has smart features, but is not internet connected. It turns on quickly and right to the selected source - no brain cells harmed having to look at ads. It slightly bugs out sometimes, but I assume this to be a general issue.
Anyway, google TVs (like my TCL tv) let you use them in dumb mode, which is what I do. I just have it wired to my Apple TV 4k (the least bad of the smart tv boxes that support HDCP) and thats good enough for me.
Like it or not it's no longer viable to sell to consumers at "cost plus margin" - you're sold a loss-making unit and the size of the loss is based on how much LTV they expect of you.
Be happy it's cheaper for you, but be aware that as an informed consumer who's not plugging in your device you have negative LTV and are thus not the product's target customer and sadly are actually kind of leeching off their business model.
I'm sure you wouldn't do that if you had a choice. But the old business model is unviable now so no one's left except these jerks.
But hey, cheap TVs!
I promise you I won't give a shit about the unsubsidized price.
Only use an external device.
That being said, I use an Nvidia Shield TV Pro connected to it, and I had to do similar steps on that to replace the launcher and install my own apps. I use "ATV Launcher Pro" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.dstudio.atv...) personally, and it's great.
I also use "Send Files to TV" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yablio.sen...) so I can download files on my phone and send them to the TV.
* Firefox in full-screen with a custom extension that makes the web UI of Netflix into something usable by a d-pad remote
* Switchfin (which has a Linux version) works pretty well out of the box
* Some custom Python+GTk apps to watch some public TV channels (they have no DRM and have a good API, so it was very easy, and I can get custom views for what my family watches)
* a nice viewer for Immich albums
* a CD player (I bought a 15EUR external USB DVD player)
Everything using a single UI paradigm, with just the things my family and I actually care for. No ads. No tracking (well, I guess Netflix still does some tracking anyway).
What so you want to know more specifically?
- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)
- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image
- Buy an Apple TV
Done.
The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.
I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.
[0] https://filmmakermode.com/ - also a good idea to do this to relative's TVs.
The apple approach would require Youtube Premium and still would not block integrated sponsor reads. It's the downside of the "golden cage"
... Bad news, brand new 2026 LG OLEDs come with Copilot out of the box packed into the software. Ask me how we know out of absolute frustration. LG has started to super enshittify webOS packed in before you even put it online.
... so I keep getting calls that the "TV keeps talking by itself" every time they hit a button and it fastspeaks everything on screen (VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEUP VOLUMEUP MENU MENU etc) because they managed to turn on settings they shouldn't have been able to get to. :)
What with all of this snazzy AI reverse engineering that people have been doing, how far are we from getting a mostly automated system that can build a clean Android for each TV model? A lot of the difficulties in making 3rd party ROMs for phones are in details like battery life, or weird sensors. It seems like much of that would not be an issue for a TV
How long before TV manufacturers start putting in countermeasures to prevent that?
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
> Tip: Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup. It can run the ADB commands for you and adapt them to your device.
Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.
At least with `curl | bash` the originating website needs to be compromised. With AI, there are about a million different ways for it to go wrong and blow up your entire HDD.
I had problems getting the Chromecast to connect to my IKEv2 home vpn at an airbnb, so I told Claude to fix it. It figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on my chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client for me that works perfectly, all in about 20 minutes without me needing to do much more than supply my certs.
It also fixed SmartTube to work on my phone, the official app only shows 5 videos, Claude fixed the .apk to show 100+ thumbnails.
EDIT: all that remains for this stack is a good browser that can allow usage of uBlock Origin. BrowseHere is a pain to use with its constant nags about allowing pop-ups on certain sites...
I only get shown the login prompt when the network connection to my server isn't established yet. I'm on Wi-Fi and need to wait for the connection before launching the client.
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.slions.fulguris.full.fdroid...
It's a fork of the original AOSP WebKit browser, which I've found to be much faster than Chromium-based browsers, and you can import your uBlock Origin filters.
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
If you stubbornly decide you're smarter than that, then wait I guess?
There is also no reason to wear out flash since you only need to update the fast boot image when things actually change.
Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.
I buy a screen. I choose to control what outputs to said screen. The discussion should end there, were the product the screen. In reality, people actively pay money to become the product (i.e paying to be advertised to, and paying for your own data yo be sold).
I see this as no different than brand allegiance. With clothing, many individuals paid for brands to advertise on their bodies, whilst in turn they signal to others. The incentives are different, though the incentives similar.
There's a reason that so many of us see beauty in Thoreau.
It really isn't. I've done this on like 4 different Android TV devices and it's like 30 minutes of effort at most and you only need to do it once.
If the alternative was a totally open Linux box you'd almost certainly spend way more time than that tweaking config and stuff (even if you'd mentally categorize than as "voluntary" time for a hobby and therefore not actually wasted).
I'll happily take that insignificant one time setup for a 100% ad-free experience (including Youtube) with a customizable launcher I can adjust to my liking on a 4K Android TV stick that cost me $39.99. And automate basically any function via ADB, including remapping the branded Netflix/HBO/etc buttons on the remote (I have a "Free TV" button that now goes to .... Stremio which I still laugh at occasionally).
I couldn't do any of that on a $199.99 Apple TV. An N100 Mini PC would cost 6x as much as I spent on an Onn stick, plus I'd need to buy a remote and would have to work around a keyboard/mouse centric UI and couldn't navigate with HDMI-CEC either.
I can't even think of anything I'm unable to do with my Custom Launcher/Sideload/Remote ADB Android TV setup like OP. It's just about the perfect couch-based interface. It does what I tell it without distractions and fades into the background completely like any good UI should, so I can focus on what I'm actually watching instead.
I think it all started with a guy making a plex app [0] in rust thereby reducing the launch times of the app.
Then lots of projects started coming up including replacing the browser itself. All these projects seems to be created with claude code.
This is truly a golden age of Personal software.
[0] Reddit Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1x043yp/i_used_...
The first version of Google TV, an internal demo, was based on MythTV. We had MythTV running against some HDHomeRun tuners, then a transparent webview (a fork of Petit Four-era Android builds since it had great d-pad nav support) running on top of it.
"Apps" were pure JavaScript gadgets, inspired by iGoogle, with custom DOM methods for anything TV-specific: channel changes, tuning info, and so on. With the MythTV demo, we managed to make some pretty fun hybrid apps that did things like pull up related stories about the TV show you were watching (maybe sounds lame now but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time: an iframe over my TV show, holy shit what can't I do with this). Adware was never discussed; we wanted to be a free and hackable OS for the living room.
After heading in this "widgets" direction for about a year, Android had been released and we strongly believed in a strategy based on it, so made the pivot. It was pretty tough, and educational, trying to build consumer products at Google in this era and without any singular unifying vision across the company. I longed for a top-down dictator like Steve Jobs who could cut the crap.. (even if we were judged to be the crap!)
I'm guessing the ad-infested OS from OP has some lineage back to the original Google TV, but of course I'm sure it's barely recognizable now.
MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.
Not a problem if you never stream anything from other devices, but we do from time to time, so I was forced to revert everything to stock.
[0] https://www.celsoazevedo.com/replace-launcher-chromecast-goo...
That's what I always do and except on one cheap Hisense with a shitty built-in Google TV, there's no lag or stuttering and I see Projectivy immediately without ever triggering the default launcher (unless I want to open it for some reason).
For Input, I've a Logitech K400 via USB dongle on the TV and Xbox controllers via Bluetooth.
Is there a slight lag? Yes. Are the majority of games I want enjoy on the couch and play on the big TV playable? Absolutely. I wouldn't play CoD but many many games just work well even with a Little lag.
PS: can also recommend playnite, giving a unified tv/Controller experience with access to multiple game stores , local Games and emulator support.
Plugged in a 15 dollar gigabit adapter and now I can stream anything instantly from my LAN with super low latency, even with huge uncompressed media.
Highly recommended upgrade, for sticks without extra USB-3.0 port, best option is a cheap USB-C dock for tablet/laptop with Gigabit ethernet. Amazon sells various versions for <$20 these days.
At the moment the best option still seems to be a somewhat old mini-PC with Linux and Plasma Bigscreen. But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle, and airmouse remote, and Waydroid if you want a more typical TV box experience.
Little tip, but at least with my AMD card and the right DP->HDMI cable you can get CEC tunneled over Display Port without the dongle.
It uses Claude to connect to your TV and clean up ads and other junk.
I'm not a fan of AI in general, largely because I am convinced it's going to be economically devastating, but things like this actually bring me some joy.
Another one is the Vibe coded Adobe suite [1].
A lot of hardware and software companies don't seem to realize they're sowing the seeds for their own destruction.
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/10/11/theres-a-vibe-cod...
But it doesnt matter. Normal people dont care about this shit, only the Hacker News types. My wife put her foot down when I said we should get dumb TV, and we ended up getting a Samsung even though I wanted to avoid Korean companies (as they have worst privacy features), mainly because it was in our budget and available
A 65" 4K TCL is about $400-500. Cheapest equivalent monitor is over $2k that I can find.
Each has their own installation instructions, but the article consolidates them into a list of adb commands. If that's a method you like, it's nice to have everything in one place, but they can still be installed the normal way.
And they shared this collected data with a bunch of third-parties.
In other words, they do the same stuff that OLED panel that you recommended never, ever be connected to the Internet does.
But don't take my word for it:
The web experience on a desktop/laptop is pretty much the only tolerable experience.
And I appreciate that the alternative clients try and address the poor UX of the default but I still find so many of the basic behaviors missing or inconsistent.
I can't offer anything better but I find it curious.
I'm on Moonfin right now. I tested a few of them. They all looked super good, but turned out they were all super buggy. Unusable, even. Moonfin is OK.
Yet still, I come back to Jellyfin all the time. It's missing some bells and whistles, but it works in a predictable way.
You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.
What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.