Not just that. Broadband connection for things will become so cheap in the future that it could become essentially free one day so it can be subsidized by the businesses depending on it. 5G aside, It is believable that in a few years most home broadband routers, even tightly closed ones, could open a channel anyway using a fraction of the bandwidth for exclusive use by devices so that only closed source drivers will be able to instruct WiFi chips to see and use it. The catch being that there won't be any means of preventing the TV or other devices from going online, short of opening them and removing physically the network hardware. I believe we badly need alternative (Open Source, auditable, trustworthy) operating systems for smart TVs too. Next will be cars, fridges, etc. Pretty much everything.

Yeah...mine shows a nag about not accepting the online agreements, connecting the TV to the network, etc. Hasn't stopped me from using it as a display for the inputs I was using on my previous non-smart TV.

Ew.

The statement, "just don't connect it to the network" still stands. If something requires a connection, return it. It's clearly anti-consumer and will do nefarious things (which we already know Samsung does).

And then you won't have a TV, and Samsung will keep making these abusive TVs without giving one single fuck about your return.

So give it a network connection for initial setup then take it away?

So you'll still have all the adverts, they just don't update?

I had to do that. My Samsung couldn’t leave “demo mode” or whatever without going online first and would restart itself every hour. I just let it register and blocked it from coming out my router. It stays quiet like that. I believe removing the wifi showed some nag when booting that I had to deal with. Real scummy stuff.

Buy it from a place with free returns. Then if it insists on showing cached ads after the network is pulled (or any other undesirable behavior), just return it. This won't help you find a better model, but it will save you from needing to research these obscure details in too much depth.

. o O ( I wonder if some hostile antifeatures go away if you buy a TV in the US but then activate it from an EU IP address ).

> they just don't update?

That's a cursed scenario...

Run it through pihole to block the ad networks? Or just whitelist hostnames/addresses one by one until the setup works.

Not exactly a user-friendly option, but an option nonetheless.

Annoying, but at least it isn't feeding your information in to the weird ad-driven panopticon (we'll leave that to the content providers!)

dns block it at the router

Yeah I was afraid my new TV would do that. I was planning to return it if it did because I had bad experience with Vizio and TCL smart TVs breaking updates before (I'm an Apple TV user).

I can confirm that Roku firmware works great without the internet and doesn't nag. I just turn it on and switch to my Apple TV.