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The Future of Freeview ?

I know that on my sony google tv you can turn off the google smarts stuff and only have apps/inputs and just not connect it to the internet after that.


Out of interest, have you looked at your network to see if it really is totally disconnected from the internet?

I've read some reports (not at all sure how accurate they are) that some smart TVs only pretend to disconnect (when done through the TV menu) and in reality they carry on sending viewing data, and so target ads based on viewing. Be interesting to know for sure whether a Sony smart TV with connectivity disabled really does turn it all off.
 
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Oh I haven’t turned off any of the google smarts stuff as it’s much better than the Samsung/LG smart tvs i’ve used - it’s one of the main reasons I bought a sony tv.
 
Samsung and LG are often quoted as being the TVs with the most pervasive data acquisition, perhaps because both Samsung and LG have their own ad companies and both Samsung and LG effectively subsidise the cost of their TVs because of the revenue their ad companies make from their TVs.
 
Out of interest, have you looked at your network to see if it really is totally disconnected from the internet?

I've read some reports (not at all sure how accurate they are) that some smart TVs only pretend to disconnect (when done through the TV menu) and in reality they carry on sending viewing data, and so target ads based on viewing. Be interesting to know for sure whether a Sony smart TV with connectivity disabled really does turn it all off.
If in doubt assume the worst. What you are saying seems like perfectly nasty behaviour one should expect from these greedy corps.
 
Professional displays are just dumb monitors, what little software they do have is for integration, management and monitoring. But they do come at a cost, but equally are built to higher standards with duty cycles to withstand being used most/all the time.

Example could be NEC E series (E = Entry), a 32" IPS would typically be between £400-500.

It you have the knowhow, connecting a consumer smart TV onto a network or WiFi segment with very tight network rules would probably cheaper but would have the overhead of maintenance of the custom network setup.
That's what I have now, they're good.

NEC MultiSync E657Q 65" E Series UHD Monitor / TV
 
Don't buy a digital signage display to use as a living room TV - they're designed for a completely different market. They are built to be powered on 24x7 and to be bright, the performance in low light situations, quality of details in shadows etc. is going to be terrible.

A normal TV not connected to your Wi-Fi will be a much better choice, and if it won't work without an Internet connection (and this wasn't made clear at the point of sale) then send it back.
 
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Don't buy a digital signage display to use as a living room TV - they're designed for a completely different market. They are built to be powered on 24x7 and to be bright, the performance in low light situations, quality of details in shadows etc. is going to be terrible.

A normal TV not connected to your Wi-Fi will be a much better choice, and if it won't work without an Internet connection (and this wasn't made clear at the point of sale) then send it back.
Completely agree, you also lose the ability for frame interpolation to over come motion blurring on LCDs (due to them being sample and hold), plus deinterlacing and up-scaling may be pretty basic with some bad artifacts.
 
Don't buy a digital signage display to use as a living room TV - they're designed for a completely different market. They are built to be powered on 24x7 and to be bright, the performance in low light situations, quality of details in shadows etc. is going to be terrible.

A normal TV not connected to your Wi-Fi will be a much better choice, and if it won't work without an Internet connection (and this wasn't made clear at the point of sale) then send it back.
You say that, but the NEC E657Q I have works great.
It even has adaptive brightness and all sorts of whistles and bells (I turned off most of them).
 
Don't buy a digital signage display to use as a living room TV - they're designed for a completely different market. They are built to be powered on 24x7 and to be bright, the performance in low light situations, quality of details in shadows etc. is going to be terrible.

A normal TV not connected to your Wi-Fi will be a much better choice, and if it won't work without an Internet connection (and this wasn't made clear at the point of sale) then send it back.

The problem seems to be finding a smart TV that can be made dumb, without losing basic monitor functionality, or being plagued with nag screens persuading me to allow it to connect.

Be very useful to have a reliable source for information on TVs that do allow use as a monitor. I've been looking around but either there's a dearth of reliable information about this or my internet search fu is lacking.
 
You say that, but the NEC E657Q I have works great.
It even has adaptive brightness and all sorts of whistles and bells (I turned off most of them).
Yeh the entry level professional displays, like the NEC E series are a step up from a domestic screen without going all the way to silly brightness and durability. Whilst entry level professional screens can be used for digital signage they're more usually targeted by the vendors to meeting room applications.
 
Yeh the entry level professional displays, like the NEC E series are a step up from a domestic screen without going all the way to silly brightness and durability. Whilst entry level professional screens can be used for digital signage they're more usually targeted by the vendors to meeting room applications.


Many thanks for that, I've been looking at the NEC E series (Curry's Business stock them) and looking at the specs they do look very much as if they are just high end monitors, complete with speakers, a remote, various I/O features (including an Ethernet port) and USB port(s) with media player functionality. They look for all the world like a smart TV without any of the streaming and data acquisition stuff.

We don't need a big screen (largest we could physically and comfortably fit in our living room would be around 50", and that would be pushing it), so the 43" NEC Multisync E438 looks to be pretty much ideal for us. Not cheap, at a tad under £480 (shows how much smart TVs are subsidised by data acquisition value, perhaps!), but given that our 32" Sony is still going strong after 15 years in all probability I won't last long enough to need to replace it . . .
 
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It's been an interesting read and I agree with both sides, having both worked in the media and also retail you also see the story from a broader point of view.

Both Freesat and Freeview having licences lasting to 2030 (maybe 2035) where the government will review them, I know recently some broadcasters renewed their capacity deal with SES who operate the Astra satellite which feeds the Sky/Freesat channels. I know the commercial channels also renewed their contract with Arqiva who operate the terrestrial transmitter network, so it's going to be here to stay for a while yet.

For the broadcasters, TV and radio still makes a lot of money, advertisers are still spending with them and want to broadcast more ads (a recent review stopped this from happening) the linear outlets are still popular with younger age groups and I'm still amazed how many people just "want" Freeview.

I think the mobile providers are more focused on getting their 5G sorted (you also forget that a lot of the Freeview transmitter network host mobile cells as well) and I believe mmWave is up next for auction in the UK.

The main problem is (as always) awareness, even with all the MVNO providers we have, most customers in my last shop still only knew the four legacy providers, the same goes for streaming services, some were convinced BBC programmes came from Netflix.

In niche areas of the internet, like this forum or other big mobile forums, the need for Freeview/Freesat linear and non-demand content may not be needed but "most" people aren't us, some don't even know what FTTP is, even my colleagues in the media or the shop!

The time will come, but it's going to be a longer transition than we all think.

As for the privacy argument, that ship sailed ages ago, if you think having a SMART TV is bad, you've already signed up for this forum, have a mobile and done much more by shopping online etc etc, you can take steps but most of us aren't as privacy savvy as we'd like to think we are.
 
The privacy aspect is certainly something that it seems very few are either aware of or care about. For years I've been running Pi Hole with regularly updated black/white lists, I block Google, Meta and Amazon as a matter of course, use a reasonably OK VPN (Nord) a fair bit of the time, use Start Page as my default search engine (with ads etc disabled), I've disabled telemetry in Windows (getting a lot harder to do as time goes on) and I don't use overly intrusive social media (so no Facebook, Twitter etc).

I try my damnedest to reject data acquisition on websites (using Ghostery) but still end up having to manually delete the sneaky stuff that gets through every now and again. The downside (not sure it really is a downside though) is that I get vanilla versions of sites that tailor their content based on what they know about users. Surprising how different sites like YouTube look when they don't know what you've watched previously.

A few weeks ago we were having dinner with some friends (a bit older than us - he's approaching 80 now). The conversation turned to their surprise at the coincidences they'd noticed with TV adverts, where an advert would often pop up not long after they'd been talking about something similar. When I mentioned that this may be related to the smart speaker in the room they were both a bit shocked.

I don't think either of them had the faintest idea of how these things work, and certainly didn't realise that they are really pretty dumb, and have to send audio back to their masters to decode if they think it's been preceded by the keyword (and they aren't that great at even recognising the keyword). Was funny seeing how quickly they both jumped up to unplug the thing, though! I think they genuinely thought that this cheap little unit had everything needed to work inside, when in reality they are very basic, and have almost no speech recognition built in (nothing more than being able to recognise the keyword).

I'm probably fighting a losing battle when it comes to keeping the stuff I want to remain private away from the companies intent on taking it, but then I grew up during the Cold War, when the fear of the state tapping phones was one of the things that marked out the more evil side of the Soviet Bloc. Nowadays millions of people voluntarily accept their conversations being listened to by global corporations without so much as a murmur
 
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