It would be a gold mine for them. People always forget the optional agreements and don’t want to find where to turn off the faucet of personal data or even know what that means.
I have brought this up while installing TVs for my job and I either get a “wtf, help me fix” or [blank stare] “why should I care?” reactions. Mostly the latter and they are all over the age of 60.
Gotta find a way to connect with the old people now that cable is going the way of the dinosaur.
The regulators allowing this should be shot.
I can put 22 billion Gokus in my ass and Fox still won’t offer me my own show, but yet they’re buying Dragon Ball? Like, tf they gunna do with that shit?
I don’t have any Roku devices luckily, but is there anyway to remove the google, roku, or amazon OS from a smartTV yet? I hope someone can crack these smart tv’s and we can install linux on them in the future to eliminate the ads and backdoors.
If you auto update your tv, you most likely are SOL for jailbreaking a smart tv. I have tried two different TVs from LG and Samsung ending in the device being bricked. This is slowly becoming a pet project that I am realizing I am way out of my depth with.
If you can replace the mainboard and just use the panel, that would be awesome.
No. TVs are pretty dang cheap these days because they subsidize the up front cost with turning them into ad machines. If you want it without the features, you have to pay a higher up front cost.
Cable is dying hence Murdoch needs a new way to broadcast his propaganda to old people.
If the big old government needs to approve this deal then FOX is in big trouble! /s
Does anyone know how to download content off those weird Roku channels? I’d like to download a bunch of stuff off of one before they (I assume) shut it down.
Time to throw out the roku I never use.
My only tv is an almost 10 year old Roku tv… Guess it’s time to finally dig into the settings and figure out if I can bypass the home screen and get it to just boot to a raspberry pi or something
I can’t wait for free movie site levels of ads.
Time to throw out the Roku I never had
Capturing all media distribution.
This is the same Fox that owns Fox News. So now Roku’s advertising push can include a side of misinformation.
Side?
I was just at my father in laws house and he has roku, it already does that. He went from voting for Harris to last week saying “Trump is the smartest president we’ve ever had”.
Sounds like dementia.
Fox news is specifically designed to target the elderly as their critical thinking skills are fading, targeting their most triggerable fears. Fox Brain is a known phenomena, one which can usually be reversed if easy access to Fox News is removed, as seen in this documentary.
I myself was able to stop my mother from going down that path with the help of a browser add-on that let me block right-wing rage bait news from showing up in her YouTube feed, which had an almost immediate and lasting effect.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like Roku’s fault.
Dementia doesn’t automagically make one rabid for Trump.
There seems to be a pretty strong correlation though
Same with the level of propaganda.
One of the things on my FOSS wishlist is an open source alternative to Roku/GoogleOS/Apple TVos, etc. there are lots of FOSS apps on these various platforms, but those apps almost always have varying levels of quality and availability across them.
Right now the closest you can really get is media center PC, but what I really need is something relatively plug and play I can send to family members, preconfigured.
Plasma Bigscreen is coming
Looks very promising
Yeah, a jailbroken Roku OS would actually be fantastic. The actual TVs aren’t bad. Roku has actually figured out how to do streaming decently. It just sucks that the entire company seems to be going down the shitter, and they’re determined to drag all of their screens down with them.
I blocked by Roku TV’s telemetry BS with my pi-hole, at least. But that won’t stop them from trying. Having a way to flash a new FOSS/jailbroken OS onto it would be ideal.
Jellyfin is quite great for me right now. Check it out https://jellyfin.org/
Jellyfin is just a media streaming application
Yarr.
Google TV is the least worst option in terms of open source optionality, Apple TV is best for privacy as is
Why tf does everyone trust apple for anything? They’re a pretty awful company.
Because as of now their main financial structure isnt based on selling personal information for ads. They make most there money selling products and services. And I think trust isn’t the right word. Apple is normally the least shitty out of all the shitty big tech companies with modern day convenience.
Because as of now their main financial structure isnt based on selling personal information for ads.
Again, how do you know that? Cook gave a gold bar to trump, they’re not a good company.
No one said Apple was a good company, just better for privacy.
Cook was giving a toddler a shiny for favoritism. That’s pathetic on Trump, not Tim.
Tim is a business man. He was brown nosing so his company doesn’t get fucked by the government.
They’re the only mainstream hardware company that takes user privacy seriously. Bad on right to repair and openness though
Why tf does everyone trust apple for anything? They’re a pretty awful company.
They’re the only mainstream hardware company that takes user privacy seriously
Why do you think that? Is that what you’ve heard or do you know that?
They’re the only truly mainstream company with E2EE backups among other things. iOS is also much more secure than stock android, only Graphene OS is better.
Best solution would probably be a mini PC running a web app dashboard like they do with kiosks. I would tell you to get a rasp pi but they went up in price by quite a bit. You would still have to order it for them and spend a few hours tinkering and installing everything.
Yeah and the experience just wouldn’t be very good. I have a lot of experience with mini PCs auto loading into web dashboards and it never works quite as well as you want it to
As a family we rarely watch “on demand” or live TV. We have a mini hooked up to our TV and sail the seas for shows we want and watch them that way. We have a Roku stick in our bedroom TV and it works great, but if I get the feeling it starts to go all Project 2025 its getting ditched, but I’m in the UK so it’ll be interesting to see how it changes here.
A FOSS alternative would likely be missing or have meh performance from many of the streamers. All the big ones use proprietary codecs that are expensive annual licenses. And even then the streamer controls what various access methods are allowed to see and at what quality. I think netflix still limits web browsers to 720p, for example. And straight web access isn’t great, you want an interface that can ideally be controlled with about 6 - 8 buttons (4 directions, OK, and Back are the minimum) which might require API access to these services, which introduces more access control. Netflix (and maybe others) even have hardware installed at the ISP level that give them a lot of control over individual access as well.
Basically for a full featured FOSS service you’d need to start with getting grants to buy to codec licenses, and then you’d need to hire people just to maintain your relationship with the streaming services to stay in their good graces while they know you’re working against their bottom line.
I feel like Kodi mediacenter app is one of the main things to consider putting on it. Like, booting some Linux and instantly launchung it, so it’s UI is the main UI for user to interact with. It covers most TV usecases of mid 2010s and shines if you have a medialibrary on the network.
But it doesn’t cover occasional web browsing, DRMed videostreaming platforms with their own apps, etc. Worse than that, if we don’t limit it to just Kodi, we’d need some UI to pick apps, swtich apps, etc, and if that’s critical, it’s probably worth it to rip an image of some WebOS, like on LG TVs, or an Android fork like on SmartTV boxes/sticks, whatever is less combatative, and methodically carve out bloat and adware, forming an image of inherently insecure/outdated OS that has the UI thing working right.
Outside of SteamOS idk if Linux (not Android) had slick console/SmartTV-like DEs/system-wide GUIs. But since the problem is on the surface, I believe there are some who tried, or configured/themed their environment to act like it.
😳
Until I read the last sentence, I had no idea what you were talking about. You sound like you could whip up a media center PC easy enough. The machine I’m typing this on doubles as our media center. I have to take the mouse to the coffee table for a movie remote, but that’s the only hassle, and it isn’t a hassle for me.
I feel like the tech is already in place. What do you want that isn’t out there?
Must get very small, very quiet, require zero ongoing maintenance besides an automated update mechanism, and have a single unified UI across all apps that the user can’t easily escape out of.
We need to develop an open, modular or all-in-one NAS with easily enabled services like Jellyfin, Navidrome, Paperless, Home assistant and so on.
With IPv6 we could avoid having to deal with CGNAT, but that could be solved as well.
People have been trying to do that for a long, long time, with various levels of success. There are a dozen options out there to try, but the scope of that kind of project huge compared to a simple streaming appliance OS.
I’d like for something like that to be sponsored by the EU
I’d like it to be sponsored by no one but the people that make it personally.
Yeah but as you said, that didn’t work so far
Coreelec on ugoos am6b+ is the best option if you want the broadest support for formats possible (though notably missing av1)
Htpc with streaming content or stuff like Dolby vision is a licensing nightmare. Some stuff works, some doesn’t, Linux support is trash, etc
What would be amazing is if there was some way to have a fully declarative system that was integrated with a system update UI.
You would upload the config somewhere, your family’s streaming box would see a new update is available and either prompt them to install it or install it for them overnight.
I’ve never used it before but it sounds like you’re sorta describing NixOS? That might be an option to sorta Jerry-rig this idea together.
KDE is able to release plasma bigscreen. That, or frankly gnome would be fine with an air mouse.
For me it’s kind of JellyFin + TailScale, but that probably isn’t going to work with less tech savvy family members or on all devices. Plex works well enough, but then again it’s the same thing that someone has to be responsible for the ‘media’ portion, and a lot of people enjoy live sports, which seems difficult through the open source things.
Yeah JF + Tailscale in one of them $20 Walmart Google TV boxes works well enough but like, I’d love to drop the Google part entirely.
Yeah, I just use the web interface, so I end up having a cheap PC with a keyboard/remote which works pretty well, then it doesn’t matter the TV and get’s away from Google altogether.
Can you configure and ship it?
Oh no! Not the pop-up AD Smart TV company! The only reason to have Roku today IMO is for those cheap Roku subsidized TVs but only when you keep them completely offline. I truly feel bad for all the people who have them connected to the internet but this is pretty on par for Roku.
Both our TVs are Rokus, internet connected and I’ve been too lazy to configure the firewall. Only ads I see are on the home menu screen, and those are slightly annoying but unobtrusive.
Wife’s TV in the bedroom is only used for YT. (I think, that’s her thing.) Mine’s a second monitor for my PC to watched pirated content.
Where and how are people seeing ads?
They’re on the home screen in a banner on the right when you select an app, as sections on the left, in a banner on the bottom left, a banner over the movie in their Roku Channel app and so on.
You may be in a country where they are not serving many ads. They also use ACR on TV models which have it that sends fingerprints of what you watch to a server for personalised ads.
Also Roku live tv has commercial breaks.
On a related note, the Samsung live tv app now runs javascript during its commercial breaks. It locks\disables about ten buttons on your remote so you are forced to wait or “interact” with the commercial.
I expect as Roku grows they’ll soon pick up that feature.
Nope. Don’t like that 🤢
Eh, fuck you Roku I never trusted you.
That’s disappointing.
