I don't understand the need for those. My smart tv is functioning exactly as a computer monitor. It is connected via a display connection to my computer, and nothing else. It does show a brief warning that it is unconnected to the internet whenever I turn it on, but it disappears after 10 seconds or so.

And now look how high $ CRTs are, even the low end ones.

I'll never get rid of mine. You can't get a 0 ms latency TV with zero "features" anymore. And those commercial TVs dont come with remotes. I never liked how flat screens look either. Laggy and awful colors. I'm sure a $3000 oled is great but no thanks

I also despise massive TVs so another win. People with 80" TVs in their living room are just ick.

I got a PS3 and a PS4 so I wouldn't need to use Windows for gaming. That's not an issue anymore, though.

The last console I owned was the Xbox 360. Once I started seeing non-gaming advertisements on my home screen, I lost all interest in the product line.

Sometimes I think internet connectivity was a mistake.

What is the cost comparison?

Link to tv box? And did you have to debload/degoogle it yourself?

The worst is when you're watching something emotionally charged (pissed off or funny as fuck) they'll put an ad exactly when the video hits you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Wait what? I have had ubo installed forever. Why is my shorts still there?!

Wait, they're willing to reward us for using UBO?

Same I just bought a used kindle and jail broken it so now I have a huge library to go through and I have downloaded a bunch of movies and tv shows to my media server as well

So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I've been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.

I had a book once that had a full color spread for the movie in the middle of the book. Obviously this was a skippable ad, but still, it’s inescapable.

If the video refuses to play, just reload the page. That fixes it for me.

AFAIK that is youtube delaying the video stream on purpose because you were supposed to watch ads in that time. If you wait 5-10 seconds it will start playing. For me it happens only on the first video, and autoplay is still instant afterwards. I am gladly waiting out the loading screen than watch ads. Knowing that I probably make google lose money on every view makes the wait even more bearable (I am never logged in, and anyways I always run youtube in private mode, so there's almost no profiling happening)

You could try to change the user-agent to make it a little bit faster (google slows down youtube on firefox btw) or you could try to sue google for unfairness or smth

That is sort of what sponsored segments are, and what sponsorblock is quite effective at dealing with.

If they're injected on the fly at variable time points, it gets harder, but I suspect fingerprinting could work well enough.

Might want to check out morphe(Revanced might be dead?)