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After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
buying a 'dumb' tv is getting harder and harder to do...
how long until you are forced to hook a new 'smart' one up to the internet, just to "set it up"--even if you have no plans on ever using the 'smart' features or embedded apps?
Roku tvs already do that, you even need to put in a credit card number for it to work.
You can choose not to connect a Roku TV to the Internet during the initial setup, and you just get access to live TV and the HDMI inputs with (obviously) no streaming channels or updates. It works fine as a dumb TV.
And the credit card thing? That's after you create your account on their website, you can just close the browser window. Or click the button saying "skip" or "later" or whatever it is.
Was helping family with setting it up, I guess I didn't see that
They don't make it obvious at all, in fact they do their best to seem like you can't