Not trying to be a Sony Bravia shill but I have two Sony Bravia XBR (X950G and X900H) TVs. Neither of these has ever attempted to show me an advertisement. They aren't the newest versions nor the most expensive. I don't include YT ads since those are YT generated.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Get 'em while that last:
“In a major industry shift announced in early 2026, Sony is entering a strategic partnership where TCL will take a 51% stake in its home entertainment division, including Bravia TVs, with a new joint venture expected to be fully operational by April 2027”
It’s the end of an era for the Sony Bravia.
This is misleading.
TCL will only be manufacturing the panel. Sony will continue to perform integration.
From what I read earlier beyond the single line you quoted, this seems to be for the panels and not the processors/boards.
We're all going to be buying computer monitors to watch TV soon.
Don't let your TV be on the internet.
changing the TV's DNS servers or disconnecting it from the internet entirely.
Chiming in as an Australian budget VIDAA owner.
I spotted that this TV attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings. I implemented a port 53 (DNS) redirect so those queries get resolved by my local server.
I also figured out which servers are serving up ads/tracking. I fired an email to Pete and got them added to his list. You're welcome. I'm guessing a pi-hole would work with it.
https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php
I didn't install the latest update, and probably never will. My TV contacts the unruly ACR servers, but the later firmware probably contacts nexxen.
I fear the day these fucks figure out DOH or something. Not sure there's any way to suppress or intercept that, short of just blocking all external traffic to the TV.
For other readers here is a tutorial to do DNS capture into a pihole server or other DNS
People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope
attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.
Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they're assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember... users who don't really understand what they're doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It's not always evil.
Thank you for this. I will check later today on my own tv to see what its pulling in the background.
Fuck that. heh.
I use a TV for my computer monitor and it's perfect. I do not use any of the TV features. And it pisses me off when something happens to lose my signal and it switches over into TV mode because it autoplays some free channel that spouts fascist nonsense. I have to poke around for the remote (which is always around but never close because I only need it every month or few months) so I can cut that shit off as soon as possible. heh
Any video I need to watch happens via my computer, thanks, where I'm in control.
They can’t force me if I don’t connect it to the internet
I can imagine future TVs refusing to work without an always-on internet connection.
I can imagine them shipping TVs with built in cellular data just for ads
... and exactly 2 weeks later modders will have figured out how to get their hands on the yummy free unlimited data inside it.
SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP don't let them hear this!
…what am I saying? And idea like that they've had, just waiting for the price to be right. heh
It's going right back to the shop, if that's the case. Not accepting an HDMI input means it's not fit for purpose.
Or having prebaked fallback ads.
I saw an unboxing for a TV for a Chinese market and it refused to start until the owner paired it with a Chinese phone otp for "age verification" 😉
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I had a 65" Hisense TV for just over a year, and a firmware update bricked it. It was stone dead, and Hisense wouldn't even try to repair it. So I spent a little extra money and got a Samsung instead. And once it was set up, I turned off its wifi...just in case.
Hisense can eat a bag o' dicks.
My first 4K TV was a Samsung. The last update broke eARC making the Samsung home theater in a box thing I had much more inconvenient.
My 2nd (free in a raffle) Samsung 4K TV connected to my WiFi without a password when a guest in the house casted a video to it despite on setup refusing to consent to any web things due to privacy concerns. Kinda interesting and concerning.
I haven't bought a TV in a decade. What kind of setup is required? Why would it need internet access for that?
LG work out the box without internet.
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We need openWrt for TVs :(
This. Have played with similar devices in the past and I was surprised how many of these devices are running standard Linux kernel with some custom engineered distros. Projects like Buildroot, OpenWRT, Busybox and a few others are what the vendors use to roll their own builds.
A few of them agressively lock down the bootloaders in an attempt to (try to) prevent people from owning the device they've paid retail price for. Many don't really bother. The good news is, that such measures are relatively easy for experts to circumvent and break down. This, of course, is not cheap, but needs to happen only once, often for more than a single model. Some kind of bounty-based system could provide incentive and financing for such efforts.
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I find myself wondering just how complicated TVS could actually be before it's no longer possible to hijack the display signal that's fed to the display
Unlike with cars, TVS seem simple enough that a sufficiently motivated novice could modify a cheap TV to circumvent these bullshit features. If they ever started requiring internet connections to start or use these, i think enough people would be bothered by it that there would probably be a secondary market of modified hardware
As with most enshitifications, the question will ultimately be one of complacency of the average consumer.
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I have a Hisense that I bought late last year and have never connected it to the internet (I stream everything through my PS5) and boyhowdy does that TV take every chance it gets to let me know I'm not connected lol
IF YOU BUY ANY TV, DO NOT CONNECT IT TO THE INTERNET.
Televisions were never meant to be smart devices. There's no reason your screen should have software of its own. That would be like your face having a mind of its own.
Ummm,
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I bought my last TV about 7 years ago. I got a "small" 38" TV. As I was checking out, the cashier asked me if I'd rather upgrade to a larger model from the same brand with smart features for 10 dollars less. I flat out told him 'no' and that was probably the best decision I made that year.
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They are cheap for a reason...
It’s true that things are worse on a cheap tv but even if you buy a $5000+ flagship model it will still have advertising baked into the os
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