> Assuming that you tested that this happening only during commercials. When you google the issue, it seems like a lot of other people are saying that it unmutes in general after 5 seconds, which matches what happened to you from the video.
While that is stupid and I would return such a defective product, there's a difference between "my TV's mute is broken" and "my TV specifically unmutes itself during ads".
"I'm about to unmute the TV and watch an advert from Amazon"
[0] https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/12/27/netflix-tells-wr...
> But if I press the mute button real hard, it mutes. Same with unmute: if I press it real hard it unmutes. If I press the button normally, it mutes for 2-3 seconds and then unmutes on its own.
Another issue when a soundbar is connected:
https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D56Q0000DkFJCFSQ4/fi...
> Same behavior. None of my FireTVs will stay muted when hooked to a soundbar via HDMI/earc. This is software related to a FireTV update in the last year as it is happening on all firetvs despite the soundbar bar and did not have this behavior when initially set up.
Edit: How about a rental in a building with ads in the elevators?
[1]: https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF
Or even a nice appliance-tier solution. I want to buy an HDMI splitter that when it sees an ad coming through Input 1, switches to Input 2. Switches back to Input 1 when its over.
For folks still stuck with cable TV this is Nobel Prize territory.
I got a Kindle Oasis as a gift /w lockscreen ads, and it's unbelievable how annoying and embarrassing they are, and many are for AI-generated gibberish. And that's a Kindle. Now just imagine living with an Amazon TV...
Customer obsession at its finest.
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Note: I haven't tried it for ~3 months, I just stopped watching Prime content. With as easy as this is, it's easier to use other providers that don't do this, and their user experience was already pretty bad. Searching through for something to watch and then finding I have to pay $15 to watch it is so annoying.
I love paying for content. I'm not going to support double-dipping.
You can't.
Really, it's baffling.
I do have a fairly large Samsung TV, but I would NEVER EVER connect it to the internet. HDMI only is the way to go, with your own device driving the interface. I basically use it as a monitor, even when watching video.
The trend in life seems to follow the trend in s/w development: there seems to be an effort to maximize external dependancies.
This isn't going to end well...
You can loiter a bit more though if you like, it looks like there will be plenty more stops for Shittopia. (We might in fact be on the Shittopia Line.)
At least on the software side I can focus on the small web and applications from independent folks with no intent to abuse.
Hardware is much harder. I’m glad I can still disconnect my TV from the network and watch everything through an Apple TV, but I don’t expect that to last forever. A TV that refuses to work without an internet connection or Apple slipping further into “services” and crapping ads everywhere like Amazon and Google are both futures that seem perfectly plausible. I hate it so much.
I noticed that FireTV Sticks now autoplay ads on launch without an option to disable that. For such setups, I'm likely to replace them with Apple TV (not perfect, but better) that aren't naked ad-delivery platforms like they're trying to copy something from a dystopian sci-fi movie.
Also, it wouldn't work on my main setup because it uses a soundbar that's only controllable by an IR remote. I would be willing to bet that it sends an HDMI CEC signal to unmute stereo receiver volume levels too.
The marketers at a company that buys advertising do not get their bonuses because of effective, accurate ad measurement. They get their bonuses because their advsrtising "worked". How do they know it worked? By hiring a third party wo uses statistics to estimate an almost entirely unobservable thing: how many widgets were bought that would not have been bought in the absence of advertising.
Well guess what, there are many vendors that offer these "measurement" services, and when you debut a provably more accurate measurement methodology than your prior one, but the results are lower than the less accurate one? You lose business to companies that give better (i.e., higher) results.
This is easily solvable: ad measurement should be accountable to the CFO and not the CMO. The CFO cares if advertising wastes money; the CMO gets their bonus if the advertising "worked".
A few years ago, Freakonomics Radio [1, 2] had a very good 2-part overview of recent ad research done by the University of Chicago [3] and other academics. Their research, which is divorced from the same misaligned incentives I cited above found that ad effectiveness is vastly overstated. At that year's advertising research industry conferences, where some of the academics were invited to speak, they were pilloried by the research heads at some of the biggest people in the ad research industry.
It's all super fucked.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
[2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
[3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-power-tv-advertising...
I'll add a little more: the vast majority of statistical tools used in ad measurement are basic basic things that have zero hope of extracting causal relationships between ad exposure and behavior. Even many of the more advanced tools have issues with the fact that advertising is usually targeted in one way or another, thereby creating a bias in your test group.
Add to that the fact tbat advertisers commonly time their ad spending with times of peak seasonality or big sales, thereby creating all kinds of endogeneity problems gor a would be statistical researcher. Third, consider the walled gardens: so much advertising happens in them that it is nearly impossible to get a full view of whether your control group is truly unexpsoed to advertising. Fourth, there are vast difficulties in linking online behavior to brick-and-mortar purchase outcomes. Finally, consider the notion that the advertisements qnd advertised products themselves change quite frequently: the results of one ad study are not necessarily applicable to future behavior.
As i said: we really have no idea beyond very basic notions what truly works and what doesn't. Some advertising very likely works; others very likely dont.
[1]: https://relaxoplayer.com - join waitlist for link to beta apk.
There is a tool available for chromecast that works very well, but my ideal solution would be an app I can load onto the shield that auto-mutes during ads and un-mutes when the ads are finished.
If I didn't already have my hands full with side projects, I'd dig into this on my own time.
I'm in the process of releasing a video player with adblocker for live IPTV on android that can definitely auto-mute the whole adbreak for you if you watch the stream in the player (see my previous comment for link).
But if you are suggesting a system-wide mute triggered by a dormant app as another live broadcast plays in some official app then that's easier in some respects and harder in others because people need to trust the data is accurate. Once we have enough users sharing accurate adbreak data (powered by accurate software with human corrections) we can offer a system-wide mute for ads in any other app playing those known broadcasts.
People used to hack on this stuff decades ago. I suspect it's not as common now because for those who care (said hackers) they already cobble together some ad blockers and pi-holes. But ad delivery has stained so much daily life now they've sweetened the pot for a new generation of, not ad blockers, but... video shields?
I might have talked myself into tinkering on this. Curious what tools HN recommends.
A guy at work mentioned using one of these on a football game and it reduced the runtime to like 45 minutes.
Apps like https://overseerr.dev make it incredibly simple for household members to request content.
Super universal.
So: Is it a bug, or is it a deliberate "feature"? Is there any evidence, one way or the other?
Ultimately in a fight between a trillion dollar brainwasher and me, I'm going to lose.
As you say, not that Walmart is better than Amazon, but it would be nice to have some more competition to Amazon.
That was more akin to renting a house though, rather than borrowing money to buy a house.
Even if you are not a homeower, you still are not free and clear...
Hacker News subtitle
But if someone can legitimately take away property because you don't pay them, I don't think it's yours.
So you're right - it may not be a nefarious thing related to ads, but for people like me, that's an irrelevant detail. I don't even want to think about buying a TV that can't get volume control right.
How many of them can't get basic volume control to work?
Yes, the fact that modern TVs are so filled with SW is one of the reasons I haven't upgraded my TV in 15 years. More importantly, can anyone explain to me the benefit of these TVs (other than display) compared to the old ones? What smartness in modern TVs can I get that's important to me that I can't get via a Roku or similar device?
> Hardware isn’t inherently bug-free and the “quality” of old hardware is usually due to its narrow scope of functionality;
Same question as above: Why not have narrow scope? What expanded scope in new TVs is actually something I would care for?
And I've never come across a "HW" TV that failed at the very basics. I've never had to return one for a recall. One of the things that makes adding SW to any device really crappy is the "ship now, fix later" mentality. And a lot of things often never get fixed (e.g. my old, ATI video card had features that were broken in Linux, and they never got around to fixing it - never bought ATI/AMD cards since).
> the ability to (theoretically trivially) modify software means that hardware can/does become better/more capable.
Until the manufacturer stops supporting it. I recall when I bought my (dumb) TV, smart TVs were just coming out, and most of my friends opted for smart ones ("it already has Netflix"). Fast forward less than 3 years, and they all switched to Roku or something similar because the TV apps either sucked or stopped working.
Owning a TV is something one should be able to do for over 10 years. Can you guarantee that most of the nice features on your TV will work more than 10 years from now?
Likewise, I should be able to buy a 10+ year old used TV and have basic stuff just work without having to register, etc. If it doesn't, then these manufacturers are simply adding much more waste to the ecosystem than the dumb ones did.
(As you can guess, I have often bought old, used TVs and never had trouble with them).
I think this is the crux of our confusion; you may not desire the expanded functionality but others certainly do. You can suggest that manufacturers force unwanted functionality onto consumers but I have trouble accepting that premise unless admit our own complicity; maybe I’m part of that problem though.
> Owning a TV is something one should be able to do for over 10 years.
Again, that’s your preference and the choice you’ve already made; I choose to not set arbitrary time limits but instead make decisions on purchasing new TVs (and other non-essential products) depending on the available technologies and toys—and, of course, the girth (if any) of my wallet . We have different preferences, we make decisions based on those preferences, yet—as far as I can tell—we are both satisfied with our choices; why complain about a system capable of implementing a bug that doesn’t affect us?
> Can you guarantee that most of the nice features on your TV will work more than 10 years from now?
Almost certainly I can. There are both massive and minuscule communities, aftermarket solutions, and DIY makers/hackers/activists that focus on all kinds of technologies and products dating back over a hundred years. The original iPod is 25 years old and yet there are still folks making firmware updates for it. The Commodore 64 has a multitude of projects, products, communities, and marketplaces to keep the product alive — nearly fifty years after it was released! There are literally thousands of examples. Interestingly, and calling back to my original point, these kinds of secondary markets are only possible because of those products’ use of a combination of quality underlying hardware and user-updatable/modifiable software—well, and that nerds like us dig breaking things.
Only you know what is important to you, but I like automatic volume levels, for example. I stayed at AirBnB a couple years ago, which had some commodity TV (Vizio?) w/o automatic volume and learned they still do loud commercials. My home TV keeps volume at the same audible level during commercials. Same with auto-brightness, I get nice image all through the day and night illumination levels in the living room. Voice control is handy when you don't live alone so other people may have a remote at the moment or it could take some time to find.
Apps on my 6 y.o. TV still work just fine, I don't need to attach devices to a TV, which neatly hangs on a wall without things hanging from it. The TV is running Android so it will keep updating from the Google's app store as long as the app vendor keeps maintaining it.
Auto-brightness - I put in a lot of effort in setting the brightness/contrast, and would really not want some SW messing it up.
Voice control - couldn't care less (and yes, I do own voice assistants and use them).
If you don't want auto-brigntness you don't have to enable it. I have a hunch that a TV sets it better (just for the reason that you are unlikely to adjust every time you turn lights on and off) but tastes do differ indeed.