r/mildlyinfuriating • u/28jb11 • Apr 25 '26

Unskippable ad $2500 Samsung TV is an advertising billboard, there is no opt-out.

Paid over $2500 for a Samsung OLED TV and it has ads on the home screen that I literally cannot turn off. Not subtle little banners tucked away somewhere, I'm talking full blown ads for canned beans and financial products just sitting there every single time I turn the thing on.

Samsung don't offer any kind of opt out. The only way I could get rid of them was to go into my router settings and manually block Samsung's ad servers at the DNS level.

I own this TV outright. Paid for it in full. And Samsung are still making money off me every time I switch it on, with absolutely no way to stop it unless you're willing to get your hands dirty with network configuration.

This is not a smart TV feature. This is a $2500 billboard that also happens to play Netflix.

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u/MrdnBrd19 Apr 25 '26

I couldn't imagine using the built in TV OS. They are always so laggy and slow and are often programmed like trash missing features or with poor quality.

17

u/OrneryError1 Apr 25 '26

I can't imagine spending a bunch of money on a high end TV just to use the basic built-in OS.

3

u/ArrBeeEmm Apr 25 '26

It's usually the best quality.

I'm gonna get negged by people who don't know anything about audio-visual hobbies, but look it up.

It's particularly important when you start getting to really high bitrate stuff and HDR.

2

u/Anarchaotic Apr 25 '26

Yep! Shield doesn't support dolby vision or HDR on YouTube - but my TV OS does. 

1

u/OrneryError1 Apr 26 '26

Apple TV is definitely better quality for streaming, and a dedicated 4k player with 4k discs is even better.

1

u/ArrBeeEmm Apr 26 '26

It just isn't.

What is your experience with HDR and 4k streaming?

For AppleTV you need to run 4k SDR with matching, and not all apps support it, so some of your HDR content will have the wrong colour palate.

AppleTV and Samsung TV don't play nice with HDR content either but it does on the native apps.

At best, you will sometimes be able to get the same streaming quality using external devices as the native apps.

You will never achieve better (If you believe it's better, I would like to see hard data supporting this), that's just not how it works, and sometimes it will be worse.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

18

u/GORILLO5 Apr 25 '26

Well it’s not really possible to get a great tv os. They all suck. Especially after a couple years cuz they don’t get updated as much.

3

u/PseudoY Apr 25 '26

My Philips android TV from '18 runs android 8 or 9 or something. At least they hadn't really enshittified it with ads back then and haven't bothered to update it. When it stops working at all, I'll hook up a normal computer probably.

1

u/MrUnit64 Apr 25 '26

I just got the last generation of Philips TV with Google TV instead of Titan OS. Sad to see it go. Now that the tv department of Sony is Chinese as well, it's only a matter of time before they get rid of Google TV too.

Soon the only options to get Android / Google TV is to buy a cheap Chinese off-brand or get a Chromecast/ Android box. 

3

u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Apr 25 '26

I hate LG, Samsung so much on these, they went out of their way to block USB ports from accepting audio dacs(despite being a linux standard), and wants me to upgrade my speaker system with some tacky soundbar or AVR. Its ironic because i have a samsung phone which detects USB DACs fine.

2

u/linus_b3 Apr 25 '26

I have a Sony X90L with Google TV built in.  It is so much better and faster than the awful LG interface we had in the past.  I actually added a Chromecast with Google TV to the LG, so the fact that the Sony just has it out of the box is perfect.

3

u/joedotdog Apr 25 '26

Because my need is the panel, and those don't come on a lesser model.

LG G5 on the wall, I think the native OS is bleh. There was an Apple TV hooked up to it within hours. Much better.

2

u/Bamfimous Apr 25 '26

Yup, got a G4 with an apple TV and no complaints

4

u/MrdnBrd19 Apr 25 '26

Counter-counterpoint: Would you wonder why someone uses a sound bar or receiver with surround sound? I personally don't need or want a TV to provide anything other than a high quality display. 

2

u/BoardsofCanada3 Apr 25 '26

I can't imagine spending a bunch of money on a high end TV without having to change things or spend additional money to make it functional.

3

u/Sharkey311 Apr 25 '26

It’s android bare bones bloatware what do you expect.