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Samsung To Roll Out In-TV Ads To Legacy Displays Via Software Update
An anonymous reader writes: According to an insider at Samsung's growing advertising team in New York, the second-largest consumer tech manufacturer in the world is planning to retrofit older network-connected TVs to display tiled ads via a software update. The South Korean company, which has seen a 20.9% decline in television sales in Q1 of 2016 under fierce competition from China, has included 'baked' ads into the interface of its recent TV offerings, and also experimented with injecting ads into users' streamed video, transmitting voice commands to a third party -- and, ironically, battling Android over its own AdBlocking technology.
"The South Korean company, which has seen a 20.9% decline in television sales in Q1 of 2016 under fierce competition from China..." So they give consumers MORE reasons NOT to buy their TVs?!!!
I'm done with ads. I will pirate ad free. Forever and ever. You can't make me like your ads. I am not watching nor participating. Arrest me now fuckheads. I hope all ad companies die and I hope all companies who support ads die. Find another way to make money or fuck off forever.
The nasty thing about upgradeable firmware is that it effectively means that hardware is governed by all the various nasty terms, conditions, EULAs, licensed-not-solds, and subject-to-change-without-notice that software is.
It's times like this when Stallman's vociferous demand for nothing less than fully free software as a necessary condition of user control looks more like lucid foresight and less like blinkered monomania. The issue was largely dormant back when firmware upgrades were hard and internet connections were the exception rather than the rule; but now it is eminently practical for a vendor to extend their control over something they supposedly sold to you more or less in perpetuity.
They're at least one-upping Google. Samsung makes you pay for it, stuffs it full of ads anyway. They're even stuffing ads into older devices you already paid full price for fair and square.
And to complete the idiocy, they can't figure out why sales are down.
Depends what they do with it. If they sell ads to sell you a less expensive TV, maybe a lot of people could jump in. If they sell me a 60" LCD 3DTV for 199$, I could accept the ads.
All this does is fuel a death spiral to the bottom. Before you know it every TV is $199 and buying a display that does not demand an Internet connection, constant data collection (e.g. cyber stalking) and ad pushing are no longer for sale at any price.
This very same thing that happened with the app stores. Everything must be free or token cost because that's what people expect. Before you know it the entirety of the business model for software is indistinguishable from spy/mal/ad ware. Those left willing to pay cost are then summarily ignored by the market.