Console gaming monitors also set a minimum bar of supporting things like 120hz refresh rates, HDR, enhanced VRR ranges, and lower input+processing+output lag. It's disingenuous to blanket assign any cost difference between a specialized product and a low end product to money made from ads. Yes, ads help subsidize low end TVs but it's nowhere near offsetting most of the overall cost.
The real best way to avoid this is disable it in the settings and filter the device on your network then use something like a Shield TV for the smarts, unless you particularly want your TV to be a console gaming monitor in which case that's a fine substitute just not an initial assumption to avoid ads. So far (and likely forever given the average consumer) it has not been cost effective to serve these ads out of band and jurisdictional requirements on requiring opt-out (or defaulting to opt-in) have been getting better not worse on top of that.
Note on something like the Shield (and regardless of display) if you truly want a 100% ad free experience you will need to unlock the bootloader and either patch the official OS or install a stock Android TV image. Either of these options will disable official access to certain content/qualities but at that point you're probably avoiding those sources anyways as such content sources are themselves covered in ads. That or an OTA adapter for non-smart content in which case you're still going to get ads OTA, but at least not additional ones from your viewing device.
> Console gaming monitors also set a minimum bar of supporting things like 120hz refresh rates, HDR, enhanced VRR ranges, and lower input+processing+output lag. It's disingenuous to blanket assign any cost difference between a specialized product and a low end product to money made from ads. Yes, ads help subsidize low end TVs but it's nowhere near offsetting most of the overall cost.
That's true, but those are features you'll want anyway. You'll want 24-120Hz VRR to watch both cinematic films and content like Gemini at the appropriate framerate, you'll want proper HDR support to get a cinema-like movie quality, and you'll want reduced input lag for when you connect your gaming console to it.
The NVIDIA Shield is actually perfectly ad-free in my experience (I've got the Shield 2019 non-pro), but the recent Android update forced some ads on the new Google TV launcher (luckily you can disable that just fine). I'm not sure what you mean regarding ads otherwise.
> The real best way to avoid this is disable it in the settings and filter the device on your network then use something like a Shield TV for the smarts
That's actually a bad recommendation, because then you'll still have to deal with the painfully slow startup times of a smart TV whenever you want to watch content and the TV actually modifying the image (most cheaper TVs don't offer a mode that avoids sharpening/softening/interpolating/color correcting/etc). And regular TVs often don't allow color calibration with an external probe either.
> That's true, but those are features you'll want anyway.
I mean sure, people WANT them. Generally that's not why they are buying budget Vizio TVs though, it's because they are low cost. The tradeoff is they don't do all of these things. Get a normal TV that does and suddenly the price differential is going to change dramatically.
> The NVIDIA Shield is actually perfectly ad-free in my experience (I've got the Shield 2019 non-pro), but the recent Android update forced some ads on the new Google TV launcher (luckily you can disable that just fine). I'm not sure what you mean regarding ads otherwise.
Well, as you say, when you turn on the device the first thing you get is home screen ads. Taking that back the first thing you get when you turn it on is offers for sponsored apps and then some pre-installed ones anyways, after that initial setup you get home screen ads when you turn it on. Then you get whatever ads are in the service apps themselves. Take for example the default apps Amazon Prime and Hulu, the former gives in app banner ads for paid items based on your ad profile and the latter will push anything from TV like ads down to just service upgrade tie ins depending on your subscription level.
> That's actually a bad recommendation, because then you'll still have to deal with the painfully slow startup times of a smart TV whenever you want to watch content
I recommend either turning the TV on at the store or watching a review before buying it. The TVs I have display the picture quicker than my pg32uqx gaming monitor but there are many TVs that won't. Similarly there are many monitors with garbage initialization times as well. Both monitor and TV are allowed to enter deep sleep mode in my case rather than hard power off, each was a god awful wait otherwise.
> and the TV actually modifying the image (most cheaper TVs don't offer a mode that avoids sharpening/softening/interpolating/color correcting/etc). And regular TVs often don't allow color calibration with an external probe either.
I recently got a dirt cheap $300 43" 4k TV for the Niece/Nephew recently, game mode and a few settings disabled most of the processing. As far as color calibration with an external probe... refer back to the price, I'm not expecting the display pass HDR1000 validation with a 98%+ wide gamut accuracy I'm expecting it to not be $900 and it's not just default built in ads removing 2/3 of the price it's the real market space differentiator - cut corners to save cost.
Assuming streaming TV via Sling/Hulu/ATT TV/YT TV, nVidia shield has a DRM module for watching content, however such hardware attestation compatibility is never a given and can spontaneously break[0]. Otherwise, you can get a TV antenna if you’re fine with the reduced selection that provides.
The general premise, though, is to get a non-smart ‘commercial’ TV without ads and use your own streaming box, maybe even a PC (with a proper OS-GPU-hdmi DRM chain), to control your experience.
The german evening news are available as free live stream via their android TV app, and outside of that, we just don't watch live TV.
But if I needed live TV I'd just connect a satellite receiver box to our AV receiver as second input, just like we've connected our Switch, Wii, N64 and the emulator RPi.
Nvidia Shield + "Console Gaming Monitor" (from e.g. Gigabyte, LG, etc)
Yes it's more expensive, but that's how much they'd make from you with ads.