My 12-year-old TV started acting up yesterday; the screen kept going dark. About six months ago, the speaker went. (I replaced it with a cheapo sound bar.) Since I am the kind of person who likes to be prepared, I started checking out replacement prices.
I can’t actually replace this exact one. It’s got a plasma screen (it was a Christmas present from my son many years ago) and they don’t make them anymore. Really beautiful picture, but excessive use of electricity.
Here’s the thing: You can get a really big TV (the one I have is pretty big, maybe 48″?) cheap — but you have to get a smart TV to get those low prices. I’d rather have a dumb TV. I hate giving Big Tech any more information about me than they already have.
At this point, my brain is frozen and I will probably wait until the damn thing blows up for good. I figure I will just unplug it and see if that fixes anything. Because that way, I get to postpone the aggravation of buying another one.
UPDATE: I unplugged the cable box before I went to physical therapy, and when I came back, it worked again. Huzzah!
Pretty much all standalone television sets today are “smart TVs” in that they come with an Ethernet port, WiFi, and the ability to access streaming apps. If you don’t log them into the internet, they can’t send any information to any source. They also can’t access Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. If you have cable TV, the cable provider does all the same info brokering that Amazon, Facebook, etc. does, and you don’t even have to be connected to the internet. So if you really want a no-info-sharing TV environment, disregard the TV’s features, cut the cable, and get all your programming from a set of amplified rabbit ears. In Philly you can probably access 50-60 channels off air, although a lot of them are crap, including multiple feeds of QVC/Home Shopping and Newsmax/OAN.
I use a Roku to get all those channels, I just don’t want Alexa on my TV.