You’re not wrong, there are a number of videos from Louis Rossman (right to repair advocate) on YouTube lambasting LG for doing this very thing on their high-end G-series OLED TVs; including defaulting to opt-in to marketing and providing PIR data after an automatic update.

It’s hard but not impossible, as even ‘retail displays’ run an OS in the background to control input switching, image settings etc.

Honestly the best thing to do is buy whatever TV you want (we have a couple of the LG OLEDs in our household), and don’t ever plug them into your network (or WiFi). Otherwise, with updates OS and apps become sluggish, with more ads crammed in.

Instead, use a seperate media player (e.g. Apple TV if you’re already on the iOS ecosystem, Nvidia Shield or similar for Android, HTPC if you’re so inclined etc.) - they’re more powerful, arguably more secure & private, and portable between displays if/when you upgrade.

It’s worse than you think; it’s $50/month!

Now part of the problem is we don’t know the average membership length, and it’s further complicated by the fact that the Tate brothers ran the ‘school’ like a pyramid scheme where enrolling another member earned you a kick-back (which is why so many random channels popped up a few years back sharing clips).

So pulling random numbers out of my arse, if the average membership period was ~6 months and they had ~30% operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, kickbacks etc.) they could have netted ~$168m from this scheme.

I too, share your self-loathing in my morals preventing me from exploiting these absolute morons.

Yup, was one of the first bits I thought of too…

I still paraphrase his “your stuff is shit, my shit is stuff” to this day… 😅

We really need someone to fill the massive shoes he left behind - an individual able to call out all the egregious bullshit.

800,000 people fell for that scam? Fuck me, that’s a lot of stupidity…

It more surprises and saddens me that we are less than 2 generations divorced from when we as a species were able to band together and ban CFCs to address the hole in the Ozone Layer, as well as sulphurous compounds to eliminate Acid Rain - yet we’ve flown right past ‘fuck around’ without seemingly batting an eye, and are barrelling towards ‘find out’ territory when it comes to Climate Change…