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Pro tip: Never connect your TV to the internet, just use it as a screen. Its easier to buy a new cromecast or Kodi Box when you need support for the latest streaming.
Better yet, go to your local indie used game store and buy used movies.
My wife and I bought a DVD/blueray player a few weeks ago, because we have just found it easier to buy physical copies of movies/tv shows than try to figure out what service it's on.
Make your own personal streaming service. Rip the DVDs / Blu-Rays and put them on your own Plex or Jellyfin server :)
If I wasn’t so lazy I’d do that.
So much easier to connect my Steam deck to the tv and pick one of the fmovies sites.
I had a friend call me crazy for ripping all of my old DVDs and Blu-ray Discs to a hard drive around 2009.
“Why not just stream from Netflix?”
Now he’s complaining about being subscribed to a half dozen services just so he can watch what he used to stream from Netflix. I kinda want to shake my Plex library with him for personal vindication, but I’m not sure he’d appreciate the irony in a way that would satisfy me.
I've been buying second hand dvds for awhile, and I also got a brand new Xbox finally. I threw a DVD in it, and it needed to download software to play it. I was a little irked, consoles used to be something that you could buy brand new and it just worked but everything needs a day one patch anymore. The smart TV is never going on the internet, but that doesn't stop it from trying to talk to any smart phones that come into the house.
I don’t buy smart tvs. I have this ugly sceptre tv with a beautiful 4k picture.
I mean, I’m sure there’s something better, but I plug what I want into it and watch it. The volume goes up and down sometimes if my router isn’t facing away from it, oh and there’s a line going across it now, but for less than 200 bucks I feel like it was a win.
Eh, I have been running a pi-hole on my network for many years now. When I did it was purely because I find ads annoying, these days I'd consider it a basic necessity.
also, I have a hard time complaining about privacy and recommending anything google, especially at the price point they sell Chromecast's for. If you're buying a consumer set top box, Apple TV is basically the only one that's anywhere near privacy conscious. Kodi box or self-built PC though if you really care, and even then I'd still want a pi-hole or similar even if you run it on Linux instead of Windows because the services themselves are doing all kinds of shady shit.