See title - very frustrating. There is no way to continue to use the TV without agreeing to the terms. I couldn’t use different inputs, or even go to settings from the home screen and disconnect from the internet to disable their services. If I don’t agree to their terms, then I don’t get access to their new products. That sucks, but fine - I don’t use their services except for the TV itself, and honestly, I’d rather by a dumb TV with a streaming box anyway, but I can’t find those anymore.
Anyway, the new terms are about waiving your right to a class action lawsuit. It’s weird to me because I’d never considered filing a class action lawsuit against Roku until this. They shouldn’t be able to hold my physical device hostage until I agree to new terms that I didn’t agree at the time of purchase or initial setup.
I wish Roku TVs weren’t cheap walmart brand sh*t. Someone with some actual money might sue them and sort this out…
EDIT: Shout out to @testfactor@lemmy.world for recommending the brand “Sceptre” when buying my next (dumb) TV.
EDIT2: Shout out to @0110010001100010@lemmy.world for recommending LG smart TVs as a dumb-TV stand in. They apparently do require an agreement at startup, which is certainly NOT ideal, but the setup can be completed without an internet connection and it remembers input selection on powerup. So, once you have it setup, you’re good to rock and roll.
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Sucks this happened to you. If it is still under warranty, you should return it for a replacement or store credit. Complain that it has ceased to function.
A good set of advice is to never connect your TV to the internet. A cheap streaming box or HTPC does the same function, and doesn’t open you up to issues like this. Your TV is also almost certainly selling your viewing data if you have it connected to the internet.
While it’s good advice to never intentionally connect TV to internet, some devices bypass you if they can. I think it was samsung that would connect to any other samsung product and through them to the internet, even if the other product was in your neighbor’s living room.
That’s creepy
This is disturbing. I wanted to know more so I googled it but I found nothing. Where did you hear this?
Not sure of Samsung’s offering but it sounds very similar to Amazon Alexa’s sidewalk “feature”
Sounds like Windows “Delivery Optimization” for Microsoft updates as well.
Almost certainly - but that is what I agreed to when I bought the TV.
Like I said in the post, I’d much prefer dumb TVs, but they I can’t really find them anymore. Best I can do is buy a smart TV that’d won’t let you do anything (including selecting inputs) until you connect it to the internet, agree to their horrible anti-consumer licensing agreement. Only then to open up a different smart device product that will still steal my data and force me to give up my legal right to a class action? The current system is scam.
Do you have any recommendations for dumb TVs?
As someone in pro AV, here’s my recommendation for a dumb TV: A smart TV that you never connect to your wifi.
All that bloatware shit they install is what makes it cheap. At my job I can buy commercial displays (no crapware) at cost and it’s still cheaper to buy a consumer one.
Unless IP control is absolutely mandatory for you, it’s cheaper and easier to go consumer for displays
I’m pretty sure that you cannot use a roku-enabled device for any purpose until you agree to their terms of service, which just puts me back into the same boat.
Do you have any recommendations for actual dumb TVs?
Sceptre makes modern, affordable dumb TVs.
We found an answer! Thank you!
I’ve been searching online between comment responses looking for actually useful recommendations. It looks like Sceptre or LG are going to be good starting points. Between the two website, I’m leaning pretty heavily towards the Sceptre. I’m excited to here more from the person posting about the professional/commercial AV displays.
I have a sceptre, I love it. I got it on a black friday sale before covid, and it still works well. Some people have said theirs went crappy within a year or two, so check models and reviews that seem legitimate to figure out which ones are crappy.
Thanks for the heads up - will do!
EDIT: Out of an abundance of curiosity, what model do you have?
Any TV that you just don’t connect to the internet at all, ever.
Hmm, yes, I agree! Totally agree on this. No argument. I’m curious though - what TV would that be? What TV can someone buy today that doesn’t require an initial setup process that requires an agreement to certain terms and conditions prior to use?
Not trying to be hostile towards you in particular. I’m feeling frustrated with this answer because I am seeing it a lot (both online and in online searches right now), but I’m having some difficulty finding it actually useful advice. Many devices are setup from the factory to not allow use until agreeing to certain terms and conditions that must be agreed to before using the TV. I need to know which TVs - if any - do not require this. It is surprisingly difficult! I feel frustrated with this answer because it feels reductive & dismissive of the actual problem.
Again, nothing against you in particular. I’m just frustrated with this - seemingly reasonable but not actually applicable based on what I have been able to research online so far - answer.
Show me one piece of technology in your life that didn’t come with T&C that put you at a disadvantage against the manufacturer, I’ll show you ten fairies, a unicorn, and the herald of darkness.
My grandmother has a Philips dumb TV that doesn’t have any network connectivity and it still showed a click-through T&C. If you can’t get something like that in your region, ship from the EU, they’re still sold here.
My computer was built from pieces of other computers, to which I installed linux and never had to agree to anything. Now show me those ten fairies, the unicorn, and the herald of darkness please…
Whew, that inter-continental shipping is going to be rough, but I’ve had to pay it before. Thanks for the advice!
I just bought a Roku smart TV and the first time I powered it on, it asked if I wanted to enable smart features by connecting to the Internet. I said no and it functions like a dumb TV now. There are a couple brands that still make dumb TVs but they are all fairly small and not great quality. Much better off researching which smart TVs can be easily disabled.
This is the point that I’ve been stuck on. There doesn’t seem to be clear, easily available, documentation on which models those are. However, I have been able to find many ramble-ly “old man yells at cloud” forum & social media posts (You know, like this one!) when a model doesn’t allow it.
You can try the display screens for menus and signs. They’re basically TVs without smart functions, aka dumb TVs.
Those often don’t have a very good picture quality though.
I’ve had LGs for years (just got a new C3 OLED) and they don’t require internet access to function. My current OLED isn’t connected and works perfectly fine. I use a standalone Roku for streaming.
I think that I’m about to sold on LG TVs. Do you need to agree to any terms of service for initial setup? Additionally, do you have to navigate menus on startup to get to the streaming device? If so, that is ok, but very annoying if I can’t set it up to start on a particular input on power up.
I did have to agree to the terms during setup. You do NOT have to navigate menus on startup. It remembers the last input and defaults there. You can then easily change the input via the remote if needed.
This is really good/useful info - thank you!
It remembers the last input and defaults there.
It never occurred to me that TVs might not do that.
Buy a really large computer monitor
Report Roku to the FBI for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking into and sabotaging your property.
That’s a sincere suggestion, by the way. This shit should literally be a crime.
Don’t do this. This just creates more work for the FBI and you know that report is going straight into the rubbish bin. That is just wasting public resources.
you know that report is going straight into the rubbish bin.
In that case, you should additionally complain to your Congressperson that the FBI isn’t doing their goddamn job.
No, what’s more productive is writing that this should be a crime. It’s currently not.
If you think otherwise, let’s pretend you’re a prosecutor. Which offence do you accuse them of committing (use a legal citation to refer to a specific section), list out each of the elements of that offence and explain why you believe each of them is satisfied.
No, what’s more productive is writing that this should be a crime. It’s currently not.
It’s at the very least coercion by ways of property damage, at least in sane legal systems.
Also it’s generally not the job of citizens to figure out which paragraph exactly to throw at an accused, that’s what police and prosecutors are for.
Piss off. You’re not even an American. Don’t tell us what to do with our FBI.
I am American.
Imposter! No Murcan would use “rubbish bin”.
“Offence” as opposed to offense, and “behaviour” instead of behavior are also non-standard for American English.
So I looked at his post history, and sure enough, there are multiple instances of “cheque” instead of check, “centralised” instead of centralized, and other obvious uses of British or Asian English.
Maybe NateNate60 is American by citizenship, but doesn’t appear to be a native American English speaker.
It’s almost as if being American and speaking languages are separate things!
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IANAL, and not that it really makes this bullshit any better but…
It’s unlikely that agreeing to terms of service that claim you waive rights to any class action lawsuit would actually hold up as legally binding in court. Many of these agreements aren’t reply binding are already legally gray… Plus, universally vaguely signing your legal rights away in any contract doesn’t hold any water either.
I highly doubt you’d actually lose any rights to a check box that’s bound to “you can’t ever sue us”.
IANAL either, but I’m pretty sure you are correct. I put it in another comment somewhere, but I’m more upset about not being given a choice to refuse the change rather than the actual change itself. I don’t mind signing the waiver at amusement parks, or to buy a car with no warranty. I just want to know what I’m agreeing to, and I don’t like folks pulling the rug out from under me or changing the deal.
The situation feels like if I were to drop out of college, I would be given electroshocks until I’d forgotten anything learned in class.
Yeah, I totally agree with you, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s bullshit to switch terms. And also bullshit to write terms that just say “if we fuck you over, you can’t do anything about it”.
I just wanted to point out that the legality of it probably wouldn’t hold any actual water so don’t be totally paranoid about it and take it with a grain of salt. For anyone who’s a little more torn.
But yeah, Idk that I’d keep the device at that point either.
Oh, I am definitely getting more paranoid as I get older, but that’s a different issue altogether. :D
IANAL either, but from my understanding of contract law, not only are terms waiving your rights not legal, a contract necessarily entails mutual agreement followed by an exchange of a thing of value. In this case, they are holding a thing that you own (which they made and designed to work in this manner no less) hostage until you agree.
I don’t think that counts as an “exchange of a thing of value”. There’s no exchange there, so it doesn’t even qualify as a contract. Even if they’re supposedly adding features along with the update, if you didn’t agree to the features being added then that can’t be considered forming a contract either. Also it’s not free agreement on your part, so it fails on a number of levels.
In fact this behaviour sounds like it’s arguably illegal to me. It could even be the subject of a class action lawsuit. I imagine the courts would be especially unfavourable to the idea that they were doing this specifically to ask you to waive your right to do so.
I highly doubt you’d actually lose any rights to a check box that’s bound to “you can’t ever sue us”.
Could the agreement not force OP to use arbitration if they wanted to sue, making it economically infeasible to do so themselves?
Pretty much all arbitration clauses require the manufacturer to pay for the arbitration. That’s the consideration offered by the manufacturer to get the customer to waive their rights to sue.
It’s actuaoworked out well for me I the past, because once you start going down the arbitration path, they’re more likely to just give you what you want since that’ll be cheaper than the arbiter in the end win or lose.
Hisense did this to me and my TV, but in fact actually broke the TV’s wifi when it forced an update that I didn’t want and couldn’t decline. I argued with them and escalated it for 4 months and nothing came of it. I reported them to my state’s attorney general and the BBB. But this is definitely a class action lawsuit that will happen sooner or later.
I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.
About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.
This made me very angry.
The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.
Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.
Just in case anyone needs to hear this, bbb isn’t a government department. They are quite literally yelp before yelp and you can straight up pay to get bad reviews taken down from both. It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.
It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.
Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.
I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.
It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.
I also got this on my stand alone roku. And it’s forced arbitration. Only way to opt out is by sending a written letter saying you don’t agree. If I can be forced into an agreement with a click of the remote, opting out should be just as easy.
Send this to leuis rossmann.
That sucks, but fine - I don’t use their services except for the TV itself, and honestly, I’d rather by a dumb TV with a streaming box anyway, but I can’t find those anymore.
Search for monitors, not televisions. For example, you can get an 48in and 55in OLEDs dumb monitors with multiple HDMI inputs.
This is a really good advice. I will be looking for a new TV soon and it seems like there are no more dumb TVs.
Be careful with this as monitors are usually a different aspect ratio to a TV so a you may get a distorted/cropped picture or black bars (depending what you connect to it) which will be noticeable at larger sizes.
monitors are usually a different aspect ratio to a TV
What? Aren’t like 90% of monitors and 99% of TVs 16:9? There are a few monitors that are 16:10, some extremely rare 5:4 and 4:3 and then there are the ultrawide monitors which are obviously a different aspect ratio but saying that monitors are “usually” a different aspect ratio is factually incorrect. If you’re deciding between a 4K TV and 4K monitor, then there’s no danger of accidentally buying something of different format.
And where do you plug in the aerial to watch TV? Or doesn’t it work like that where you’re from?
You’ll need to buy TV tuner with HDMI to do that.
But honestly, I probably wouldn’t go the monitor route unless you were all in on streaming.
Which most people are or should be tbh. Also, if anyone is searching for a dumb TV it’s more or less guaranteed they’re tech savvy enough to be running some sort of stream box/pc anyways for the TV.
Antenna TV is still kind of nice in that there is live coverage, it’s free, and it works when the internet is out. I get the appeal.
Is there a factory reset button on it? Maybe you might be able to reset the TV and never connect it to the WiFi?
Potentially - but I’d prefer not to do a factory reset. I was/am happy to use the services that I was already using and paying for that were not affiliated with Roku. A factory reset would remove access to those 3rd party services.
Besides that, I’m pretty sure that you cannot use a roku-enabled device for any purpose until you agree to their terms of service, which just puts me back into the same boat.
Do you have any recommendations for dumb TVs?
Earlier you wrote,
Almost certainly - but that is what I agreed to when I bought the TV.
And wrote that they should at least let you select an input without agreeing to new terms.
Now someone attempts to offer you a solution where you only need to agree to those original terms and get a separate streaming device like you asked for and you brush them off?
The situation with roku is unacceptable but please be reasonable with the people trying to help.
How on earth is saying “I would prefer not to do something” being unreasonable with people?
Saying you wanted something then changing the goal when someone offers you a way to get it is uncool.
“I wish my cancer riddled grandmother wasn’t suffering.”
“Well, you could always just kill her! Then she would feel anything!”
???
Even more so, I didn’t even disagree or say that they were wrong. Just that I’d prefer not to do that because, along with my grandmother not suffering, I also want her to be alive. Contrary to popular belief, humans are capable of wanting multiple things at the same time. Have you ever been thirsty while you had to pee?
I just stick with computer monitors these days.
“Smart” TVs are f****** ridiculous now.
Problem with monitors is they’re not practical as a TV replacement for a livingroom environment. The 16/9 ones pretty much top out in the 40s inch wise unless you’re going for something outrageously expensive like the Samsung Arc. Then you’re investing a lot into features that don’t necessarily benefit the livingroom entertainment uses like GSync if all you’re using it for is watching movies and TV.
There’s a lot of smart TVs that work great as dumb displays (my LG never shows anything from it’s OS, just my inputs) as long as you don’t connect them to the internet
I didn’t know there were any smart TVs that weren’t pieces of s*** anymore, so that’s good to hear.
Personally, I’ve never had a problem finding a large monitor that fit my living room well.
I buy a separate Chromebook or similar $30 used laptop and run everything off of that through HDMI to the monitor.
Cheap and easy.
Ditto for my Samsung QLED. It’s fine as a dumb monitor. Don’t connect it to the internet, throw the remote in a drawer, and use CEC streaming boxes and game consoles to control it.
I reached out to Roku support regarding this. The rep told me “why are you complaining. You are the only one.” He then disconnected the chat. I’ve reached out to my state’s AG to report this. No action so far but waiting. If there are enough complaints, that might help move the needle.
What Roku is doing should be completely illegal - bricking the product after purchasing it for full price if you don’t agree to waiving your rights.
Sounds like a class action lawsuit to me.
use the search terms “commercial display” to find dumb tvs
Except if you care about anything having to do with picture quality, brightness, contrast ratio or features such as HDR etc, then it’s going to be a really shitty TV. They’re made for the menus at McDonald’s, not a device for modern media.
not quite. here’s one for ya
I suppose you’re in the US so I don’t know if my answer fits but if the terms are against the law they are simply void: as in if you have a reason for a class action, no terms or contract can take it away from you
That is some grade A bullshit right there (not op, the Roku tv)
Why do you call it “your” physical device?
Lol, point well stated…
Why can’t we ever have anything nice?
I don’t even know what’s worse, really. Is it that they’re making a shit product on purpose, or that their EULA says you cannot sue them for making a shit product
IKR? I’ve been pretty happy with their service up until now. Sure, the home menu ads were certainly annoying, but were easily ignoreable and didn’t interfere with normal use of the TV.
It’s weird, I don’t mind waiving rights when I know what I’m in for. (I’ll sign the release form when I do something inherently dangerous.) However, I don’t like having the deal changed out from under me, and I certainly don’t like not being given a choice. I should have had the ability to hit decline, then forfeit my right to access roku on-demand services and maybe even firmware updates. But, whatever I had installed and working with 3rd party services shouldn’t be affected. They shouldn’t be allowed to disable the hardware. Honestly, and I mean speaking from the heart here, I probably would have just clicked OK without much thought about it if they’d at least included the disagree button.
You can still class action lawsuit them. No matter what, you can’t sign your rights away. Also, they can’t prove that YOU confirmed their agreement. -“oh my nephew must’ve clicked it.”
