On 9/4/2015 5:55 AM, Roger Blake wrote:
On 2015-09-04, Ewald Böhm wrote:
Is that the sum total of the advantages of WiFi on a TV?

A disadvantage to Smart TVs is that they quite literally spy on you. At
least one manufacturer has issued a warning about it:

https://www.thestar.com/business/tec...-smart-tv.html

I really don't understand why anyone would even consider the purchase
of such a device. I suppose for many that convenience and entertainment
trump all other considerations these days.

From the manufacturer's standpoint, this approach (to the imagined problem!)
makes sense: why incur the added cost of putting enough processing
power in the TV to be able to decode INFREQUENTLY spoken commands?
It makes more sense (assuming transit times are short) to ship the
"data" ("sound") off to a server (located at some firm that you
CONTRACT WITH -- not even *your* server!) and have it do the heavy
lifting.

And, the TV needn't deliberately be "spying" on you to still allow
them to harvest other information from it. I.e., if you are
*talking*, then, chances are, you are still sitting in front of the
TV! Your eyes are more likely to be viewing whatever than looking
through the refrigerator for a snack! That's worth something to the
content distributor pushing that "movie" to you; or, the vendor who
has purchased the ad time!