[u-u] IP/TV project

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

RANT!

Very interesting!  I think that it is great to try to build apps for 
platforms already in our homes.  Unfortunately, I feel doomed: an 
unwelcome. guest in devices in my own home.

Apparently smart TVs are even doing content recognition on their 
HDMI inputs and shipping statistics to home base.
<https://blog.lon.tv/2025/11/05/is-smart-tv-hdmi-spying-legal/>

I have smart TVs but only connect them to the internet once in a blue moon 
to see if there are firmware updates.  Always by ethernet so that I know 
that they are disconnected when I unplug the ethernet.

I do have Set Top Boxes connected to the internet, so I haven't escaped 
anything.

Set top boxes and smart TVs are listening to the room.  What they do with 
that is undisclosed, as far as I know.

LG's WebOS has a setting deep in the menus (I forget where) that makes it 
close to dumb, at least as far as menus are concerned.

It is too bad that WebOS, Tizen, FireOS (a rebuild of Android), etc. are 
dying.  They provided some semblance of competition.  It looks like what 
will be left is just Android TV and iOS.  With that little competition, 
things can only get more exploitative.  Unfortunately, since spying is a 
dirty little secret, they don't compete by promising less spying.

Unfortunately, the customers they were competing for were primarily TV 
makers, not us.  They bribe TV makers to use their OS.

Android made a move to control Android developers: all had to be 
registered; 3rd party repositories were to be locked out.  I think that 
they backed off in the face of extreme criticism but it shows their goals.

ATSC 3 apparently will allow over-the-air broadcasts to be copy protected.

People are extremely lazy and ill-informed about this.  I cannot blame 
them: it is so hard to keep up with this and hard to do anything to 
resist.

Enshitification is rampant.


> From: Vance Shipley <vances at motivity.ca>
> To: u-u at unixunanimous.org
> Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:15:06 +0800
> Subject: Re: [u-u] IP/TV project
> 
> There is, and there isn't, a single platform environment for smart TV
> applications. Android TV is leader however Samsung has Tizen and LG has
> webOS.
> 
> I have a big beautiful Samsung hanging on my wall and for some reason felt
> compelled to develop for it. I now have a CI/CD pipeline which delivers
> applications onto my TV. What I learned however, is that the Tizen
> environment is stale. The toolchain is based on Ubuntu 18 (bionic) which
> was released in 2018 and EOS since 2023. The community is quiet and the
> roadmap hasn't been updated in years. It was headed in the direction of
> WebAssembly though, which was interesting.
> 
> Smart TV vendors are turning into Big Brother, they are subsidizing the
> cost of the TVs by selling information they are collecting about you. They
> are also taking control over the interface and forcing you to consume their
> content. It's big business and they aren't too interested in third party
> applications getting involved. They are now competing directly with Netflix
> et. al..
> 
> If I were trying to build a streaming business I wouldn't target smart TVs,
> but rather devices with HDMI which can use any screen. Unfortunately that
> hardware ecosystem is also not open, which complicates that path, however
> it's still a betterfield.
> 
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 12:03 AM Jim Mercer <jim at reptiles.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a contact looking to scale up a PoC of providing in-room video
> > streaming to a more robust setup.
> >
> > They want to take IP/TV feeds from one or more ISPs, through a gateway of
> > sorts, and allow in-room smart-TVs to stream different channels.
> >
> > Could lead to other interesting projects.
> >
> > Drop me your contact if you are interested.
> >
> > --jim
> >
> 
> -- 
>      -Vance
>