I ran my old 2004 Samsung television into the ground: the EL backlight was so worn out that the picture had large dark holes in it, and the TV would take 20 minutes to warm up and display something.
And today it wouldn’t start at all anymore. It’s deader than a dead dodo. But hey, 20 years for a modern TV ain’t bad. I’m pretty pleased with that.
So I went to the supermarket to find the cheapest set I could find. I asked the salesman if they had a cheap, but most importantly NON-SMART TV - thinking non-smart TVs are probably the cheapest of them all, if they still existed at all.
The man said “We have this dumb 43” TV here, but it’s the last one, and then we won’t get anymore dumb TVs for 3 months."
I looked at the price and it was - gasp - $20 MORE than the cheapest Android-encumbered smart TV of the same size.
I asked the man how come and he said “Well, dumb TVs are hard to get and they sell almost immediately. So they’re worth more than the smart ones.”
Wow. So people actually WANT dumb TVs and are willing to pay a premium for em. It means attitudes towards the value of privacy are changing and that’s great!
If you are not able to find a dumb TV, I recommend Google based TVs (GTVs). Unlike some Roku based TVs, GTVs will boot and work just fine even if you never configure their network access. If you do opt to enable network access on a GTV, you can set up static IP addresses on them, including PiHole as DNS.
My wife likes the convenience of a smart TV in her office so I DMZ’d it so that it has no access to our home network and it goes through a dedicated PiHole on a Pi Zero. Neither the Roku or LG TVs we had allowed for this, so I sold the RokuTV and I connected the LG to a thin client with a Bluetooth remote.
PS: Hisense makes a great 4K TV that goes to shit the moment you connect it to the network because of inadequate computing power, low memory, and bad code (memory leaks). If you don’t connect it to a network and use it as a dumb TV, it is great display for very little money.