Over the years, I have come to believe that advertisers end up corrupting ad-supported media. Almost within living memory, we've seen broadcast radio and TV have multiple scandals about advertisers getting ad placements in what's nominally content (cigarettes, soda, etc) and causing radio and TV news to cover them favorably. Newspapers were notorious for spiking stories unfavorable to their big advertisers. Web search was pretty much ruined by SEO, Google cooperating with SEO *hats, and by ad placement even before LLMs made it worse.
I may have to include advertisers corrupting their own products if stories like this keep showing up. It sounds like this particular TV wasn't even sold with the faustian bargain of showing ads or containing shovelware to keep the price down.
bediger4000 | 7 hours ago
Over the years, I have come to believe that advertisers end up corrupting ad-supported media. Almost within living memory, we've seen broadcast radio and TV have multiple scandals about advertisers getting ad placements in what's nominally content (cigarettes, soda, etc) and causing radio and TV news to cover them favorably. Newspapers were notorious for spiking stories unfavorable to their big advertisers. Web search was pretty much ruined by SEO, Google cooperating with SEO *hats, and by ad placement even before LLMs made it worse.
I may have to include advertisers corrupting their own products if stories like this keep showing up. It sounds like this particular TV wasn't even sold with the faustian bargain of showing ads or containing shovelware to keep the price down.
rts60 | 2 hours ago
I wonder if the folks at eMudhra realise what a gift they ended up giving to hardware hackers?
atmosx | 11 hours ago
Sounds like a nice weekend project. Thanks for sharing!