It's textbook rent-seeking behavior. They discount the TV $201 to undercut someone else, and make up the difference selling the ads over the life of the TV.

This is how SO many things work, it's only surprising that it's taken this long. If you watch YT on this fancy TV, you're getting the same thing.

I guess it's hard when they've probably factored in ad revenue in the pricing. It's not a new practice - it's been done with cheap Chinese smartphones that were sometimes sold below the cost of hardware and production.

It's terrible, I agree. Brands like this go into a list of offenders that I'll make sure to avoid in the future.

Genuine question, is there a downside to a HTPC?

They're becoming "smart" as well, unfortunately.

Get 'em while that last:

“In a major industry shift announced in early 2026, Sony is entering a strategic partnership where TCL will take a 51% stake in its home entertainment division, including Bravia TVs, with a new joint venture expected to be fully operational by April 2027”

It’s the end of an era for the Sony Bravia.

I fear the day these fucks figure out DOH or something. Not sure there's any way to suppress or intercept that, short of just blocking all external traffic to the TV.

For other readers here is a tutorial to do DNS capture into a pihole server or other DNS

https://youtu.be/EdzDCkFaskc

People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope

attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.

Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they're assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember... users who don't really understand what they're doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It's not always evil.

I can imagine future TVs refusing to work without an always-on internet connection.

My first 4K TV was a Samsung. The last update broke eARC making the Samsung home theater in a box thing I had much more inconvenient.

My 2nd (free in a raffle) Samsung 4K TV connected to my WiFi without a password when a guest in the house casted a video to it despite on setup refusing to consent to any web things due to privacy concerns. Kinda interesting and concerning.

The apps available on the TV may work when it’s new but quickly become nonfunctional because of a lack of updates. Best to use something else to stream, hopefully something more trustworthy.