You paid for an expensive TV from LG? If it is up to the manufacturer, you still will have to deal with more and more advertisements…
In many households, the ever-expanding screen of the television still occupies a prominent place. This makes it the wet dream of every public relations and advertising professional. Because ads on that screen are seen by everyone in the house, sooner or later. LG understood this very well too. In fact, they want to steer their entire TV business in a new direction, according to this post from What Hifi. In which a total integration with smart home systems should be the center. The base is formed by webOS, LG’s housebrand operating system (stemming from the late PalmOS, for those who remember it).
TV as a billboard in the living room
In practice, this new direction mainly means an expansion of the number of advertisements and advertising channels. So don’t be surprised that in the coming months and years your LG smart TV will start showing more commercial content in various places with regularity. Is that fair? Well, as long as customers accept it as the “new norm” and thus keep buying televisions that turn your device into a billboard, yes. It is one of the disadvantages of smart TVs: the manufacturer can do all sorts of nasty things with them remotely. One solution to avoid all that, is simply not to connect such a TV to the Internet. Instead use an Apple TV set-top-box, for example. That gives significantly more control over what you get to see, simply by deciding which apps to install. The Apple TV’s OS, at least natively, does not contain imposed ads at all.
Some manufacturers are impertinent and even aggressive!
What does the EU and the various consumer protection associations, which are also or partially subsidized by public budgets, do in this case?
Good question. This should be illegal. Either you pay for a product, or make it free and place ads.