▲ ▼ Make TV dumb again
The Operating Systems, Applications used by major Smart TV manufactures are found to be highly vulnerable to hacking. Also, updates for earlier Smart TV's isn't straightforward as many need to be flashed via SD card and which not many are going to do even if the manufacturer had updated their firmware to fix some vulnerabilities.
Smart TV manufacturer's themselves exploit the available capabilities to flash unremovable Ads and may even upload screenshots from your TV for automatic content recognition.
So, if Smart TV's are dangerous, annoying, why buy them right? Well, that's the problem I'm stating here - There aren't many options to get a dumb TV with latest display technology i.e. 4K/8K HDR if we want to supply our own apps via SBCs/Apple TV etc.
LG seems to be selling Business/Commercial line-up of dumb TVs,
e.g. LG 65" 4k HDR dumb TV: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/business/commercial-tv/lg-65UV340H
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24668232
An article comparing different Dumb TVs currently in the market - https://pointerclicker.com/best-dumb-tv/ .
Alternatively, the standards of the TVs need to defined enough to allow independent developers to root the systems, build and install their own operating systems (as it's done with with smartphones). Partly doable already but not as mainstream as with phones I would think.
I agree that the capability to flash alternate OS would be nice, but manufacturers supporting it would be just a wishful thinking as we saw in the smartphone ecosystem; manufactures which supported aftermarket firmwares when their were new to market (to seek hacker/developer blessings) eventually went on to lock down their phones once they reached top.
Yeah, I can see this happening. It would be great to define binding industry standards for interfaces. Same as we got them for all kind of machinery, tools, etc. etc.