Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

We have an older curved 55" Samsung "smart" TV that I put in the basement for the kids. Mounted high up on the wall, out of reach of little destructive fingers.

Turns out it can be configured with a default input. When I moved it to kid duty, I cleared out all the wifi credentials (I think I just factory reset it), disabled all the "smart" garbage I could find, then stuck a Roku stick in it and set that input as default. The Roku remote handles TV power and volume, and the Samsung remote is put away with the rest of my tech ~~hoard~~ stuff. Pi-hole on my network removes the Roku's ability to show ads at all. I always forget that there's a big ad spot on the home page.

Just disconnect it from the internet?

That is going straight to a pawn shop, holy shit.

Yes Roku tvs are the worst piece of tech ever..

Man I would graciously thank the gifter but decline. I wouldn't put that shit in my house.

You can turn off the scan, which by the way is that it takes a screenshot every so often and checks if it matches known content so as to make you watch through their platform. Really recommend changing that setting.

Secondly, block *.logs.roku.com with a pihole was my solution. That TV is the single most banned traffic on my network still.

Have you tried doing a factory reset and not connecting it to the internet?

Maybe there's an app that can inject junk into the signal to spam it and fuck up the data collection.

I…feel like my Roku tv does not do this? But I haven’t move it to my new place yet, and I don’t remember. It’s also a couple years old, but it was a decent model.