vidyeshNewly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features
Isn't that actually great? Just never create and sign into a Walmart account and now your TV isn't infected.
This presumes that, now or later, there won't be an on-screen message that can't be dismissed saying "Sign in to a Walmart account to enable all TV features."
There's plenty of ways they can interfere with attempts to use the TV in "dumb" mode. Heck it could refuse to show any video at all til you've signed in.
Pi-Hole sped up my Samsung home and menu screens tremendously. I use something like this list [0]. The growing size of the list itself is a testament to the enshittification of Smart TVs.
I wonder if the SmartTV blocklist change history and size of commits could tell a historical story of how things have evolved? I'm aware that DoH makes this approach less and less viable ... but for my existing TVs it still seems to work fine as long as I'm careful not to blindly update.
[0] https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...
