The new TV

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

Let's continue the Cassandra saga on smart TVs!

This article was written on January 29, 2019 from Cassandra

Cassandra's loose change 430/ The new TV

From a cloud of smoke, a story, two pieces of advice and various considerations.

It really all started with a cloud of smoke. Acre, of burnt Bakelite, the swan song of the high voltage transformer, an event that decades ago was a typical failure of cathode ray tube TVs. A fault that can then be easily repaired... with an economical but now unavailable spare part.

Alas, it is no longer a world for old things, and therefore Cassandra had to resign herself to the purchase of her first SmartTV, obviously as less smart and intrusive as possible.
It wasn't difficult. The Christmas period, a series of filters and a couple of technical checks led to a very quick choice, thanks to a well-known (even too well-known) e-commerce site.
Requirement: no microphone, no camera, 39 inches and geometric dimensions specified to the millimeter to be sure of fitting in the library, full-HD resolution (no-4k), SAT and DVB2.

Result: not many models and only 3 brands, especially due to the obligatory size of 39″, which makes 4k useless.

A google around; only one of the brands seems to have Italian assistance that can be contacted both via toll-free number and email. Incredibly low price, order. Less than an hour in total.

Despite the looming Christmas, after a few days the package arrives. The removal and recycling of the corpse of the last millennium, of the boxes for the SAT and for streaming (that's another story), of the gorilla of related cables and associated centuries-old dust took a couple of hours; the assembly of the new 30 minutes, the setup about an hour, also due to Cassandra's inability to figure out how to do, in the forest of menus, to switch from SAT to DTV.

The setup is relatively honest; it says, quite clearly, that the TV will only work if you say yes to the user license, and that all usage data, including that of any apps, will also be used by the manufacturer. That's how it is if you like.

While waiting for the European Community to make these universally widespread behaviors illegal (if it ever will), let's proceed to minimize the damage.
No additional applications installed, connection to the network not via cable but via wifi, on a specially created guest network that can only go out to the internet.
When Cassandra has time, she will sniff the names of the servers that the TV tries to contact and make contact impossible, or redirect it to fake local IPs.

For now, not only Netflix but also the TV manufacturer will know when and what I watch in streaming.

Ooops, RaiPlay, for a change, stops continuously, in particular on the "Ladies' paradise”, which my lady actually demands to be able to see.

The firmware updates over the air, and is up to date.
With a bad feeling I go to the manufacturer's website and send a request for intervention. I wait to call the toll-free number and, after several days, I receive an email requesting further information. I send them, and still silence follows.
With the state of mind of someone who, as a last resort, goes to the shaman, I phone the toll-free number and, miraculously, after a few tens of seconds I am on the line with an operator. Despite the report already made, it makes me fill out a registry. Then he finally asks me for the description of the problem, and closes by promising a contact.
In the afternoon another miracle. The operator actually calls me back, I repeat she calls me back, to find out about an obscure subversion of the firmware, which I promptly provide her.
A few more days of silence and then one morning the email from the technical service arrives with the link to download a new firmware, and detailed instructions on how to do it. Within half an hour, including completely resetting the TV, everything worked. Moving.

Now I have a light, but a very short-sighted and deaf one, in the living room, and I can finally disconnect the 10 meter HDMI cable that connected the PC to the old TV, a connection that I had to use to watch streaming.

Now that was a great satisfaction.

Marco Calamari

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