The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV

(wired.com)

15 points | by m463 6 days ago ago

15 comments

  • torginus 5 minutes ago

    I love the idea of a TV designed to look like a picture frame - I might even mod mine, to have it blend better into the room.

    But as for actually using it as a picture frame - no way. I think it's the reflection of modern rent culture where landlord put these things in along with generic Ikea furniture, allowing tenants to 'customize' their living spaces without being allowed to drive in a single nail.

  • fidotron an hour ago

    This reads a lot like post CES submarine PR, having worked in this exact space.

    To date the market for these things simply hasn't had traction, at all, despite it being a long term dream of many display manufacturers. They also cannot resist the urge to go all in on inevitable privacy invasion stupidity, because they believe all the others will do it and so undercut them.

    Oddly the generative AI wave is exactly what the marketing people thought they were missing when I was involved, since they wanted you to be able to describe something and have it just appear. Now you actually could.

  • TechTechTech 2 hours ago

    My 75" Samsung The Frame (2024) uses 70w in 'art mode'. It has a motion sensor and you can configure to fully switch off after some timeout.

    I see a lot of blocked requests in my OPNsense firewall (not sure what exactly) but I see that with almost all 'smart' devices (which I like to keep local).

    • juujian an hour ago

      Wow, that really puts the 10W my laptop uses into perspective.

      • fidotron 44 minutes ago

        Not sure if it's the case now, but early Frame models had fans which could be quite audible.

        The system I worked on never had fans in, but was rated to operate at 75C instead.

  • ta988 2 hours ago

    So they use power 24/7, do they also listen to what happen in the room? because those brands sure like to spy on what users are watching (even the HDMI in on some of them)

    • john-h-k 2 hours ago

      Presumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR.

      I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

      • torginus 3 minutes ago

        How would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.'

        Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.

      • fidotron an hour ago

        > I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

        You mean the media stopped talking about it - it has no relation to whether it happens or not.

      • tehwebguy an hour ago

        Amazon literally invented the class of products that sit in your house and listen to you

        • john-h-k an hour ago

          Yeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage

      • pluralmonad an hour ago

        But tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.

        • john-h-k an hour ago

          If a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage

        • gruez an hour ago

          Seems like a stretch to equivocate hearing aid telemetry with smartphones or TVs secretly eavesdropping?

  • DoctorOW 2 hours ago

    I worked at a TV station that would use these for monitor walls (more for the anti-glare than anything else). I remember seeing paintings on set being a sign something went terribly wrong.