When you’ve woken up after falling asleep while watching Netflix, and you turn your TV off and go to bed for real, your day may have ended, but your TV still has business to conduct.
Unless you turn off your TV’s power at the wall, it’s going to use that downtime for various tasks, not all of which you might approve of.
It’s collecting data about what you watch (and how you watch it)
When we say it records everything, we mean everything
It’s called ACR or Automatic Content Recognition, and it’s one reason your last TV might have been so cheap. You probably already know and accept that when you use a streaming app on your TV, both the streaming service and the TV manufacturer know what you’re watching and use that information for their own gain. It’s the price of convenience.
However, what if I told you the TV maker was also watching the game you play on your console or making a note of what DVDs and Blu-rays you watch? What if the company could take screenshots from private home videos and photos and send them off to be analyzed in a remote data center? ACR can do all of this, and that’s why you should turn it off as soon as possible.
It’s talking to company servers in the middle of the night
Everyone needs to phone home sometimes
Even if your TV isn’t necessarily sending off private data about you in the night, it’s likely still communicating over the network for more mundane reasons. TV makers care about diagnostic information, usage patterns, and lots of other boring information that can nonetheless be useful when designing the next generation of product. For example, if few people ever use the TV at its peak brightness level, then why make TVs that can go that bright?
It updates itself—and sometimes changes without your consent
Who asked for any of this?
It’s also probably not news to you that your TV will download and apply automatic updates during the night when it’s not going to disrupt anyone’s viewing. It’s normal for automatic updates to be on by default, and so you might find when you turn on your TV in the morning, it’s updated and things have changed.
This is what happened to me with my LG OLED TV pictured below. When I bought this TV (at great expense, I remind you), there were no advertisements on the home screen.
However, one update changed all that. Now my TV shows ads on its home screen, and its behavior has changed so that the TV always starts on the home screen rather than going back to the last input I was using.
I can’t roll back the update, but since I use an Apple TV 4K and PlayStation 5 with my TV and don’t touch the internal apps, I went scorched earth—Factory reset, no Wi-Fi or Ethernet access, and no more updates for you, Mr. TV.
Now the TV complains that I can’t “enjoy” its many smart features with no internet, but all I want is a TV and my privacy. Is that too much to ask?
- Brand
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Apple
- Operating System
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tvOS
You’ll get the full Apple experience with this streaming device. The A15 chip provides great hardware for all of your apps, Apple-exclusive or otherwise.
Your OLED TV is (not so) quietly maintaining itself
A “click of life” is a nice change of pace
This last one only applies to those lucky folks who own OLED TVs. OLED panels consist of organic components that generate their own light. That’s as opposed to LCD TVs that use some type of backlight that shines through the LCD layer.
OLEDs have amazing image properties because of this, but those organic LEDs are subject to degradation. What people call OLED “burn in” is really uneven wear across the OLED panel, which can show up as a legible pattern. Modern OLED TVs have all sorts of mitigations built in to reduce or prevent image retention. They can rotate your pixels or dynamically reduce brightness, as two examples.
At night, your OLED might do a “compensation cycle.” It comes with an audible “click” with the screen off and involves a sophisticated algorithm that tests each pixel and adjusts its voltage to compensate for wear and ensure there’s even brightness across the panel.
If you switch your OLED off at the wall or interrupt the compensation cycle too often, it can shorten the life of your panel. So do give it the power it needs. The cycle only runs when needed every few hundred hours. In the case of my LG, it does pop up a warning that the next time I switch it off, the compensation cycle will begin. For once, a popup I actually want!
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
