Nah, it's not even that. It's same thing that's ruining many products and services -- Wall Street's insistence that "endless growth" is possible.
  - Endless growth in customer base -- by adopting anti-password sharing stances to pressure new account signups whenever possible.
  - Endless growth in revenue (per customer) -- by selling advertising access and user data to aid targeting of ad campaigns to paying subscribers.
  - Endless growth in profits -- by almost-yearly price increases, and reducing operating costs in ways that are detrimental in service quality.

People keep bringing up old Netflix. People were fine paying the rates then and not-pirating. There was a better selection, catalog content to chase the "long tail" of consumer demand, etc. Was Netflix profitable then? If yes, they should be profitable now, but the issue was all the content providers stopped being satisfied with their slice of the pie. "There must be some way we can get more of the revenue for ourselves here!"
  - And so they started asking for more for licensing rights (and Netflix starts looking into more original content to reduce their dependence on studios) --- resulting in shittier content and quick pivots to drop anything not top-performing, despite impact on customer satisfaction.
  - Then those studios started wanting to start their own services, and cut Netflix out of the deal entirely (now the content is splintered and users are getting pissed having to jump between services to view things, let alone the monthly costs multiplying).
  - This follows with them then increasing their own services' subscription rates to consumers.

Every step advancing because shareholders said "there must be some way for this company to make more money now than last year". Whether they were making a healthy profit before or not isn't important. It's never enough.

If Netflix wasn't profitable back then, when they had such a better selection, better pricing, customer goodwill, and so on... then maybe this whole streaming service as a business idea was a failed business idea to start with. With all the anti-consumer moves now they certainly aren't improving the prospects.

I think the point is they patched it and released a fixed version prior to the venerability becoming public knowledge, instead of users discovering the issue being exploited and then having to wait for a solution from the vendor.

There have been multiple bugs that have cropped up in the 1.41.7.x betas through 1.41.9, and I'm not positive they have all been fixed now. I think I'll continue with 1.41.6.9685 for now, since that would pre-date the venerable versions.

What differentiates it from the already-existing Hisense UX 116" set. It's also RGB LED backlit.

I paid $180 on sale for my Shield Pro, and the lack of advertising was something me (and a lot of other people) felt was part of the benefit of that higher price, only to have the deal altered later on by a software update. I can install third-party interfaces at least.

Apple TV owners get nervous whenever there is talk of Apple adding ads to Apple TV specific system apps for the save reason.

Those are literally the ads we're referring to. The tiles advertising movies and shows people aren't interested in, and other apps/streaming services they don't have. If you check screenshots from the NVidia Shield when it first came out there was no top third of the screen taken up with a rotating promotion for video content on various services that exists now. The FireOS interface on Fire Sticks and Amazon FireOS TVs is particularly bad at this, as there is the top banner area, and the area on the bottom half, too. The bottom half advertising content from whatever app you have highlighted in the single row in the middle of the screen where you get to pin your most-used apps. In FireOS they now have the system by default change to full-screen video trailers with sound on power on, if you don't press any buttons to navigate off the top banner. This can actually be easily disabled in the prefs (to change it to just static images full screen instead), but many people don't realize this.

The Android TV interface still has the top banner and row of favorite apps, but you can list more apps (the row can extend off the edge of the screen). The next row under the app row is multi-function: an "up next" row with the next episodes queued up or partially finished programs from your services available for easy access. This row can even pull info from the Plex or Jellyfin client apps, or live streaming channel offerings (this is a fairly recent enshitification by Google of his row). And then there are some rows below that for each steaming service to peddle their own programming, The rows can be reordered or even removed in most cases if the user wishes (so no row of Netflix show or Prime content if you don't want it). There is no such control on a Fire Stick's interface.

Some advertising, like on the Android TV platform, is tolerable by me. Especially when I have some control over so much of the home screen real estate with moving/rearranging rows (I move the Google-sold content rows I can't remove to the bottom of the screen). But there are some people very sensitive to the types of programming those rotating banners at the top plug. The FireOS interface seems built to only allow the consumer a tiny sliver in the middle of the screen for any control at all, and a limit of six apps on that home screen steers users to limiting their choices. The easiest way for the average consumer to work around this is to -- subscribe to services that are on your Fire Stick remote with dedicated buttons (/wink) so you can use the slots on screen for something else.

They don't want the AI industry squashed by a huge judgement (or for AI to not be able to train on previous creative works).
They still have a dream of a future where their corporate leadership can sit in a chair and make new product simply by describing the music or movie to a computer with voice recognition, never having to deal with (let alone pay) any other human being in the process to make it.

What a ethnocentric view to have, as though the West is the only important part of the world...

Actually the opposite if we're comparing it to Amazon's FireTV platform. I'd gladly change my Fire Sticks to Android TV if I could, because there are less ads than FireOS has. The Fire Sticks I have support 10-bit h264 video, though. I haven't been able to locate an OTT hardware device that has this capability beyond them,

I have Slashdot, the BBC World News feed, and a few other things subscribed in the classic version of Flym.

Of course Google wanted to get rid of RSS, can't put rich advertising experiences in a text list and everyone's entries are given equal billing together ordered by time, so you can't sell "promoted" top-of-feed entries.

Yes, Recall and Copilot constantly on the vigil, like having someone shoulder-surfing the entire time you're working. No more getting duped by malicious websites, or visiting the wrong websites, citizen. Your writing checked for perfect spelling and grammar... and no dangerous thoughts. No more privacy when using your-- I'm sorry, their computer.

Authoritarian governments love it.

Not sure if global warming joke...
or missed Labor Day is September 1st. /SuspiciousFry.jpg

Almost made it through the summer. At least some charities benefited here.

CEO of company tries to claims his company's products are essential to society, to calm investors concerned the company is not a major player in the latest trend.
Wouldn't have seen that coming at all.

Yup. If they want to start charging for their cloud connectivity service that's one thing, but removing the local connectivity option people got with devices that were already purchased -- that's another matter. The level of support they would offer to those would be dependant on how they worded their original warranty documents.

For outright changes in functionality, those need to be made in future products, which they have to then make a value proposition for to sell. This is like a business deciding they didn't work out their revenue model right the first time and thinking they should get a "do-over" with all their previous customers.