alt Hacker NewsNever ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!
(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)
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Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.
There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.
I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.
A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.
The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).
This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.
[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/