Something like a chromecast would be the easiest solution.

Me personally, I just like having a media pc hooked up to my tv. I bought an amazon fire tv cause it was fairly cheap for 4k and its never been hooked up to the internet.

Depends on your router. Some have the ability to disable internet access to single devices while leaving their internal network access intact.

You probably can give it a static ip through your router and block any access to the internet for it. Could even set up pihole to block the ads from coming in to any device. That said, it's possible the TV has built in ads or error messages to show in place of the ads when offline/blocked, or may just not even work if offline for longer than x minutes/hours/days

That's how I handled my "smart" TV - I had a spare minipc from my old homelab, threw Linux on it and plugged it into the HDMI port.

It has never connected to my network, despite the BestBuy employee insisting it would need firmware updates for better picture.

if it gives you the option you could try setting the DNS settings to something that doesn't exist.

You can probably get a DNS based ad blocker and configure your router DHCP to assign it to devices.

Maybe if you give it its own vlan? Idk tho

You may use it as a display and connect it to a Raspberry Pi (or other mini-PC) with Kodi on it.

Sure, break it's routing. You can give it a fake DNS server (like a pihole that blocks everything), you could set up routing rules that block everything not addressed in the network ip range, there's a ton of ways I can think to do it off the top of my head. It might require some tinkering though

...that's what I've been doing. I've accepted my fate

Then I make my own mainboard.

Good thing I saw that pcbwaydotcom ad.

it's standard here in sweden to deliver TV over internet these days, TV can fuck itself sideways and die

Serious question: what’s the mechanism of this? I can think of a few it might be but I honestly don’t know:

• Is it that 99.9% of the market wants smart TVs and there’s not enough demand for dumb TVs to support a production run?
• Is it that existing companies can somehow block smaller upstarts from entering the market, and then they decided as a cartel to end dumb TVs?
• Is the NSA infiltrating TV companies to force this product line choice?
• Is there a new law requiring that all TVs get smart?
• Some mechanism I haven’t thought of?

"fun" fact: most modern cars have over a dozen sim cards because various components relay statistics, etc. to their respective manufacturers.

They don't sell good TVs that aren't Smart anymore. You could get a monitor but that comes with size, featureset and price limitations.

Where are you buying a non-smart TV in 2024? Genuinely asking for some links to something bigger than 32" and that is not a $3,000 "commercial display panel".

An more expensive dumb TV, actually. They want you to buy the thing that makes passive income so its cheaper.