Suggestion: PineTV

[Arwen]

I have also had issues with Smart TVs that are not connected to the internet being extremely slow; my assumption being that they still attempt to load the smart features, and it takes a bit of time for them to timeout.

I have seen that in other, non-TV cases. And I agree with that likely being the cause.

As a work around, it may be possible to install a firewall rule that that detects some of those attempted connections and sends a TCP reset. Or perhaps a DNS response as localhost. But, that does require the TV be connected to the network... scary that the TV might attempt to connect to other resources you have on the network, like SMB shares, LDAP, media shares, etc... so being as paranoid as I am, I'd give such a TV it's own network port on my firewall.


Note that one reason why TVs can be cheaper than "dumb" monitors, is that they CAN sell ads, telemetry and such. (Not just the volume.) You can see this in the Roku streaming players, as they now have ads on the home screen. At least they are not animated.