No immediate benefit, but it might provide a sufficiently deleterious effect for the manufacturer to effect the desired behavior.

Vendors that have a large amount of returns are often penalized by the store. Returning the product (if possible) would have a much bigger impact than you getting a $10 merchandise credit to cover the value of the “change in functionality”. You’d also have more money to buy a different TV…

But having to return something is an impact on me, and they know that statistically most of I will probably not bother.

There should be some sort of penalty for inflicting the damage after the sale besides merely nulling the sale.

Now I have to find another tv, and until I finish the return and shop and install process, I have either a defective tv or no tv, which screwed up any plans I made involving it.

Meanwhile, I did not get to mess with the money I paid for the tv after I paid it. It went into the manufacturers posession and I never got to touch it again, take some back, change the interest rate it's earning, change what stocks or equipment it was spent on...

Being able to return for refund is great, but it doesn't actually make you whole, and the damage done to your property and your use of your property was deliberate and unnecessary. (not an accident or honest failure or act of god, but a knowing choice to damage property owned by someone else.)

Getting the money back and no more is like getting punched in the face, and all you get for that is you get to make them stop punching you in the face.

And the damage may or may not be a mere trivial annoyance.

This is a contrived example, but ALL examples are contrived and yet countless real examples exist and happen all the time, so the contrived nature is irrelevant:

What if for example the tv were used as part of a recording process monitoring a long-running experiment that was either very expensive to set up, or whose results are important, not just money important but Important, and can't be replicated except by starting over which may require time no one has like years, and the banner ad obscured a critical part of the image and blew the whole process?

You can't just say "you shouldn't construct something so important with consumer parts". It's true but it doesn't get the property damager off the hook, since it's still a fact that the damage didn't happen by itself as a natural proprerty of the fact that a device was sourced from BestBuy, the damage happened because the manufacturer chose to actively cause the damage.

> But having to return something is an impact on me

So, in a much bigger way, is having to file a lawsuit.

> and they know that statistically most of I will probably not bother.

That's even more true with filing a lawsuit.

Class action lawsuits might be suitable in this case? Much power impact on consumers.

Maybe. I think it brings about more schadenfreude to just see their sales tank when they realize that maybe people don't want their tv owner to show pop ups on what should simply be a means of presenting content from other services.

Their sales won't tank, because this will start to get rolled out across the industry. They might take a hit for being the first mover, but once this is normalized they will ride the same gravy train as everyone else.

This is classic industrial organization economics. These companies know that they are all in tacit collusion agreements with each other. It's not hard to set up "repeated prisoner's dilemma"-type games where collusion is the dominant strategy.

Basically, as long as companies know that it's in their long-term best interest to all do the same thing, then they will all do the same thing, even if it might yield some extra profit in the short term to deviate.

The only way to stop this garbage is to make it so bad for companies to engage in this behavior that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the above situation, where the supply of alternative goods is likely to dry up, the only other forms of recourse are punitive court damages or prohibitive policy/law from a suitably powerful government.

that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's an inevitability. For example, Samsung tried the exact same thing in the mobile space, despite holding a much more dominant position in the market than Vizio in TV's. But the rest of the competition didn't follow suit. Even amongst billion dollar coporations, a prisoner dilemma still has that allure to suddenly have one "defector" (or more) turn around and suddenly proclaim "hey we aren't doing X bad thing!". Technical details may go over consumer's heads more of the time, but ads is a near universal experience in a first world country. Marketing something as "we don't have ads" would be understood quickly.

But maybe it's just my cynicism of the modern court system that makes the suing solution sound like a waste of an individual's time and money, only to end up with nil in terms of industry impact. If that user is a very outspoken millionaire ready to fight, I welcome it. But I'm unsure if that sort of user is around these parts making comments dreaming of such opportunities.

You think judges are dumb, or appreciate having their time wasted?

You're going to be out thousands of dollars and get nothing.

it would be a valid case of class action imho. Its not like these updates would've only affected one or two people.

Class actions do virtually nothing to make individuals whole.

Class action normally means you get even a smaller nothing than you would get in a direct action, but, if you win, your lawyers, despite the reduced per-plaintiff recovery, get many times more than they would in a direct action. (It also means that, for N plaintiffs, the defendant, if they lose pays an amount x where 1 << x << N times the amount they would pay with one plaintiff.)

Class action is the reverse of what you want here. You want endless people suing them, all individually if at all possible.

Actually, what you probably want is a mass direct action, not endless individual lawsuits, but, first, you want a legal rule of recovery far better than you would get even for actually taking back the TV under current law.

That's one strategy. A class action lawsuit can attract so many more people to raise damages. A strategy involving both could work.

Couldn't you sue them to restore your tv to the original state as opposed for monetary damages?

Not in small claims court. At least not in my jurisdiction. You can seek monetary damages in (presumably) any jurisdiction but not necessarily return of property.

you would do this in small claims court, not with a lawyer.