Just don’t connect it to the internet.

You don’t have to get a smart tv at all. TVs do not need to be smart. If you search ‘business monitor’, you will find large quality displays such as used for corporate signage. The one issue is they often have only a few inputs, but that is easily addressed and worth it to avoid the completely unnecessary hassle of a TV too smart for your own good.

My two cents

My advice is never use a smart tv of any kind.

Use a third party device like an apple tv or roku, hell even a bluray player with apps on it.

Then get what ever TV you like and never let it see the internet.

I personally like Visio, but any mid grade display is fine.

I would avoid anything built into the TV.

1. Its starting to be used for spying on you
2. The chip they come with are usually not that good unless it's a high end TV.
3. They are building ads right into the TV themselves.

I would not connect the TV to the internet and use a external media player. Either a Nvidia shield or an Apple TV is your best bet.

You can also try building a media player yourself using a small computer.

Note - The self made media player will be more limited in terms of apps available, unfortunately, as well as streaming quality from some of the streaming services.

I heard that https://libreelec.tv is pretty good

I have a WebOS tv and the answer is: just don’t. It’s open source in a similar way Android is, spy’s on you, has way less apps available and can’t/is really bad at basic shit

None. Don't connect it to the internet. Get a PC and use the TV as a glorified monitor.

Home theater PC

Real world, it's a royal pain in the butt trying to get a not-smart TV. There's a couple of companies that sell them at consumer-accessible prices and they aren't as frequently on the kinds of deep discounts bigger brands go for. You might just have to steer your parents towards using an Apple TV (the only ads are for Apple's own services plus nice integration with iPhones if your parents happen to be iPhone users) then set it up to boot straight to the Apple TV so they never see the Smart TV OS, and of course never connect the Smart TV to the Internet so whatever data harvesting it does do is useless

I would be careful of anything ‘smart’.

Buy a retail display screen. Totally dumb.

https://plasma-bigscreen.org

LG is currently even worse than Android - it autoinstalls (gambling!) Apps(yes,we made sure there was no hack/malware), tries really hard to get into the network, etc. But I might be biased as I am very unhappy with their support as well - their display showed a faulty line exactly 10d after the guarantee/warranty ran out, they quoted more than the current retail value for the repair and 80% of the original retail value. For a problem that is very likely not even the display itself but a faulty cable. Fuck them.

Personally, if a Pi is out of the scope (which I totally understand) I would go with a Android box and any TV you like displaywise- while Android is as bad privacy wise as any other TV OS nowadays, it is usually far easier to lock it down at least partially so at least the worst problems can be avoided/most of them can be rooted or get linage OS installed. Just make sure the box you use can do that.

Because in the end it's also an usability problem - your parents will call you if Netflix, Disney+ or something like that refuses to play because they now require widevine in a newer version than LibreELEC offers,etc. If you want to support that, go for a Pi. If you don't, find a middle ground.

Everything is really bad. But sadly it is nearly impossible to buy a normal TV these days. Just buy any SmartTV, and get yourself a MiniPC with the Linux Distro of your liking.

LG WebOS doesn't have good support for things like Jellyfin. If you want to ever build a library of media and let them have easy access to it, then WebOS is gonna suck, so will Samsung's Tizen. But all the Android TVs have access.

Don't know if you're interested in that kind of thing, but figured I'd share it in case it was a factor.

The only other alternative is a commercial display.