Instead of ‘splurging’ on a dumb tv bc they’re more expensive now thanks to the data sompanies sell off of smart tvs I was considering getting a smart tv and dumbing it down. Is the way to do this never connecting it to the internet? And is that the only way?
Generally, no. Manufacturers just bake in a DNS server setting and it will only fail over if it can’t get to it.
The way to get around this is to have your router block outgoing dns requests to anything but your dns server (which I have my pihole do double duty for)
I’ve come across devices where they will stop functioning or flood my network with DNS requests if they can’t reach their baked in addresses. I setup a redirect rule to handle that. ANY 53 request gets redirected to my DNS server. I’ve had similar issue with NTP and had to do the same.
At the same time they are assigned an IP that’s part of a subnet that has a rule preventing access to WAN. It allows me to “contain” my smart home devices but continue to work as much as possible on LAN without it freaking out.