Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master?
Amid the overall electronics boom thanks to A.I., one piece of electronics is almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these device
My dream is for my kid to learn enough about electronics to be able to open up his TV, identify any microphones, and be able to disable them. Then he might have a chance of privacy when he’s an adult.
Same with cars. An auto elec that can disable the snooping would be rich.
That’s likely not going to cover it. They’re taking snapshots of what’s on screen and sending that info home. They’re using wifi and Bluetooth to get your location and information about what other devices you have. Never connecting it to the internet is going to be one of the best things to do for privacy.
If they’re using bluetooth and wifi, we better find and remove those components too. Ain’t no way they won’t have the OS forcibly connect to the nearest open network or start bluetooth to deliver what they want when you ain’t using it, regardless of whether or not you have connected to internet or not.
Lenny, never let that TV touch the internet. Who’s that mic going to talk to with no connectivity?
Unless they start adding cellular connectivity for serving ads. Though maybe the calculation doesn’t work out, presumably most people would either connect the TV to the internet voluntarily, or they’re not gonna use the TV:s UI much and thus not see many ads.
My friend, we don’t need to speculate. The industry gives us all the info we need.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sixty-one-percent-of-us-internet-households-use-their-smart-tv-as-the-primary-streaming-device-according-to-parks-associates-302653704.html
https://worldscreen.com/majority-of-u-s-viewers-use-smart-tvs-as-primary-streaming-devices/
Right now, it’s about consolidating power at the TV operating system level. Make the TV replace devices like a Roku box and you get all that data. 61% of US households use the TV as their main streaming device. So that’s about 82 million households. Some stats get as high as 70%
https://www.aidigital.com/blog/connected-tv-stats
So connected TV use is growing at a huge rate.
It’s a hard number to get, but I’ve seen estimates that smart tvs are subsidized by about $200 per unit based on a value of $120 per viewer per year on days collection when they’re connected. Average about 2 people per household and a 3 year lifespan of the TV, and that’s $720-$200, so $500 net profit from data sales on average per unit. So already that’s close to $40-$50 billion in data sales alone across the smart TV market in the US. Without adding in hidden bells and whistles to collect more data.
But the gap the industry sees isn’t people wisely not connecting their TVs. It’s that there’s so many connected devices! They want the TV to just replace some of them.
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/392601/89-of-us-households-now-have-streaming-video-se.html
And it’s working. Simply causing TV OS bloat to try and get ahead of human laziness and undercut Roku is the goal. With huge gains to be made without spending a penny on things like embedded sims cards and cellular service for 40 million TVs sold annually in the US to collect data on a group that’s already shifting patterns to the TV as the primary device. Why bother? It’s wasted money for most units sold. If companies just sold cheap, subsidized TVs that demanded they must be connected to work, then that’s the easiest, cheapest, highest profit angle to play.