Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive • The Verge
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Nilay Patel: You guys are committed to low price points and you often beat the industry at those price points. Can you hit those price points without the additional data collection that TV does if you don't have an ad business or a data business on top of the TV?
Bill Baxter, CTO of TV maker Vizio: So that's a great question. Actually, we should have a beer and have a long, long chat about that.
So look, it's not just about data collection. It's about post-purchase monetization of the TV.
This is a cutthroat industry. It's a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it's pretty ruthless. You could say it's self-inflicted, or you could say there's a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don't need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.
And then I need to make money off those TVs. They live in households for 6.9 years - the average lifetime of a Vizio TV is 6.9 years. You would probably be amazed at the number of people come up to me saying, "I love Vizio TVs, I have one" and it's 11 years old. I'm like, "Dude, that's not even full HD, that's 720p."
…And the reason why we do that is there are ways to monetize that TV and data is one, but not only the only one. It's sort of like a business of singles and doubles, it's not home runs, right? You make a little money here, a little money there. You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know. It's not really that different than The Verge website.
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Well, it's a point of view. Now let's rewind a couple of years…
link to this extract
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VIZIO, Inc., one of the world's largest manufacturers and sellers of internet-connected "smart" televisions, has agreed to pay $2.2m to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General that it installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without consumers' knowledge or consent.
The stipulated federal court order requires VIZIO to prominently disclose and obtain affirmative express consent for its data collection and sharing practices, and prohibits misrepresentations about the privacy, security, or confidentiality of consumer information they collect. It also requires the company to delete data collected before March 1, 2016, and to implement a comprehensive data privacy program and biennial assessments of that program.
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(Via The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say)
Also, try to buy a "dumb" car.