“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Fuck me, this is the amount of money that’s enough motivation for them to ruin my experience and make me angry?
I guess regular users have much higher tolerance to ads than me, but our home has a strict zero ad policy.
A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.
Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.
This should add to their profits.
It’s even better for them: those $190M are per-year for the lifetime of that TV.
So if for simplification we said they also sold 9.5M TVs in 2021 and again in 2022, in the year of 2024 the will be making $570M from the TVs they sold in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
If Samsung TVs are used in average for 10 years, in 2033 they will still be making money from TVs sold in 2024 and all the years in between. If their rate of sales remains 9.5M per year and how much they generate per quarter in data and advertising revenue from those TVs remains $5 (true, all big simplifications), by 2033 they will be making $1.90 BILLIONS from just this in addition to what they make from selling TVs.
No wonder they’re full in on this monetization of users even whilst making user experience significantly worse - they would need to lose a huge number of sales due to this for it to not be worth it for them.
That’s just 1 year’s sales. If the TV lasts 5 years it’s raking in 5 times the data. 190M x 5 = 950M/year, and 5 seems conservative.
That was the sentence that stuck out to me the most in the whole article as well. Incredible how much is lost for so little. I imagine it’s like drug dealers though, maybe $5 for the first seller, then gets chopped up and cut again and sold for less and chopped up again…
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
I’d like for us all to stop for a moment and appreciate just how thoroughly and comprehensively fucked up it is that Linux, which is what all these TVs are running and which is supposed to be Free Software (which exists for the express purpose of empowering the user’s right to control his device), has been subverted so goddamn badly!
“commercial display” is a worth while route to explore. They do cover a wider range of image quality and features, so it does take paying close attention to specifications.
Be cautious with the commercial display route. A lot of them come with “management system” software the company is trying to push which can paywall control features or break things on you if they get online for firmware updates.
In general though they do make good displays: they are typically a lot more expensive (and heavy!)
I’ve heard somewhere else that it’s a 50/50 split between the TV sales and ad revenue
If a company could pay $5 a customer for a competitive edge in customer satisfaction over their competitors, they would. Either they are getting way more than that or there is some cartel/monopoly action going on in the market. Maybe they are playing the long game to introduce an ad free model at a premium.
Still don’t see how nobody is undercutting existing players with ad free, smart tvs.
Why is basic math.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.
That is beyond the capabilities of normies.
My wife would agree with this:
And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.
This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.
Exactly what I’ve been looking for too, and have come up wanting. I got excited recently about finding KDE Plasma Big Screen, but then it falls at the last hurdle on the app selection.
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
We had a samsung 4k curved tv that has ads on the input menu, and the ad space is filled with a samsung ad if the set has never connected to the internet.
It also harasses you with a pop up about connecting occasionally on startup.
It’s bearable but absurd. We returned it on principle
i for one cannot wait for this future
I went to a buddy’s house to watch TV and that’s how his Xbox Live looks like.
Like they’re so oblivious and he’s paying for that shit.
Mine is a monitor and nothing more.
Bonus points for buying a smart TV to get the heavily discounted price and never connecting it to the internet.
Some of the brands have been reported to not allow you to do anything until it has an internet connection to do its “initial setup” (or some such excuse).
I hope I can find a list of which ones to avoid when I have to eventually replace my old dumb TV.
Then right back to the store it goes and labelled as defective so it gets tossed resulting in losses for all companies involved.
I am so genuinely surprised that there isnt a bigger movement to hack TVs to replace the OS’s on them with non-invasive open software alternatives.
Especially with shit like this.
Because it’s not actually necessary; leave the TV isolated from the internet and use a set-top box (Apple TV, Shield, game console) as the media player.
While I agree, I think this solution is some nonsense. I bought a “TV” and paid for all the hardware and software that went into it, but I essentially have to use it as a monitor with my own hardware to escape the enshittification.
I also agree, but I view it more as ‘I bought a TV, and that’s all I want it to be’.
I don’t care about the built in software features foisted on me because I wanted an OLED panel; simply because they are going to be abandoned within 1-2 years, are powered by some anaemic chipset that is already multiple generations behind what is already available in my TV stand; and will likely end up as an attack vector to my network some period down the road.
The article mentions that TV manufacturers make ~$5 a quarter from selling your data. So those ‘features’ aren’t even free, they come at the expense of your personal information, privacy and likely security as a result.
So to quote a famous Dave Chapelle skit: “fuck ‘em, that’s why!”
Kind of, I haven’t had to buy a new tv to replace my dumb tv from 2014 but my understanding is that these awful smart TVs are at least cheaper because they’re subsidised by all the ads. If that’s the case, at least you didn’t actually fully pay for the hardware and can hopefully afford to put your own on there without being out of pocket by too extreme an amount.
The best solution os actually to keep the decoder smarts separate from the actual displaying of image because those two things have different life-cycles and different costs.
A decent TV screen will last you decades and work fine at doing what it does, with the only pressures to upgrade being video connectors - which change maybe once every 2 decades and usually you can use adaptors to give them another 2 decades or so of life - higher resolutions - which make no difference unless you have a very large screen, something which requires a large living room to view at the optimal distance and in which case what really drove you to replace it was not obsolescence - and screen tech advances - which is another of those “every couple of decades it changes but the old ones are generally still fine” kind of thing.
Media Playing, on the other hand, has its life-cycle linked to video encoding and compression which change every 5 years or so and either you have a seriously overpowered generic CPU there (which smart TVs do not) or you have hardware decoding, and in the latter case new video encodings require new hardware with support for them.
So your TV with built-in decoding - i.e. “smart” TV - will need to be replaced more frequently driven by the need to support new digital formats, even though the part that costs the most by far - the screen - is still perfectly good. On the other hand if your media player functionality is separate, all you have to replace with some frequency is the much cheaper media box whilst only replacing the much more expensive screen side once in a blue moon.
Smart TVs are great for manufacturers because they force people to replace the TV much more often hence they sell 2 or 3 times more TVs, but they’re in the mid and long term a really bad option for actual buyers who needlessly spend much more on TVs, not to mention Ecologically with all those perfectly good screens ending up in landfills because the $20 worth of “smarts” tied to a $1000 screen is not capable of handling new video encoding formats.
Many of the cheap TVs with Roku built in require you to set up a Roku account before you can even use the HDMI inputs. After setting up your account you can disconnect it from the internet and use it as a normal TV, but I spent a while trying to get around this block. In the end I had to create a Roku account.
That sounds awful; hopefully you were at least able to poison their DB with a fake name and a 10minutemail (or similar) account?
