Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive

>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.

The "greater strategy" is doing what everybody else is doing - tracking user's habits, collecting data in your home 24/7, selling to the ad networks, etc.

Yeah, I'd say it's self-inflicted when you decided you would compete primarily on cost.

I'm hoping I can continue to avoid connecting a smart tv to the network. If the day comes when none of the work at all without a connection, I'm hosed.

Considering this is mainly about Visio, I think noting that they were fined $2.2M for spying on customers is pretty relevant:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/02/vizio...

Esp considering this comment: " I think you know that Vizio has been pioneering privacy and active viewing data disclosures for the last several years, and we actually lead the industry in those disclosures."

This is clearly nonsense. Simply because the amount they are getting for each device they sell our data from is really not that much so the difference wouldn't matter.

Given the fall in prices of these panels, couldn't you theoretically build a business where the TV is absolutely FREE in exchange it's programmed to track some anonymized usage behaviors for ad targeting AND the TV actually has an ad network built in that shows ads at a reasonable rate (assuming it can do things like pause Netflix automatically and insert an ad).

The Verge should have added the word "supposedly" before "make"