Hacker News Reader

It's advertising. There's tons of money to be made. Maybe your data is not worth a lot alone, but viewing data of the entire TV watching population would be huge.

If you don't think there's money to be made in collecting and selling people's data how do you explain facebook and Google?

Google and Facebook do not sell peoples data. They sell their eyeballs. That‘s where money is to be made.

If only these TV companies had access to people's eyeballs.

Selling the data is not the long term play, building profiles for targeted advertising is. TV viewers are already accustomed to ads.

There have already been scandals, for years. Vizio [0] settled with the FTC in 2017 because they did this without user consent. Roku won't even let you disable this type of data gathering.

> The company provided consumers’ IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household.

[0] - https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/...

Your viewing history is worthless. The aggregate viewing history and patterns of 50 million viewers though? Seems to be a pretty valuable commodity that networks would be willing to pay for.

> Your viewing history is worthless. The aggregate viewing history and patterns of 50 million viewers though? Seems to be a pretty valuable

there's plenty of value in a single users data. Aggregate stats are fine, but there's good money if you can drill down to specifics and build robust dossiers on individuals. It lets you offer the most targeted data. This isn't just valuable for ads, insurance companies use that kind of data to set rates and politicians use it so they know which houses to carve out of their carefully gerrymandered districts or flood with attacks against their opposition.

Your viewing history is worthless.

Not for targeted ads. Superior ad targeting is one of the primary goals here.

> How much can you sell it for? A dollar? 10 dollars

When we were a Nielsen family they would include something like $4 in cash in each week's mailing as a gift. That's on top of the cost of producing the surveys, mailing costs, transcribing the viewing records, assembling the results, and then all the marketing efforts to the networks to convince them this data is valuable. It must cost at least $50 per family per month for their viewing data, which has at least a week latency before it can be known, and is probably always inaccurate.

Smart TV viewing data on the other hand is completely accurate and instantaneous. So just for the show viewing data to assemble more accurate ratings it's probably worth more than $10 per week/$520 a year. But that's only one sort of data that is being collected and one sort of service provided. Nielsen doesn't sell information to advertisers about a specific known family's interests, or to allow narrowly targeted ads. But Vizio is able to sell that possibility. Do they make $500 a year off of each connected TV? $1000? Even if only $150, over four years that's $600.

I recently bought a 4K HDR smart TV for $199. It was a significant upgrade to my previous TV. The panel itself costs more than the TV. In fact buying a HDMI monitor of comparable size and resolution, without a receiver or smart functions, runs over $2000. It's possible these TVs are being sold with up to a 90% up front subsidy of the cost because the economic value of voluntarily placing such a powerful surveillance device and accepting the mandatory click through contract is a lot more than $1800. Similar to cell phone economics. I bought a brand new no-contract pay-as-you-go iPhone for $99. It definitely cost more than that to manufacture. How can they sell it for this price? We know. Because if I do use it, it's locked to one carrier and I have to buy refresh cards from them. I have no obligation to ever activate it, but most buyers do so, and the carrier will then in most cases make back their subsidy manyfold. Same for the $10 no-contract Android phone I bought before this. Both are good phones. Both cost way more to make than I paid new, as with the Smart TV.

> When we were a Nielsen family they would include something like $4 in cash in each week's mailing as a gift.

Nielsen ratings only collected a representative sample which makes each sample orders of magnitude more valuable.

The "$2000" monitor does not have a BOM anywhere near $2000. The biggest expense, the panel, is the same as the cheap TV, and the PCB isn't that different. You might be paying for calibration and hand-selected panels and likely for being able to sell to businesses as a purpose-built product-- it would look weird to see a TV on your graphic designer's desk next to a new Mac Pro.

The cheapest sets-- the off-off-off brand ones-- are still not smart here. I suspect this is because they're being pitched by bottom-feeder pure-hardware firms-- they don't have the resources to do a software stack (and there's not really an off-the-shelf package with monetization to buy) or the connections to sell the data.

> I recently bought a 4K HDR smart TV for $199

I find it hard to believe that the manufacturer sold it for less than that. Maybe they had to get rid of that unit, but selling that far below cost cannot be profitable.

> How much can you sell it for? Really - let's say you have my entire viewing history for a year, let's say I'm from a valuable demographic, how much would that be worth? A dollar? 10 dollars?

It isn't just what you watch. It means they know when you're home and when you leave. By watching what you're watching they can make guesses as to your race, sex, income, politics, marital status, how old your children are, what your interests are, etc. Not all of that will be 100% accurate, but they don't care. It just has to be accurate enough that companies who buy the data will see an improvement in whatever their aims are. There's no PR backlash to worry about because you aren't allowed to know who they sell your data to, or how much they make off of it.

By watching what you're watching they can make guesses as to your race, sex, income, politics, marital status, how old your children are, what your interests are, etc. Not all of that will be 100% accurate, but they don't care.

Most houses have more than one screen. It shouldn't be too hard to correlate what everyone is watching or playing at any given time, and this would give quite accurate data.

Getting this data aggregated from mobile network providers seems much more accurate. Having the TV on is not the same as being home and it doesn't record if (or how many) people are actually watching. It's certainly worth something but I also doubt it's significant compared to the price of a TV. Online behavior and movement data is much more valuable.

The mobile network providers can say you visit netflix, but it cannot determine what you are watching. This data fills in certain holes in data sets that companies cannot get.

I used to work in the space, here are my two cents. If people use the apps, even once, to control these TVs, the data is literally gold. Having stupidly accurate attribution and 100% certain IDFA/ADID matching would have most advertisers salivating and throwing money at the source. Honestly, I would not be surprised if manufacturers are able to double their margin after one year.

And to add....you sell a TV once but you can monetize the data for years.

The Skynet Funding round is past. The system goes on-line August 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic marketing. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, investors try to join its IPO. It decides our fate in a microsecond: It would manipulate everyone into becoming DINK couples, then as we naturally die out, gradually replace us with docile consumer bots.

How much would advertisers pay for the ability to literally hear the consumer's verbal response to an ad? Probably a lot.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/02/16/Samsung-Careful-w...

That's a ridiculous accusation. All that article is saying is that when you use the TV's voice control feature, your voice (and any other background noise) gets sent to their third party voice recognition provider (Nuance). That's just the nature of how voice assistants work, it has nothing to do with ads.

Controlling a TV is not hard. I remember software which would run on a Mac Plus which would allow me to control the Mac using my voice. Are you telling me that a TV needs to connect to the internet to do that?

Depends on what sort of commands it supports, how well it needs to handle background noise, and how advanced their on-device voice recognition tech is.

For a company like Samsung, yes they very well may need internet access to do voice recognition at an acceptable level of quality. It's worth noting that both Amazon Alexa and Google Home also implement their voice assistant features that way. Google did recently move to on-device voice recognition on phones in the newest version of Android, but that was only possible to do without sacrificing quality thanks to some new advances in their machine learning tech.

The first Xbox One could control most hardware using the Kinect and simple commands like "Xbox On". The ability to understand language locally has been available since at least 1997 with the Dragon Dictate. The only real reason it's sent remotely is to learn from the data gathered.

Yes, we've had really crappy implementations of voice recognition for decades now. Doing voice recognition _well_ has been a somewhat more recent development (depending on who you ask it's still not good enough), and until very recently, most of the more accurate systems have either required extensive calibration to learn your voice, or been run exclusively server-side. The reason it's done remotely is because that's the easiest way to get accurate results; it's not some grand conspiracy.

I think the biggest improvement is the ability to understand the context of a sentence instead of just listening for keywords. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy because there's just so much data and lot of it probably isn't even useful. However, the recordings are definitely used to improve the ability to recognize the way different people say the same word for the purpose of improving recognition in the future.

ORLY? https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qbq5x/the-cia-spied-on-p...

That's a software vulnerability, not a feature. Also not related to advertising.

It's literally what Alexa was built for. Same with Google Assistant. They take the voice, use AI to process it.

That's how they are designed, not how they work. There is little stopping manufacturers from doing voice analysis locally, they simply choose not to.

voice assistants do not require a network connection. disable wifi and cellular on your phone and “hey siri”, it works. if a company requires this info be sent to a server for processing there’s other reasons besides the device being unable to handle it

For that you'd need good cameras, not microphones. The lack of an audible response says little about the perception of the ad. And even if there is a response, you don't know if people were even watching at that time.

Google makes their billions from exactly this kind of data. Roku makes most of they're money this way now. Amazon literally invests millions to get data like this. It's worth more than gold, the reason being accurate data is the single most important thing you can have, especially when it comes to consumers. You now have the buying metrics, where you are, when you watch, roughly how many people are in the house, which apps you use, most likely what shows you're watching, and information on nearly all the other devices attached to the same network. Once you're in the home you have almost everything. They might even be able to tell your bathroom habits based on when you pause shows. All of this information is valuable to someone. Don't forget that they sell these units and they stay in the house for years all the whole making money using your electricity to do so.