I've just bought a tv for thousands of dollars from the company, selling my data doesn't seem very cost effective, especially considering the PR backlash of some scandal that could come out of it.
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.
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.
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.
Nielsen ratings only collected a representative sample which makes each sample orders of magnitude more valuable.
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 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.
> 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/...
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/02/16/Samsung-Careful-w...
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.
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?
Selling the data is not the long term play, building profiles for targeted advertising is. TV viewers are already accustomed to ads.
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.
Not for targeted ads. Superior ad targeting is one of the primary goals here.