Not even a secret. A TV manufacturer publicly said a while ago that a TV without "smart" features is more expensive for the company (even if sold at the same retail price) because they cannot make any money from selling usage data.
Or maybe at high volume it becomes negligible anyway.
Their userbase is almost universally clueless as to what it is these devices are doing and what the goals of Sonos, as a company, must be.
They should have been one of the good ones - and I had such enthusiasm for their products - but they have proven to be very, very antagonistic towards their users.
This behavior is despicable and we must not accept it just because "I wouldn't connect the network cable/wifi anyway". Because one day that isn't an option and by then it is already too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_materials#Tr...
Imagine my surprise when it turned out only being $4 a month to remove commercials. It almost hurts my feelings knowing how little I’m worth to advertisers...
For example I would never subscribe to a service with ads, regardless of price. The Hulu tier that includes ads would have to pay me about $30/mo before I would consider switching from the ad free tier.
The number might be unrelated to ad revenue at all and they figured that was the perfect threshold between capturing the highest number of "cheaper" subscribers while also maximizing new ad-free subscribers.
Services revenue in general is where all devices are going. If you subscribe to Netflix on your smart TV, the TV maker gets comms. Again, this referral/conversion model is pretty dated. Otherwise TV maker has no incentive to pre-bundle your app (same as Windows, some Android phones, Lenovo laptops, etc).
The big one is "supports popular services out of the box" is a selling point to consumers.
Even if it boots up to a store page where you can download them all, a whingy answer for "Does it do Netflix" will drive buyers to the next TV.