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I think we’re safe from that because enough people put their smartTVs on the network anyway.

We’ll lose some precision in the data because it’s biased against grandma, but good enough to sell the reports.

It may be $25/unit, but if 9/10 put their device on the network anyway, that’s $250/useful outcome.

But that $25 is if every module is activated. If the Customer connects the TV to their own network anyway then you just cancel (if even activated anyway) the data plan for that TV.

My argument is more that from a cost point of view we are pretty much at the point it could be done, Not that I think it will happen any time soon (Reg's about data collection around the world are beginning to tighten up, personally I think getting the lawyers to draft up the paper work for an always connected TV for data collection alone is gonna be more the sticking point then the cost of the equipment/data to do so).

Sounds like the trick will be to convince my TV that I’m in EU.

The TV would know where you are by knowing what phone masts are in your area. But if you are in the US then ain't California pushing for tighter data collection regs?

But I get what your trying to say. Time to spin up a Software Defined Radio and start faking cell towers so your TV thinks it's in the EU :-P

Hopefully we can just tap into the serial interface.

A lot of them has started even locking down the serial interface. Hell even the boot logo on most LG TV's these days are signed.

EDIT: One thing that "might" work is a repair remote / repair menu. On the LG TV's in my house the repair menus allow you to change things like what HDMI mux the TV is expecting (I can't recall if the WiFi Module was included in such menus, but if it is you could change it to something its isn't and hopefully break connectivity. I'll have to dig out my repair remote and play around in the menus again).

There’s so many inputs, I’m sure there’s piles of vulnerabilities.

IR interface buffer overflows anyone?

i've never been so happy to not have a smart tv...

might is not a smart tv. I will need one sooner or later, so i am going to look at corporate televisions. Like in meeting rooms, and hotels that dont have this smart cack into them. Just a good panel, with honest HDMI ports on them!

Yep, the other good ones are for "commercial signage displays". No one wants to pay for smart garbage on those, so they're usually just good panels with ports.

all i want is a good panel with ports!

No wonder that even when it’s explained to them, people just shrug their shoulders. If the alternative is to go full guerilla war against your own [0] appliances, no wonder many people just give up.

[0] I expect any day now we’ll get “subscription TVs” (as in, the actual hardware). We’re already there with headphones. https://www.channelnews.com.au/nuraphone-launch-subscription...

Roku does it now... you have to register the 'Roku TV' before using it (even if it's not network connected). TV generates a code, punch it into their network, get counter code.

I can totally see a month to month plan for getting a TV (the 50" is $260, so you could do a $20/month and come out ahead after the first year).

No, when setting up the TV, if you choose not to have a network connection, there is no need to link. There wouldn't be a way to link, as the TV can't reach the Roku servers.

I saw a subscription PC on the Dell website a few days back.

Doesn’t GDPR apply to EU citizens, regardless of geography? I know that at my place of work, I have to get consent from EU citizens to email them, even if we are talking in the US

Legally it does

From the privacy policy:

"If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or Switzerland, with respect to transfers to the U.S. of certain personal information collected in connection with your use of Samsung Smart TVs, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its subsidiary Samsung Research America, Inc. are certified under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the European Commission and Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, respectively, regarding the transfer of certain personal information from the EEA and Switzerland to the U.S."

Which basically means that Samsung pinkie swears that they won’t do anything bad, and the EU is powerless to do anything anyway.

I don't understand how this works.

If you're not in the EU, the EU doesn't have jurisdiction, period. They can say whatever they want but it doesn't mean anything. I'm sure China would love to enforce their laws worldwide too, but it doesn't work that way.

Tell that to the US and US tax laws

Those are enforceable via extradition treaty because tax evasion is a crime in every nation in the world; if you want to extradite someone, the act in question must usually be a crime in both nations. The GDPR imposes regulations which have not parallels in other nations, so extradition is not an option. The Europeans are, however, free to arrest those who enter their nations, so it's still worth following for most people.

In case with Samsung, EU authorities can forbid selling their products in EU.

China does try and succeed, I’d like to remind you of the NBA fiasco and the Blizzard catastrophe.

If you want to do business in, or travel to, the EU, then you obey their laws.

You’re free to ignore the GDPR but don’t be surprised if they arrest you if you ever visit.

You should only have to convince it that you're an EU national.

> But that $25 is if every module is activated. If the Customer connects the TV to their own network anyway then you just cancel (if even activated anyway) the data plan for that TV.

Sounds to me like connecting it once, then resetting WiFi password will do the trick?

We’ll lose some precision in the data because it’s biased against grandma,

That will single handedly kill ratings for CBS.

$25 is hugely expensive. This is an industry that removes $0.02 bypass capacitors by trial and error to save a few pennies.

It is also the same industry that grossly overvalues ads.

In their mind $25 is a steal.

Normally I would agree (The race to the bottom is huge) but in a market where the cheapest Samsung 32" TV in the UK on Amazon is £183 (~$240), The brand carries some weight for "quality", the data the module would generate can be sold on to generate income and you would be in a fine position to sign a custom deal with the carrier where you only pay for data if the customer didn't connect the device to their own connection the extra module itself is gonna cost $5. The extra $20 is only in data charges if they chose to exploit it.

Samsung could throw in the cheapest caps they could find from Shenzhen Markets, but they usually come with a decent brand (at least in the TV's I've taken apart in the past couple of years).

Sneaking in the extra cost of the modulke to the customer (if its as low as $5) will be pretty easy as long as the rev generated from the data collection is more than the data charges they are billed for (omitting the cost of dev'ing the FP'ing software and generating the FP's in your server farm).

EDIT: The 3 years of service was just a random number plucked out of the air. A length of time that could be used to study to see if the costs would be worth it (and a number I picked from experience with updates / new features no longer being pushed to smart TV's). If they found its not worth it, they could drop the service 12 months in and not have to pay for the 2 years left on the experiment (thus reducing the cost again).

The manufacturers have the numbers (number of units sold vs the number of units phoning home) to know if it would be a worthwhile endeavour. Just making the point that we are pretty much at the point where the costs of such connectivity is not a huge sum in the grand scheme of things.

True, but bypass capacitors don't produce ad revenue.

... yet.

Found "Mad Man" Muntz's HN account

Amazon will knock $20 off the price of a kindle if you get the version with ads. And those only display static grayscale ads, advertisers may be willing to pay more for something more invasive. Extracting $25 of value from spyware on televisions doesn't seem out of the question.

Amazon doesn't make that Kindle $20 cheaper, it makes the ad-free version $20 more expensive, or at least, that's how I see it. That's more about market segmentation than the actual value of ads.

Even if we assume ads are nothing more than an annoyance with $0 value, the "with ads" version may still be beneficial to Amazon. That's if people with a lower budget tolerate ads and those with a high budget don't. If they only sell the expensive ad-free version, they will lose the low-budget customers, if they sell the ad-free version at the with-ads price, they lose money from people who are ready to pay more. Ads here are just a market segmentation tool. Just like it is common for low end products to be the same as their high counterparts but with disabled features.

What about your experience on the Internet leads you to believe a company would value ads at $0?

Can you point to another Amazon produced product where they achieve segmentation by making the same product and then disable features on the cheap one?

> Can you point to another Amazon produced product where they achieve segmentation by making the same product and then disable features on the cheap one?

Prime video, amazon fresh. i believe the latter is no longer available outside of Prime. I think Prime shipping itself also counts here, given the changes over the years.

Edit: spelling

Hulu more than doubles their subscription price to hide ads. Do you really think that they're making less net revenue per subscription from ad-viewing users than ad-free ones?

If you're getting $26 from the ad agencies, then it's $-1 on your BOM. Done deal.

But is individual data worth that much? I mean isn’t “my” Facebook data is worth less than $0.20US/year?

Facebook had 20 USD per active user revenue in 2018. So it is somehow worth more than that.

I bet they count API hits (FB app checking in but not being used) in that. If it was based per interacting user I bet it's much higher.

User revenue isn’t the same thing as what the user data is worth. What would their revenue be if they did nothing more than IP geolocation ads without any other user data?

It's only "worth" that little because of FB's pricing, which also includes their signaling on how worthless they want people to think their data is, overall.

Advertisers pay Facebook a total of $100/yr/user in USA.

So that wifi chipset is worth $-275, given a three year lifespan.

And that’s why you have 50” LCDs selling for $300 in the USA.

"individual data" is what makes all the difference here. Once you have the individual tv viewership data you can build products like - - tv to digital re-targetting - tv ad to actual sale/visit attribution - ad campaign performance analytics - in-tv targetted ads - show/ad ratings - and many more reports

you can sell these products to broadcasters, brands, ad agencies, tv show producers and even to election campaigns !!

Additional requirement for modern media room:

Faraday Cage

Eldest Child: "DAD!!!! Why doesn't the WiFi work in the media room!!!!"

Thinking about it, That is an added bonus... ;-)

$6/yr is early adopter price. With a little competition and multiple spy devices per home, that will drop to bulk rates of $1/yr/device or less.