Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Wow, and on the heels of the disastrous price hike in Youtube TV because well gee those content guys are so MEAN they want all the dollarz. I also like Google Chat you know its like that thing we got rid of years ago, went through about six evolutions and came back to but without the interoperability with other systems that actually made the first one useful.

It makes me wonder if there is anyone working at Google who understands what the term "value added" even means.

Maybe they should just buy Roku and crap on that. After all Roku is moving into an analytics for sale company away from a streaming company. Why? Because everyone wants to be a portal but they can't afford to be with the studios demanding extortionate sums for their content. So instead of getting money for bringing you the content (because they have to pass on more than they can afford to the content owner) they sell their observation of people watching content to people who want to make content that people watch which is "their data" because it happened on "their device."

It makes me physically ill sometimes with how messed up this whole system came to be.

Big Roku fan here. Was an early adopter, have had many versions of the device over the last dozen years and been a brand evangelist to my friends and family.

I also try to avoid being a panelist in behavior datasets. For this reason there are financial planning services I won't use and I won't buy a Vizio TV.

So, I'm very curious about your assertion that Roku is doing analytics for sale. I hadn't seen that before, so any further insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

From last year: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20908128/smart-tv-survei... but my source was a long time Roku employee who eventually quit after the monetization started getting "out of hand" (his words, not mine).

Are they actually selling the data directly to 3rd parties? Or just using it for targeted advertising? The latter is obviously occurring but not sure about the first.

What’s the difference in terms of impact to the users? Even if they are not selling “AznHisoka watched x minutes or y show on this date,” they are using it to influence your behavior through ads.

I'm not asking from an user perspective, just curious from a business perspective. The data, if sold, could be useful from a content creation perspective. IE. if you know what shows X usually watches, it could help you with creating new shows.

Obviously, it's useful for advertising as well. But if they're not selling the data directly, it doesn't help with the content creation use case.

My understanding (and to be clear, this is hearsay, I did not seek to independently verify it) is that they will sell viewing information to a channel provider. (so Amazon could find out how often you opened up Netflix vs Amazon Prime Video, or you started on Amazon, closed it, and then opened up Netflix, etc).

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