Imagine if you could sell to a company an accurate estimate for the number of times your brand is mentioned in a zip code in a month.

I would imagine the profits from that dwarf the hardware costs of some antennas (that the consumer pays the power for).

The profit incentive from surveillance is already there. We have to be vigilant in rejecting products that include it.

If a significant number of people start leaving their tvs offline maybe they would. Everything is so integrated now. Perhaps it would be on the chips as the wifi so not much of an extra cost?

Maybe it would be sold as a feature, like "Built in 5g hotspot!" or something like that.

If $30 of extra hardware makes them able to directly sell $X0+ of ads per TV per year, they're going to be happy to do it.

They can recoup the costs with ads.

They will. Because they are selling your habit data on the backend.