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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

"Dumb TVs" would cost more. It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.

They would cost more because post-sale content sales and advertising generate revenue for TV manufacturers, which they use to subsidise the device sale price, because it's such a competitive, low-margin, market.

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I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

Then again I remember that if commercials weren't successful, TV as we know it would not exist. People gobbling up ads and buying stuff because of that is why ads are still being used after all.

After all... https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

There's also the factor that whoever owns the platform showing the ads doesn't care whether the ads are effective. So long as your eyeballs are tracking it, they'll get paid anyway.

Only in the sense that restaurateurs don't care if the food is good. If it's selling... sure, they'll keep selling something that sucks. But generally, advertisers aren't quite the fools everyone thinks they are. There are always fools around, but prices tend to be rational enough long term. If ads aren't effective, revenue will dry up eventually.

All that effort to track people for ads... these are all attempts at improving effectiveness.

I don't entirely agree. A better analogy might be that a restaurant's landlord doesn't care if the food is good. I've run into the problem that sellers of adspace will often prefer to work more with customers who have lower conversion rates. Makes perfect sense when you think about it, people with the crappiest products need advertising the most, while the best products can lean on word-of-mouth.

Edit: Come to think of it, the fact a product is advertising at all might come to be seen as a negative signal of value by the public at large.

There are 20 equally good product brands for 99% of things you buy and use everyday. But you have a clear favorite amongst those 20 that you have already chosen to buy and use consistently. And you don't change your preference unless you are repeatedly reminded of those alternatives. This is advertising 101. Then there are products that you don't yet use because you don't yet think you need or want them. And you don't feel you need/want them until you are repeatedly and subtly/overtly "sold" this product.

Please don't act as if you know me. Advertisers don't know me nearly as well as they'd like their bosses to think and neither do you.

Please don't take it personally. I obviously don't know _you_ and the "you" in my sentences isn't referring to you specifically. With that "you", I was referring to the typical user in general.

Fair enough. I intentionally cultivate a preference for novelty which is at odds with that description. Between that and the presumption a lot of the hype around advertising has, I can get defensive around the subject.

Alternatives as well:

- There are things you buy infrequently or on a whim where the options are equally good, and the advertisers just want their product to be the last of the competitions' logos to be associated with a positive feeling. For example, I rarely drink soda, but when I do I'm choosing between Coke and Pepsi with no real brand connection (other than both companies feeding feelings into my brain on occasion). How can I know whether the advertising is some part of what influences me to pick one?

- Products whose function is partially social signalling, where the advertising can serve to establish the signal/brand connection. I care virtually not at all about pickup trucks, but I have a mental connection between Ford and Denis Leary's voice talking about "toughness". Ford pays for all that because you're much more likely to buy an oversized truck for your grocery runs if your community's overriding association with the F150 is "tough" than "small hands".

Your last statement runs contrary to centuries of business evidence. "Build it and they will come" is a myth.

That is only true while people don't know your product exists. Once they know it exists they try to get an unbiased review; advertising can't provide that.

This isn't how regular people think though. When presented with X products, with different features but generally good quality, people choose with their gut. You are an extreme minority if you deviate from this pattern.

Not to mention, most products can't carry themselves by word of mouth. Only a select few. Advertising prevents concentration of mindshare.

I don't think advertisers are dumb. I think they're immoral, unethical, despicable jerks.

for every 10 people like you, one is affected by it and buys something.

economies of scale and all that

>> Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

This is an eternal sentiment. For the more analytical, there are many examples of advertising millions demonstrably doing nothing. Ha, BMW turned off their ads for a year and nothing happened. So and so blew squillions on ill conceived ad campaigns, etc. It's very easy to cherry-pick advertising stories. To bastardize the adage, "half of the advertising tree is always cherries."

And yet, advertising is one of the biggest economic forces of our time... as you say. It literally rivals oil, shipping and other traditional giants. FB & Alphabet are, as businesses, $trn advertising businesses. That's the market proof that advertising does affect your choices.

The simple proof is easily visible to anyone on the advertiser side of the advertiser-consumer relationship. You open an online business. No one shows up. You advertise. People show up. It may or may not be profitable, but the causality is plain. Even without tracking/analytics/snooping... it's a plain fact that many or most customers for many businesses or even whole sectors are attributable to ads.

Consumers only notice that ads piss them off. Advertisers only notice that ads make consumers do stuff. Both are extremely dismissive of the others' intelligence.

To be honest, if it was just "hey, here's this show on Netflix!" or "Try this new streaming platform!" type ads, I could deal. I've never had too much trouble disabling this sort of thing on my Sony TV.

The thing that always worries me is that it's essentially a low end smartphone with a really sweet screen. I still don't know what will happen if the OS/firmware ever gets borked. Will it just fail over to the last input I used, essentially rendering it a monitor? (not the worst thing that could happen)

Or will it just boot up to some error screen and become useless because the "smarts" broke and now I can't use a perfectly good display anymore?

I know a lot of people prefer the ease and convenience, and that's why they sell so well. But I'd always prefer to have the display be the display, and then use whatever box or dongle or PC I choose to provide the content. Those can be swapped and upgraded. The 2014-era smartphone SoC built into the TV can't.

Ads are not primarily about making the user consciously _like_ a product. They are about making the user _know_ a product or brand. Once they are in the mood or need of buying something, product X "feels" vaguely familiar. This is supposed to give them more confidence in the potential purchase.

> I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.

I don't think you're living in a bubble, but I do think that advertisers will pay for completely ineffective ads. Therefore, Samsung and LG have to compete to make the worse product so they can win the free money these naive advertisers are handing out.

I assume that investors simply won't accept one-time sales as a business model anymore. They want continuous growth with no employees on payroll to grow things. Ads are that. (You can see this everywhere. Apple wants 30% of Spotify subscriptions just for making the iPhone. Games are designed for esports and the associated sponsorships. Amazon wants $99 a year for shipping, rather than $10 on top of each order. Easy money, and people say "yes!!!!" to it all.)

That seems extremely unlikely. The "smart" portion is hundreds of dollars in most TVs. A quick search proves that out:

https://www.cdw.com/product/Samsung-40-Full-HD-Non-Smart-Hos...

https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-hg40nf690gf-nf690-series...

The bill of materials for the "smart" parts in a smart tv costs less than $20-$30 US. Nothing more than that.

I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.

But its presence can be sold for a hundred more, because the consumers apparently... want these features? Things like YouTube, Netflix, video calls, etc. And, of course, voice control.

> I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.

Citation? Because I find that assumption outlandish.

I've watched them replace the control board in my 7 year old Vizio TV, the hardware is significantly better than anything but the highest end current RPi. Dual core cpu, quad core gpu, AC wifi, 8gb of memory, and the ability to push 4k HDR video at 120hz.

You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?

My idea is that chips themselves, sold in bulk, are but a fraction of the cost of the complete control board. Assembly and testing easily double the cost. For a consumer device like RPi, also shipping, packaging, and markup add, say, 50% on top.

For a TV manufacturer, most of these costs don't appear because they just need to add a few components to an existing PCB, and add more tests for them.

The other part of costs is licensing and/or development of software, its ongoing maintenance, extended tech support (online, phone), maybe sometimes content deals (a free month of Netflix, or something).

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/...

Must be nice to be a corporation so when 6o7 hack into people's computers and wiretap their homes you only pay a fine of $1 per victim.

> You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?

Since you are talking about a Vizio tv, here's some straight from their CTO's mouth:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397/airplay-2-homekit...

"So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.

This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost."

Let's imagine the bill of material is about $30, and that's cheap knowing they have mid to high end embedded SoCs or DSPs being able to move 4K video.

To that price, you also need to add a continuous software development for the OS and some apps (even if they are Open Source, because they need to do at least some modifications). Minor bugs will happen and you would need to solve them.

Also, more complex hardware and software usually equals more complex testing and debugging, and with this more person-hours and a bigger cost. At the end, it might not be $100, but it will be near enough to round it for $100.

To be clear, this is said without having ever worked in a TV manufacturing company, but knowing how this kind of things are made, I think I'm not too far from reality.

That was a part of my point: BOM is not dominating the difference in the price.

No, it's common industry practice that "Smart TVs" (i.e. ones with built in ad tracking) are sold at-or-below cost and companies make up the difference by showing ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18905408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781481

So, maybe a business model of buying a bunch of smart TVs, pulling off the wifi module and reselling them?

Perhaps better yet, install a switch -- a big red toggle on the rear, with even bigger lettering -- to physically dis- and, if desired, re-connect it?

> It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.

I'd pay for privacy and control.

The other option like I've said is to recycle and mod smart tvs and rewrite their logic so that the user can do wathever he wants. Maybe marketing the modding kits. That would be more akin to those people who install custom open source bios on IBM Thinkpads.

Recycling and modding would be great, but I'd also like to be able to buy a new high-end TV without smart features.

You can, sceptre makes a number of models, all of which have no smart features at all. Aimed for the home market

Thanks for the tip. Sadly it doesn't look like they sell in the UK but for the US market this might be a good option.

> I'd pay for privacy and control.

Then buy a monitor. They have HDMI ports so they can get whatever video feed you need. Some even have speakers.

Monitors are designed to be used closer to your eyes. Probably have more pixel density.

So I believe there would be a huge price gap between a huge 50"+ monitor and a TV that is more expensive because some extra work on software had to be made.

Monitors lack remote controls.

A lot of functions you would use a remote for can be managed by the connected device.

HDMI-CDC (Consumer Device Control)

I, my wife, her parents, as well as the majority of people buying TVs, want a remote.

If you're using a dumb TV (monitor), and a device feeding it (Apple TV, Roku, Firestick, Chromecast), they typically come with a remote which will handle those needs.

I will admit, OTA TV (that is, via an antenna) will be... harder.

I'd rather be protected by regulation than pay more for what I shouldn't have to pay for in the first place.

When was the last time regulation protects anything?

The Security Act of 1934 created the SEC and look at the past 20 or so years and see how many scandals has happened under their watch. All big players. Look at Madoff. Whisper blower after whisper blower to the SEC and what did SEC do? They looked the other way.

You're not engaging in good faith, but I'll offer this: I have not died of botulism thanks to regulation.

Do you seriously need someone to provide a laundry list of all the ways government protects you and your interests? Or are you just being obtuse?

I disagree that it's hard to market. There are plenty of privacy conscious people that would pay extra. I see billboards every day for duckduckgo that advertise their privacy features. I think a privacy focused TV or IOT device would do well.

Privacy is only one angle, a lot of it is about selling you content like TV/Films that can be promoted via the TV. Often goes hand-in-hand with advertising that has privacy issues, but much of the money comes from the consumer not advertisers. That's a more subtle one to market: buy this device that has fewer choices about buying content.

I think you might be underestimating the cost of developing or licensing smart TV software.

It isn't hard to market something that costs more and lacks a flaw.

This is why I saw "what most people consider". It's easy to market this to HN but most people don't know or care about this sort of control over their devices.

Well, they might cost more, but TV/monitor prices have dropped so much over the past couple of decades that it can't be that much of a deciding factor.

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