Telly Is the First TV Paid for by Brands | Hacker News Reader

Telly Is the First TV Paid for by Brands

freetelly.com

59 pointswithinrafael135 comments

> We also collect information about how you interact with our TV,such the physical presence of you and anyother individuals using the TV at any given time

> We may share your Viewing and Activity Data with third-party datapartners and advertisers who use it to show you relevant ads andprovide you with customized content

> We may also use your Viewing and ActivityData to improve the Services and understand how you interactwith the Service

> You have the right to opt-out of sharing your Viewing and Activity Data, but unfortunately, that means you will no longer have access to the Services [and must return the television]

https://www.freetelly.com/viewing-and-activity-data-policy

Not to overuse a reference already used to death but: telescreens for surveillance capitalism. Hooray.

"physical presence of you and any other individuals using the TV at any given time"

okay, so the deal is we give you a cheap TV that's constantly showing ads and we are going to watch you through this nifty camera. But you can video call on it!

Max Headroom? Go Blipverts!

I mean, what does this mean for the privacy of your guests? If you invite someone round, do they have to sign something?

Do guests in your home have to consent to Alexa or any other device? I don't think so.

The telescreen[0]!! We’ve finally done it!!!

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

I was thinking about the TVs in Ideocracy, a movie that is gradually revealing how prophetic it is.

Yep, that works too.

Fahrenheit 451 too?

23ish years after the Free-PC ended, we've come back around. What a world.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/business/no-more-giveaway...

I'm already thinking about the amount of e-waste these are likely to generate.

Our electronics and our churn through them already contribute so much. Getting a new phone every 12-18 months is a completely normal thing even though we've long passed the point of diminishing returns.

I like to think things like this are being properly recycled but I carry a lot of skepticism.

> properly recycled

Yes. Totally properly.

Probably just as much e-waste as currently where people feel the need to constantly upgrade every few years for minor improvements

I was expecting a story about the i-Opener but I suppose it wasn't free, just heavily discounted. I sort of wish I still had mine, I could use it with my CueCat.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

It looks almost exactly like the dystopian, brain-sucking, ad-laden television from "Idiocracy". What a sick world we're living in.

But not forced by government and not monoply Or only choice, so not so dystopian yet.

That is not the definition of dystopian. This could have come straight from a Black Mirror episode.

From the landing page:

> Now, all smart TVs come with ads. But you still pay for the TV

So much for choice

Considering the symbiosis between corporate and government i am not sure there is a distinction.

Yes! This the dystopian future I was hoping for!

What's crazy is that TV's are already crazy cheap. I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago spending $5 on some lettuce and right next to the checkout was a big stack of 50" TV's that they were selling for $199.

I'm simplifying here, but how is mining a dozen rare-earth materials, making a handful of integrated circuits, casting a flawless LCD panel, pick and placing circuit boards, winding coils for magnetic speakers, molding a case out of plastic and shipping the entire large box across the world the equivalent of growing 40 heads of Romaine lettuce? Doesn't the lettuce just kinda grow from seeds with occasional watering?

Maybe a good startup would be a refrigerator that only opens after you let it track your movements, preferences, listen in on your conversations and then watch a few targeted advertisements in exchange for some free lettuce?

Just pointing out that the lettuce costs what it does because of logistics. It’s fresh where you expect it to be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost of growing the lettuce is less than 5% of the cost.

My dad used to comment often on how it always baffled him that 90% of the cost of anything involving steel beams in his construction work was just moving the beams.

Also reliability and consistency and efficiency. Growing one head of lettuce in your yard is easy. Growing fifty million heads of lettuce a year, year round, every year, rain or shine, summer or winter, in sickness or in health, without it consuming 20% of your entire population... Yeah.

Sure... but is there not a bunch of logistics related to procuring the hundreds of parts in the TV's bom, organizing international shipping, distribution and sales required to get the TV to the exact same grocery store as the lettuce?

The lettuce is grown in my own country and is already picked and tended to by low-key slave labour (migrant workers).

Not in comparison. That was my point, actually, that the logistics situation for lettuce is much different.

It’s mostly in the time value, but the ratio of value to weight/volume is also much lower (which is going to result in logistics affecting the price a lot more). The biggest factor is that the clock is ticking for the lettuce going bad, and also that it needs to be refrigerated at every step along the way. Logistics are expensive! It’s the difference between night and day when time/refrigeration doesn’t matter.

The logistics involved in getting a TV to a grocery store is nothing in comparison. There’s no risk factor for delays (this risk is incorporated into the price of lettuce) and the total time between manufacture and floor-display doesn’t matter.

I meant steel beams as an example of logistics with special constraints. In the case of steel beams it’s extreme total weight/size/shape.

I keep thinking the same every time specific people complain about supposed price fixing on hard drives / SSDs. Those things are dirt-cheap, even compared to other mass-produced items. If you consider the value of what's inside, it's incredible how much reliable, fast storage you can get for the same amount of money as that TV.

The cost of the good is negligible. You eat the lettuce and it doesn’t continue to provide revenue for the farmer.

Telly will record what shows/etc you watch, record your living room, and sell not only that data but targeted advertising to brands. CTV commercials that are $15-$70 per 1,000 (cpm). Banners on ctv devices are probably $2cpm or so.

So if a user watches 1,000 commercials, Telly has already profited despite giving away the TV. And they can sell your data in perpetuity, us AI to combine it with other data to resell it later fore a higher price, etc.

The problem is that it's likely that people who get this TV have significantly lower-than-average household income, which makes them less valuable to advertisers. If banners are now $2, advertisers might quickly find that they're only willing to pay $0.50 for the demographic of people who owns this TV.

I don’t know about markets in general, but when I ran a retail liquor store I was making all my money on low income customers. The occasional rich guy who came in and bought the $300 bottle of Scotch wasn’t even close to matching the large number of regulars that were buying high margin $3 nips and $8 wines.

> I'm simplifying here, but how is mining a dozen rare-earth materials, making a handful of integrated circuits, casting a flawless LCD panel, pick and placing circuit boards, winding coils for magnetic speakers, molding a case out of plastic and shipping the entire large box across the world the equivalent of growing 40 heads of Romaine lettuce? Doesn't the lettuce just kinda grow from seeds with occasional watering?

I won't pretend I know the answer, but I do know some people who work on electronics/the hardware side of things, and some who are rural workers, and I think part of the reason could be that for the TV, once you have the mass production facility operating, unless you hit supply chain issues, the whole thing is rather predictable. Predictable as in, you know if you get the necessary inputs, you can produce X units in T time max.

With the lettuce, sure, it just kinda grows from seeds (though the lettuce you grow for seeds is not one you'll eat), but it's a lot more unpredictable (there could be droughts, flooding, fires, invasive species, bugs, and last but not least, thieves).

So again, I won't pretend I know the answer to your question, and I'm not even an expert on either subject, but after becoming a little bit more familiar with the process involved in producing food to supply a population (so I don't mean your home orchard, which is lovely to have, but won't feed a city) I think a lot of us folks with very little knowledge of rural life and food production tend to underestimate the effort to produce food, and overestimate the improvements modern technology has brought into this.

In any case, I completely agree with your point about the dystopian future. In line with your refrigerator startup idea, a few years ago already some friends and I were joking that, in the future, people wouldn't even own their bathroom: it comes in for free, but you can only use it once a day. After that, it's in-app purchases (at least two tiers, of course!).

The implication is of course that your advertizing data is so valuable to subsidize the cost. I don't believe it - maybe advertizers do of course. Actually from the outside it looks like the advertizing market is continuously collapsing. Look how bad ads have become, and how irrelevant linear ad-paid TV has become.

I think what's actually going on is that the $200 (or let it be $400, same ballpark) is a fair price. Drizzle a few LCD crystals on a glass plate, pop it into a cheap injection molded plastic case with an off-the-shelf TV mainboard and ship it in a container. Also, $200 is a lot of money, for that price you can get a supercomputer for your pocket! I think what's really going on is that the price of food is insane and our food industry is a grift, but that is a different topic.

Imagine a world without advertising constantly. No generation before us has ever had to deal with this kind of constant aggressive product placement.

It makes me want to hatch a plan to take over the world, solely to ban advertising in every way, shape, and form, outside of Yellowpages. It's completely out of hand. And it would take real restraint to not send the advertisers to the pillory for the rest of their lives for thinking this is an OK way to treat human beings.

The entire modern corporate ecosystem is build by and for adtech. Its interesting to imagine where we would be if advertising had been disallowed or nonviable as a business model.

A cellphone isn't a supercomputer. Sure, it might have relatively decent grunt versus computers of yesteryear, but it doesn't trade punches with the average GPC, nor an actual supercomputer.

It trades punches just fine. What do you think people use computers for? Punches like "has access to the Internet" or "runs Google Docs". Other ones too, like "runs Candy Crush" or "lets me watch Netflix/YouTube/Disney+". True, it'll get sucker punched by shots like "runs Kerbal" or "runs Factorio" but that's a niche market.

Except it doesn't trade punches whatsoever, especially once you consider price-to-performance of what a £1000 computer performs like versus a £1000 smartphone. You're not scoring movies, doing serious CAD and you're not playing latest-gen games in max quality from a phone.

The popularity of something has no bearing on whether something is or is not a supercomputer or capable of trading punches with a desktop computer of equal price. Irrelevant counterpoint.

I think you assume those existing TVs don't already engage in a large amount of the activity you describe, which is what allows them to sell those TVs at less of a profit margin, or perhaps even a loss.

Taking up amateur radio has given me an idea of what mass-market consumer electronics might have cost if economies of scale hadn't kicked in so thoroughly.

The mistake you're making is in assuming that the price of something has anything to do with the inputs. It's a fairly common mistake. But looking at loss-leaders, door-busters, sales, and verblen goods, hopefully you're able to understand that it's true.

Thus, discussions of supply chain length of lettuce vs TV is the wrong one. Comparisons can certainly be made between the two but in determining how much something costs? At the right places at the right time (moving day) and find you TVs for free.

I don't think this will work, because it seems like the average person prefers being lied too, or put another way, people prefer to live in blissful ignorance.

A $300 TV gives you the illusion of privacy, sure you see some ads, but you always have seen ads with your paid cable subscription, so what's the difference.

With this, a free TV immediately makes me skeptical and defensive. "Nothing in life is free". Plus, Telly is doing a hostage situation - Here's the $300 tv for free, but if you fuck with anything, we'll charge you $2k (or whatever it is).

I don't see this going well for Telly.

Most non-techies don't care about privacy.

The difference is that this TV is being upfront about ads and that it’s FREE. I don’t think the average person really cares about their privacy. I’m sure many will jump at the chance for a free TV since all TVs are ad supported anyway. (If people cared they’d uncheck the obscure setting on their smart TV that disable ad personalization)

> Plus, Telly is doing a hostage situation - Here's the $300 tv for free, but if you fuck with anything, we'll charge you $2k

Wait is this mentioned anywhere? I’m pretty skeptical of this. Even if you got the free TV and never even hooked it up or immediately broke it I don’t think Telly is going to hunt you down demanding their money back.

In the terms:

> The Product requires an Internet and Wi-Fi connections from third-party providers in order to be functional. Your Internet connection or data plan is subject to the fees, restrictions, terms and limitations imposed by your provider. In order to use the Product and Services, You will:

> (a) Use the Product as the primary television in Your household;

> (b) Keep the Product connected to WiFi and internet; and

> (c) Not use any software on Your WiFi network that with advertising blocking capability.

> (d) Not make physical modifications to the Product or attach peripheral devices to the Product not expressly approved by Telly. Any attempt to open the Product’s enclosure will be deemed an unauthorized modification.

> If we discover that You are not abiding by the requirements above or have disconnected the Product from an internet connection or WiFi for more than short periods each month, You will no longer be able to use the Service and You must return any Products in your possession to Telly. Failure to return Products to Telly will result in Telly charging the credit card on file. If you do abide by the Terms of Service, your credit card will not be charged.

I'm guessing the reason why this service is US only is because I feel like this shit wouldn't fly anywhere else.

Nah, I'm sure it'd fly in plenty of places, but shipping TVs internationally is going to be rough with import fees et al.

US advertising CPMs for this type of placement will be 100x more valuable than Southeast Asia and 50x LATAM. The economics don’t work anywhere else. Even Europe

I'm not entirely convinced that the economics work in the US either.

It feels like it has the same problem as those iBuyer ("we'll buy your house with a price we'll calculate using an algorithm") products - the market you capture isn't a solid cross-section, but rather weighted. So iBuyers tended to attract people who might not be able to get the best value for their home on the open market. I think Zillow Offers flopped quite spectacularly.

Similarly, the notion of a free ad-powered TV would be more attractive to people with less purchasing power. For a middle/high-income household, the cost of purchasing a 55-inch TV, even a high-end one, is not that steep. The Wirecutter LCD pick (Hisense U8H) is $648 and OLED pick (Samsung S95B) is $1300. There's also a budget option (TCL 5-Series) for $450. So if the target audience for the Telly is someone who can't justify spending ~$400 for a TV, I am not sure if they are an advertiser's dream.

If this ad model truly works in the US, I imagine that it could economically also work in Europe. However, I imagine they would have issues with GDPR considering what a massive data harvesting and selling operation this is.

> Nothing in life is free.

We're bathing in free services and most people don't ask about that.

What happens when a person feels “over advertised” to? Two video ads at once, three, at some point does consumer psychology begin to turn? I can’t take certain broadcast media already because at some level I’m physically aware of how unrewarding it is. I wonder what would happen if people encountered a situation so manipulative it was like a trauma.

One step closer to the TV programming in Idiocracy[0]: https://te.xel.io/img/posts/2016-05-14-facets-of-greatness-t...

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

I'm curious how the following will be enforced:

> Any attempt to open the Product’s enclosure will be deemed an unauthorized modification.

The FTC has previously warned others (e.g., Microsoft) about similar attempts https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/04/...

Probably it's different because Telly is clearly lending you the hardware (according to their ToS). There are many reasons why they would ask the users to return the hardware, like if it's not connected to the internet for too long. They are presenting it like the TV is a product you own, but that is not in line with how their ToS are phrased.

Please drink a verification can.

Also:

> Now, all smart TVs come with ads. But you still pay for the TV.

Here's the crazy other solution: let me pay for the TV and don't put ads on it. But I guess milking those who can't set up a simple DNS ad blocker (you wouldn't believe how many people don't even use a browser ad-blocking extension) is too pretty of a penny.

I'm totally fine with buying a TV that's default OS includes ads when connected to the internet if it means the price of the TV is subsidized and I don't have to sign some kind of agreement that requires I don't modify the TV in anyway/always have it powered on and connected to the internet.

Honestly, even using the default smart TV OS in most cases isn't really that obtrusive. I don't do it anymore but when I did I really didn't mind.

Is Telly short for Telescreen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

It's also common British slang for television... but maybe.

I really don't like seeing Orwell's ideas leave the page. Sigh.

A lot of hate here for this, but honestly, I think it's just fine - they're transparent, you know what to expect, and you can make an informed decision.

I don't think it's necessarily transparent. This page claims it will only put ads in a corner of the Smart Screen, but I would be pretty surprised if they don't also use the rest of the Smart Screen, and the main screen, and the speakers, and camera and microphone for targeted advertising. They also don't make it clear that they will actively monitoring what you're watching and adjust the ads accordingly, and I don't think that will be obvious to the people that sign up for this.

I would also expect microtransactions to unlock some of the functionality they advertise on the page, which again is not stated anywhere.

The level of data collection is unexpected too - this thing is going to monitor how many people are in your house and watching particular TV programs, and probably scan their faces too. They will sell that data to anyone who wants it, and not make it clear anywhere besides the fine print that they know you don't read.

Informed consent is when you buy a newspaper knowing there is an ad on page 2. Uninformed consent is when you visit a news website knowing there is an ad on the side, but not knowing that it's installing 10 cookies that will track all your browsing activity forever and sell the data to anyone. This TV is equivalent to that second example.

Sure they are somewhat transparent, but is the average person really going to read all the fine print?

I see nothing wrong with this. In fact, I’d love for a company to give me a free car with ads on and/or in it for me to use during road trips.

I'd probably take free ad-sponsored taxis but I'd definitely not want to let a company pay me to put a camera in my home.

> I see nothing wrong with this.

Aside from all the data collection, anyway.

If you're willing to put that aside, it's great.

Hopefully this is the death knell for TVs that cost over a grand yet come with bloated adware and other bullshit that you can't uninstall. If I want ads on my TV, you'd best be sure I'd like to be paid for viewing those ads.

Fuck paying for the privileged of be advertised to.

> Fuck paying for the privileged of be advertised to.

You've described TV in a nutshell.

TV previously generally didn't watch you.

"If you stare into the void, the void stares back."

Sure, if you're willing to ignore the downside of anything, then that thing is great.

Personally, this is no more attractive than any other "smart" TV -- which is to say it's a nonstarter -- but I have no doubt that there are enough people who don't mind it that they might be able to make a business catering to them.

Data collection is not inherently wrong. As long as there is consent I will willing take the benefits in my hypothetical situation.

Consider the alternative - we are literally discussing an ad now, and received nothing. Anyone who clicked the link has likely had some data taken about them.

> As long as there is consent

True, yes, as long as it's actually informed consent (which is incredibly rare in surveillance marketing). I was just expressing that it rates extremely high on my creepiness scale, not that there was an ethical problem with it.

the thing wrong with this is that there's already too much shit in this world, and advertisers paying you to put shit in your living room is just going to result in a bunch of extra shit going in landfills.

At scale, though, it just pushes poorer people into accepting it, since it frees up cash for other uses. So it turns into a propaganda and monitoring device that mostly targets a pretty specific group.

And those poorer people aren't very valuable to advertisers, since they have far less money to spend on frivolous extras, so it's hard to run 'free stuff' services like this.

This is the real issue with it - the people who opt in are almost certainly the least valuable from an advertisers' perspective. I would definitely wonder what kind of assumptions they built into their model about how much ad revenue folks would generate when deciding whether this was a viable business model. I wouldn't be shocked if they just used an average, ignoring the fact that this group is likely to be below average, and that renders the whole business infeasible.

I don't see this as an issue.

Sure, there are expensive stuff that get advertised which poor people are shy to spend money on.

But there are lots of stuff that poor people do buy. Like toothpaste, mobile phones, shoes, clothes, dishwashers, deodrant, soft drinks.

Although these stuff are cheap, they are billion dollar industries.

And manikng a lot of people switch from one toothpaste to another will make a company a lot of money.

The thing about low income earners is that they spend pretty much 100% of the money they make, and there are a lot of them

Yes but you are thinking that the ads would lead to increased spend instead of redirecting spend to the advertised alternatives.

There's lots of bottom feeders who love separating poorer people from their money. Gambling companies, payday loans, pyramid schemes, etc...

True, but those advertisers still don't expect to pay much per ad impression. The ballpark of what I've heard is that type of ad impression is worth only between 1% and 10% of what a typical ad impression is worth.

This is the reason that companies like twitter don't allow their paying members to see stuff ad-free.

If they did, then ad revenue from the non-paying members would drop a lot, since now advertisers know that they are no longer targeting the general public, but instead the general public who refuse to pay $8 for a better experience.

> And those poorer people aren't very valuable to advertisers

Their vote is still valuable, just feed them propaganda towards your candidates

I couldn't tell if this was satire or not but it seems to be completely serious?

Whats to stop people from just taping black construction paper over the 'special ads screen?'

Uh! Good idea. Maybe it uses the camera to track your eyes. And it won't turn on if you tape the camera! That would sound on brand, right?

Edit: I mean, it may track you to say "you've not watched ads for the past 30 minutes"

What a hostage situation.

Get our free TV; but try to cover the ads, or mess with the Wi-Fi, and we'll charge your credit card the full thousand bucks - just like that. Oh, your internet was down for four days because Comcast sucks? Well... sorry for putting you in financial distress. Have a free movie rental! We'll also send a free cupcake if you take down your bad review!

Oh, and your kids had better not throw a Wiimote into the thing. Otherwise that "free $1000 TV!" quickly is a terrifying liability, not a perk.

From a business perspective, the problem I see is that 55" TVs are already extremely cheap because TVs are the one product segment that consistently defies inflation. So the target market is definitively people for whom $250 is a lot of money (55" TCL 4K HDR TV price at Walmart right now), which doesn't seem lucrative for US advertisers.

I'm curious what the terms of usage would be, since eventually people will figure out how to block all the ads one way or another.

Also after having seen a few cheap Walmart tvs, some with very intrusive ads I think there might be a market for this

I'm curious if you'll be able to turn the damn thing off or prevent it from turning itself on.

You mean like covering the lower screen with some black duct tape?

I imagine at some point they'll update the TVs so that the lower screen is required to use the TV (like for changing settings or something), and people will make sliding/pivoting physical ad blockers for the second screen.

True, you could put the whole navigation system down there. I'm sure they've already thought of all of this.

> people will figure out how to block all the ads one way or another.

I’m not so convinced about this. Locked down hardware and software, not like you can download a browser plug-in.

In before anyone says “PiHole”: anyone actually doing that would be a rounding error in usage.

They make you send it back, or if you tamper with it, charge you two grand.

Telly is slang for TV here in the british isles - does it exist over there too?

Yes, but I have not heard it used for years. It seems to have fallen out of favor like my dad’s favorite: “boob tube.”

This website has some of the worst scrolljacking I've ever seen. It seems okay at first, but then sometimes it ends up scrolling at a ridiculous speed??? and then it goes back to normal.

for those who thought juicero was peak consumerism

This TV is going to get hacked in 5 minutes. Or just tape a piece of paper over the advertising screen.

I'm thinking of getting one just for the novelty, and not attaching it to the internet.

That’s always the best with these things. It’s a giant cue cat!

Also I wonder how many verification cans it comes with.

> It’s a giant cue cat!

I still have a couple of them in a drawer somewhere...........

Oh that's a good idea. Should I sign up for one of these and just wait until they go bankrupt? What are the odds that they'll want to recover individual units from each user? How much will I have to pretend to use it while I await that implosion?

I bet you that second screen will be hacked by just removing like two wires :D

"We've determined that over the past six months, you have been provided 47 opportunities to enjoy Hunt's Catsup®. Our consumer data partners indicate to us that you continue to purchase Heinz brand when shopping for your family or loved ones. Unfortunately, this often indicates tampering with the Second Smart Screen. Please confirm your adherence to the Terms and Conditions by taking advantage of the wonderful offers we provide."

The magic bullet theory is back, almost 100 years later!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model

Removing two wires can easily be detected, and then you have to pay $2k.

Covering the bottom screen with some nice vinyl wrap, however...

That sounds pretty easy to detect as well. If it's custom made hardware they gotta have a plan for that.

You can't do that. From the terms:

  If we discover that You are not abiding by the requirements above or have disconnected the Product from an internet connection or WiFi for more than short periods each month, You will no longer be able to use the Service and You must return any Products in your possession to Telly. Failure to return Products to Telly will result in Telly charging the credit card on file. If you do abide by the Terms of Service, your credit card will not be charged.

Gotta load up on verification cans

> If we discover

Well, then the obvious thing to do is make sure they don't discover it.

They'd have a heck of a problem at my house because my internet is regularly out for days at a time.

Time to use one of those dynamically loaded digital credit cards then set to max $1 charge amount hehe

They could still go after you in court.

Than they send bailiffs to your home....

In addition to advertising, they could make money by producing a reality show about trying to repo the TVs.

Maybe the business model isn’t advertising, but instead doing checks on all the customers and sending a fine to anyone with an active GitHub.

IMO the start is the small advertising screen. Soon they'll start interjecting ads over the ads on the screen or inserting ads where there weren't any before.

This TV would have to be pretty damn good for me to accept advertisements being shown to me constantly as I watch a movie. By the vague description, I assume it's not. I'm sure you could find something that matches the description "55” 4K HDR Theater Display" for under $300 easily.

Something about this makes me feel uneasy, as though its success would cause the rest of the TV industry to adopt similarly invasive ideas without any price reduction.

Tv isn’t a necessity. Don’t give up your privacy that easily. 99.9% of tv is trash anyway. Mine has been on once in the last 2 years (no cable to streaming services). My wife wanted to watch something on YouTube. We live great lives without it. And we save money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

Also see:

> Telly to Give Away 500k Free 4K TVs with a Second Screen Showing Constant Ads

> 12 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35948916

Is there and hope in solving homelessness problem with this approach? Free housing, clothing, food and transportation - completely paid by brands :) We got entertainment companies covered already it appears.

Can anyone guess how this will be reinforced? can they make legal action on every guy who decides he wants to throw it off a cliff or harvest the panel and speakers?

I would love a Telly and put tape over the bottom screen (or put some decorations in front of it) so i don't have to look at the ads.

You have no problem with them surveiling you in your own living room?

Tape also solves this.

Their T&Cs also solve evading surveillance by charging you two grand for tampering, so no, tape doesn't solve anything in a meaningful capacity for the consumer when they could buy an equivocal TV for much less than that.

That's interesting. Thanks for pointing that out! I see that anyone can opt out of the arbitration clause, and I wonder how it would play out in court if someone put a shelf or some tape in front of the camera and was charged for it. I wouldn't suggest anyone try it, but it would be interesting to know how effectively this could be enforced. The dystopian aspect of the telescreen isn't the fact that there's a camera on the TV but the enforcement mechanism behind it.

Idiocracy had such TVs with ads around broadcast.

Or the episode of Black Mirror where everyone's bedroom was a small room with only a bed and walls that ran TV shows 24/7 and took up the entire walls and ceiling with shows and ads.

Netzero, but with a TV and cameras.

What a fucking abomination...

Sweet, now I can open it up and sell the parts on eBay!

I wonder if it runs on top of Android.

Hopefully would make it easy to exploit and flash new software onto it.

Maybe get one of those prepaid credit cards and put it on the Telly account so if they see you haven't turned your TV on or flashed the firmware they can't really do anything about it. Are they really going to hunt you down and ding your credit over a $200 television? Seems very post-capitalism economy.

Looks like a very anti-consumer business model, or maybe it is a very friendly consumer model?

I suppose this was inevitable

Now this IS "late stage Capitalism"!

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