Depends on the manufacturer. Some use it to get you to use their other services. Some use it for second screen apps. Others for various on-screen info. Not sure of all use cases. I don't think the data was ever used for targeted tracking.
83 karma · joined September 19, 2019
It sends audio and/or video fingerprints (not frames, for privacy and bandwidth reasons), which are matched against a fingerprint database. Whatever people see on TV is usually 10 to 60 seconds behind the real live stream at the broadcaster (which is where the reference fingerprinting happens). GeoIP data can be used to roughly deduce where the TV is located, in order to better filter out false positives out of multiple matches (e.g. in the US where lots of programming on east/west side is just shifted by ~3 hours due to time difference).