Removing the software wouldn’t make it cheaper considering where TV manufacturers are making their money nowadays. The choice would be between a cheap smart TV and a more expensive dumb TV. This has been going on for years.
It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.
There’s a new type of TV coming […], and it’s completely free if you don’t count the price of your attention — or data. Telly […] offers up a TV that makes up for its nonexistent price tag by showing constant advertisements in a second, smaller display.
Removing the software wouldn’t make it cheaper considering where TV manufacturers are making their money nowadays. The choice would be between a cheap smart TV and a more expensive dumb TV. This has been going on for years.
From 2021:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021
Then there’s this taken to the extreme:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23721674/telly-free-tv-streaming-ilya-pozin-ads