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Vizio Wants Next-Generation Smart TVs To Target Ads To Households (reuters.com)
Smart TV manufacturer Vizio has formed a partnership with nine media and advertising companies to develop an industry standard that will allow smart TVs to target advertisements to specific households, the companies said this week. From a report: The consortium includes major TV networks like Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal and CBS, as well as advertising technology companies like AT&T's Xandr. Addressable advertising, or targeting viewers on the household level based on their interests, has long been the goal of TV marketers. But TVs lack cookies that internet browsers use to allow ads to follow people around the web. [...] The consortium of companies, dubbed Project OAR, or Open Addressable Ready, hopes to define the technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver addressable advertising on smart TVs, which are WiFi-enabled TVs with apps for services like Netflix Inc and Hulu, by the end of this year, McAfee said. Further reading: In January this year, Bill Baxter, chief technology officer of Vizio, spoke about business of data collection in an interview. He said: 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. And then I need to make money off those TVs. They live in households for 6.9 years -- the average lifetime of a Vizio TV is 6.9 years. You would probably be amazed at the number of people come up to me saying, "I love Vizio TVs, I have one" and it's 11 years old. I'm like, "Dude, that's not even full HD, that's 720p." But they do last a long time and our strategy -- you've seen this with all of our software upgrades including AirPlay 2 and HomeKit -- is that we want to make things backward compatible to those TVs. So we're continuing to invest in those older TVs to bring them up to feature level comparison with the new TVs when there's no hardware limitation that would otherwise prevent that.
Soon all TV will do this, better idea is force the TV through a proxy that filters ads... Squid + Privoxy and man in the middle yourself so you can filter the https connections too. Problem solved!
That sounds like projection. You must be an Apple customer.
I owned a Vizio 55-inch "Smart" TV. Vizio had already gotten into trouble for collecting user TV activity without properly disclosing that. I quickly realized that the "Smart" features of my Vizio were worse than what I got out of my gen. 1 Chromecast. So I disabled Vizio's "Smart" TV functions.
But the firmware of my Vizio TV was terrible. The TV would turn itself on overnight! I would come into my living room the next morning to see the TV turned on, but the remote would not work. The few buttons on the TV including the power button would not work either. I had to pull the electrical cord to get the Vizio pos TV to turn off. This happened at least three times over two years.
Changing channels on the Vizio "Smart" TV was slow. Much slower than my non-smart Sharp TV which I love. And since I was using an antenna, channels with weak signal would cause the Vizio "Smart" TV to strangely change to a channel across the dial (going from something like 45-3 to 15-1 without any user input). I repeatedly hid 15-1 from my channel lineup, but the Vizio would add it back repeatedly.
I finally called Vizio's customer support. The moron from Vizio did not seem to know that channels on physical frequencies (specified in megahertz) are mapped onto logical channels (45-3 for instance). He kept talking nonsense to me. Then when I complained about the firmware problems, what was his solution??? THAT I SHOULD BUY A NEW VIZIO TV BECAUSE THE FIRMWARE ON THEIR NEW TVs WORKS BETTER! I paid Vizio for a final product, not for some piece of shit alpha TV which spies on its users.
BTW, from the Vizio CTOs comments, 720p IS full HD, in that the original HD spec allows either 720p or 1080i. So even Vizio's CTO doesn't know what he is talking about. And no, Vizio does not support their older TVs at least not with firmware that works.
Avoid Vizio at all costs. Vizio TVs suck.