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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.
I know what kind of TV I WON'T be considering for my next purchase...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I speak for ALL OF US. Nothing more to be said, you can close this thread now :)
[($)]
Honestly, the more I read these articles the more convinced I become that I'm living in some kind of satire-based, candid-camera type show. I mean this product idea just screams DO NOT BUY ME on so many levels it simply has to be a wind-up because no sane person would honestly suggest it with a straight face.
The idea that could something that combines the reality-dreck that passes for TV these days with targeted advertising (and I'm going to assume all the spying that goes with it)... I mean seriously, in what alternative universe is that an attractive proposition??? And then to go on and suggest that a person who has managed to score an old-fashioned, non-smart TV would want to retroactively obtain such features... the mind boggles.
To go out of business.
For anyone who is interested the modern advertising industry is the brain child of one Edward Bernays who deceived women into thinking that smoking was a sign of their freedom.
I highly recommend a documentary called Century of the Self for anyone who want to see just how we got into the situation we are in now.
For all of the things that a human beings time gets wasted on, advertising has to be the most offensive.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If this is the way the industry's going, fuck'em.