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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 :)
[($)]
This is a cutthroat industry. It's a 6-percent margin industry, right?
I'll give you 10% extra if you replace that hardware and software with a couple additional DVI and DisplayPort adapters. You could even make it a swap-out-able module.
...my Vizio tv isn't connected to the internet, nor will it ever be, except for firmware upgrades.
My AppleTV isn't trying to monetize me.
All right! It's now a bidding war!
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.
for it.
I) It was cheap at the time and my previous dumb TV had died
2) It was dumb as dirt. HDMI ports with some CEC support.
If this one goes, I'll probably buy a smart tv (since there aren't any choices) and toss a streaming device on it like an android TV box. Netflix, and kodi support are pretty much all I use, with the occasional chromecast from my computer. If the streaming device dies or needs to be replaced, it's usually less than $100.
No smart TV will have any access to any Internet access. If they start putting 4G/5G sim cards in their devices, I'll be removing them as well.
If the current prices aren't sufficient to support Vizio's profit model, they may want to rethink their business.
No "Smart TV" for me until I can replace its entire software/firmware load with an open-source alternative.
My family's TV watching (mostly CDs of old movies) is done using a NTSC CRT TV fed with analog video.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Netflix does not show those ads while watching shows. It basically promotes itself and shows by showing them higher up on the list and auto-playing previews when you're idle. It experimented in a small subset of the market by showing some ads before the movies start but it was not making people happy so they stopped that. But if it ends up like the crappy CBS streaming service showing ads in the middle of shows then the customers will unsubscribe in droves. People who don't mind ads are already over on Hulu.
It's time to start taking aim at CEOs..... with high powered rifles.....
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.
My Sharp BluRay player actually has a setting that allows me to block discs from accessing the network. All I see is a brief pop up that says “disc trying to access network, blocked” or some such, and then it finishes loading. Turning this option on took disc load times down dramatically because they no longer download some crappy new trailer before going to the menu.
Now if only the menu options allowed me to override the built-in ads and skip straight to menu, I’d be happy... why consumers can’t do this on media we f’n ALREADY PAID FOR is beyond me. The only people who don’t see the FBI warning and the preloaded ads are the pirates.