There are two screens on this TV, but one is for the constant ads

May 15, 2023 1:50 PM

Hardware startup Telly launches a free smart TV entirely supported by ads.
posted by DirtyOldTown (66 comments total)

This post is short because the first draft was 92% swears.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:57 PM on May 15, 2023 [75 favorites]

What's preventing someone from papering over, or otherwise covering, the advertising screen?
posted by Glomar response at 1:58 PM on May 15, 2023 [19 favorites]

In case (like me) you were thinking of getting this and then just blocking the ads or leaving it offline: the terms of service specifically call out the use of ad blockers and require an always-on connection. If those conditions (among others) aren’t met, you’ll have to either return the TV or let them charge the full MSRP to your card (which they say they will periodically validate). Whether or not they can actually detect the use of ad blockers will be interesting to see…
posted by boisterousBluebird at 1:58 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

A boot, stepping on your face, selling you shoes, forever
posted by Going To Maine at 1:58 PM on May 15, 2023 [81 favorites]

You could physically block that bottom screen, correct?
posted by NoMich at 1:59 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

What's preventing someone from papering over, or otherwise covering, the advertising screen?

My guess is they have some kind of camera or light sensor that would detect that. They'd have to, right? Otherwise, you'd just put books in front of it or hang the second screen behind the TV stand.

Actually, looking it over, it definitely has at least one camera, because it does video calls. I'm sure the advertising people harvesting your data via an always-on connection wouldn't abuse that, though.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:59 PM on May 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

previously
posted by not just everyday big moggies at 2:02 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Okay, yeah, that's a double.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:03 PM on May 15, 2023

My next tv will just be a really big monitor.
posted by furtive at 2:05 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

The future feels like a dark and scary place.
posted by lock robster at 2:06 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

They should have the common decency to call themselves Sirius Cybernetics so we'll know what to do when the revolution comes
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:10 PM on May 15, 2023 [17 favorites]

Everything old is new again (but worse, so much worse)
posted by gwint at 2:23 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seems to me that just like bitcoin, tv is speedrunning advertising history. Not content with YouTube doing endless, useless data collection and amazing innovations like 2 commercials at the start of a video, they are just going to constantly show commercials. Maybe they could show The Home Shopping Network constantly as part of the next innovation.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:27 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Probably important to remember that this will surely work badly - sensors that think they’re blocked when they aren’t, etc. just kinda crappy all over.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:30 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Inching closer and closer to the dream...
posted by Thorzdad at 2:39 PM on May 15, 2023 [9 favorites]

I don’t get what’s free about it? Does it pay your internet, Amazon, hbo, Netflix, Hulu, whatev subscription? It’s not like tvs are even expensive. You can get like a 3x5 flatscreen for a couple hundred dollars, or less on a clearance, open box, or door buster. The reason for this is that smart tvs are capturing, repackaging, and selling all your data, in ways that recapture even more of your money in targeted marketing and coercive manipulation of user behavior. Think about your health apps etc. If you think about it, TVs should be free anyway, since the purpose of tv is to communicate normativity, on whatever axis.

Haha but a free TV tho
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:41 PM on May 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

It’s not like tvs are even expensive. You can get like a 3x5 flatscreen for a couple hundred dollars

For some people, a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money.
posted by box at 2:45 PM on May 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

A boot, stepping on your face, selling you shoes, forever

the convenience you demanded is now mandatory
posted by philip-random at 2:56 PM on May 15, 2023 [19 favorites]

lol I know a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money. My family members got the “ad-supported” kindles bc another $10 to not endure limited advertising predation was too much for them to manage all at once. That’s why, jeez. Srsly?
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:59 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Can you even imagine thinking "we can make unskippable ads ubiquitous in people's homes" and then NOT making it happen? And you call yourselves American.

Side note: If the ads are always in the same quadrant of the screen, that's where you put your potted succulent.
posted by pmbuko at 3:07 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I fucking love that they invented a banner ad-shaped TV.
posted by rhizome at 3:09 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

What's preventing someone from papering over, or otherwise covering, the advertising screen?

I'll bet you a donut that the entire navigation of the set happens in that lower screen. So you could cover it up, until it's time to change channels or whatever.
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:19 PM on May 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

FTA/press release:

"constantly innovating the living room experience."
posted by soundguy99 at 3:24 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to picture my reaction to the above phrase.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:24 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

This will make for an absolutely absorbing hackaday post when its numerous tracking deficiencies are defeated, for the fun of it, using a combo of deniable ISP style filters and physical objects
posted by Typhoon Jim at 3:41 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is pretty much a meh. TVs are probably cheaper now than they've ever been. Yes, for some people, a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money. But if you're one of those people, this might be an option. Tho...

...not that it seems like it'll be a very viable venture from this short article. Because, yes, TVs are pretty cheap. And if you have a 24/7 connection, you can probably afford other, non ad supported options. This startup would have to really sweeten the deal with premium functionality and/or content to get widely adopted. Toss in free HBO, Disney, and/or Netflix, then they'll have something.
posted by 2N2222 at 3:53 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

For some people, a couple hundred dollars is a lot of money.

Yeah, but I kinda doubt that it makes much business sense to spend a grand plus to show more ads to folks who won't spend $250, or to surveil them very closely.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:06 PM on May 15, 2023 [12 favorites]

GCU pipped me to that point. (I was going for "non overlapping Venn diagram of consumers too broke to buy a tv VS desirable demographic for advertisers.")

I'm calling it now. It'll be Juicero 2.0 unless there are some amazing capabilities not outlined in the article.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:11 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is some real-life Black Mirror action.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:26 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hardware startup Telly launches a free smart TV entirely supported by ads.

Okay, now do one you pay for without ads.
posted by pwnguin at 4:34 PM on May 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

For some reason I instantly thought of this patent (Snopes)
posted by credulous at 4:35 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not Juicero, Cue Cat. You had to pay for a Juicero.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:37 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

What's preventing someone from papering over, or otherwise covering, the advertising screen?

The camera's eyeball trackers kindly ask you to remove whatever you have covered the ads with, sir, before collections sends a bill for a telly with vigorish.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:43 PM on May 15, 2023

Screw that! Just pay me to watch the damn commercials. Then I can afford to buy a TV of my own.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:55 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I could cover that bar with ten, maybe 12 post-it notes.
posted by bendy at 5:01 PM on May 15, 2023

I remember dreaming, back even before cable was a thing, of a subscription to a TV channel without ads. That would have to have been a better deal for the would-be advertisers. Now I not only pay for streams with ads, but I pay for "ad-free" streams with ads. I think about this every time I select one of those apps and wonder at where that dream went, and if it's in the same mass grave as most of the others.
posted by fncll at 5:03 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

To hell with it, let's cut out the middleman and be done with it. I'm just going to start inviting the advertisers directly over to my house.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 5:14 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

So I grew up in India in the 80s/90s, and the interesting thing is that, for most people of my generation, TV ads were a positive thing, not a punishment. For one thing, there were fewer of them - for instance, only at the start and end of a show, never in the middle - and for another, AFAIK Indian advertisers worked hard to make ads that were positive, entertaining, catchy, and/or lovable.

So people of my generation will nostalgically hunt for these ads on YouTube because we love them so much.

The notion of ads as this thing you must suffer through for the sake of something else didn't come to me till later.
posted by splitpeasoup at 5:54 PM on May 15, 2023 [15 favorites]

"This is information retrieval not information dispersal."

-Jack Lint
posted by clavdivs at 6:23 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

I’ve gotten my last two TVs from the curb of rich neighborhoods on trash day. They worked great. Though I imagine it’s harder to get free stuff in parts of the country where the good trash is in gated communities.

Although if you’re near a college, you can find all kinds of expensive, perfectly good shit in the dumpsters next to the dorms during move-out, which is happening right now.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:39 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh, hey! It’s a thing I didn’t know I didn’t need until it existed and then I realized my life was fine without it!

I’m not sure there is any TV worth putting up with that much advertising.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:45 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

TVs are so cheap that they are almost free these days. So who the hell wants this
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 6:58 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's a better, pithier tweet that I've seen a couple times in the last several months that sums it up much better, but goddamn, those dystopian science fiction novels these techbros are harvesting their ideas from were supposed to be read as a warning, not as a list of fun ideas to bring to market.

I firmly want to believe in another world, where tech advances have been used to create a genuinely better life for people, and that people there are living happy, peaceful lives, freed from so much of the demands of daily life because tech was used for the common good, and not the single largest form of wealth capture the world has ever seen. Hell, even the robber barons funded museums.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:00 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

ctrl-f "Max Headroom"
ctrl-f "Blipvert"

walks away shaking head in disappointment.
posted by meinvt at 7:19 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I haven't thought about this in years, but in the UK back in the 1990s, we had this for the internet.

Phone calls still cost a few pennies a minute back then, even for local calls, and broadband hadn't really taken off yet, so being online cost you both a monthly subscription to an ISP and per-minute phone charges.

But someone started a free ISP called X-Stream, which had no subscription and a freephone number, but you had to run their own Windows dial-up software, and it would take up a chunk of the screen the entire time you were connected and fill it with banner ads.

Needless to say, there was a bunch of fun to be had in hacking the software to hide the ads. But if I remember correctly, even if you faked everything else, you still had to actually download the banner ads or it would terminate the connection. And this was on a 28.8k dial-up connection (I don't think their service even supported 56k at first, it was probably built with cast-off modems from other ISPs), so the ads took up a good chunk of the bandwidth.

God it was awful.
posted by automatronic at 7:45 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

This will make for an absolutely absorbing hackaday post when its numerous tracking deficiencies are defeated,

It's unclear, probably on purpose, whether this thing's second screen is on 24/7 or just when the main screen is in. Also unspecified whether you have to actually plug it in. I don't see them being successful for the above mentioned demographic reasons but if I was in the states and you aren't charged if you never plug it in I'd sure be requesting one to repurpose when the company crashes. Like a 55" screen would be perfect for a dynamic gaming table.

so people of my generation will nostalgically hunt for these ads on YouTube because we love them so much.

This is the most popular station in town. Wall-to-wall mini-tunes.

posted by Mitheral at 7:50 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Evergreen.
posted by brundlefly at 8:56 PM on May 15, 2023

(of India:) For one thing, there were fewer of them - for instance, only at the start and end of a show, never in the middle - and for another, AFAIK Indian advertisers worked hard to make ads that were positive, entertaining, catchy, and/or lovable.

That's kind of the case in the US too? Commercials, on the average, used to be a bit more entertaining. There are collections of US ads on Youtube that are pretty fun. I don't know if that's nostalgia talking, but we've put them in the before- or after-show at MST Club once in a great while.

I haven't thought about this in years, but in the UK back in the 1990s, we had this for the internet.

Also seen in the US, in the form of Juno, which offered free email at first, and eventually web browsing. Juno still exists (owned by "United Online") but I think is now just a typical ISP. NetZero also offered ad-supported internet, via a proprietary client that had an ad bar.
posted by JHarris at 9:44 PM on May 15, 2023

Ghidorah, was it this?

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
posted by Carillon at 10:50 PM on May 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

"Smart" network-connected appliances already have an appalling security risk factor, especially when they are devices for which the manufacturer will receive no further revenue and where the consumer overwhelmingly makes their selection according to other criteria, but I somehow expect these to be even worse than the refrigerator that "needs" to live on your home network for some reason but has no provision to receive updates or patches.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:57 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, Carillon. The Torment Nexus, best purchase ever forced onto me in the Terms of Service I skipped over, and am now damned to suffer from for all eternity.

Void offer in Utah? No, Void OFFERING in Utah. Damn fine print.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:01 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

No.
posted by dg at 11:15 PM on May 15, 2023

I think about this every time I select one of those apps and wonder at where that dream went, and if it's in the same mass grave as most of the others.

And I think about you, and the billions of others like you, every time my conscience pricks me about my longstanding personal policy decision to have nothing whatsoever to do with any advertising-supported broadcast service and nothing whatsoever to do with any streaming service and instead run my own home media server that gets all its content via file sharing.

The upside of there being no ethical consumption under capitalism is that I get to decide the particular ways in which I wish to be unethical. So if I can do something that hurts the advertising industry, toward which I feel more resentment and contempt than any other modern enterprise, more than it hurts anybody else then that's what I'll do.

The day the advertising industry succeeds in making it impossible for me to amuse myself by stealing copies of what it distributes to its livestock is the day I will stop consuming that content altogether. But since all such attempts necessarily rely on the efforts of engineers who have at least as much reason to despise their coke-addled overlords as I do, I can't see that happening in my lifetime.
posted by flabdablet at 11:15 PM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Thinking about it: not all that content got there via file sharing. Music, I buy from Bandcamp.
posted by flabdablet at 11:52 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Somebody tried this with a PC back when the internet exploded and became available for Joe Public. Didn't work then either.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:23 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

What's preventing someone from papering over, or otherwise covering, the advertising screen?

What if I want to only see the ads, can I paper over the larger part of the screen?
posted by chavenet at 1:52 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

How can this device recoup its cost? Obviously it’s terrible, etc etc, but I don’t see how advertising data is worth the cost of shipping a free tv. Even if the device aggressively parses and collects data, from the network and even the webcam, what can it really tell advertisers that is worth the cost of this setup? This sounds like another hole that VC is pouring money into, but maybe I’m wrong about the value of ad data.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:49 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm assuming that it's the usual "create some data-harvesting horror show that runs entirely on VC money and has no possible way to to make a profit, but last long enough for one of the majors to come along and buy it out for an eyewatering sum so the VCs run away laughing". e.g. Google or Facebook who seem unable to resist any new method of feeding their data-about-us addiction.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:59 AM on May 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

We have no large screens in our home, no cable, and only one of us watches some subscription tv dramas on their iPad. (I watch no TV.) when we occasionally want TV news -- and I do mean occasionally, like a huge breaking story or an election night -- we listen to it on a streaming service. I'm not saying this is more or less virtuous than anyone else, only that in the five or six years we have lived mostly "without" a TV, life has been better. We don't miss it.
posted by spitbull at 3:21 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is objectively a horrendous dystopian idea - BUT - what I find very interesting is all the people who immediately started to think of ways to bring a piece of hostile surveillance technology into their home, which they would then need to consistently spend time and energy undermining.

Fascinating.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:53 AM on May 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

...every time my conscience pricks me about my longstanding personal policy decision to have nothing whatsoever to do with any advertising-supported broadcast service and nothing whatsoever to do with any streaming service and instead run my own home media server that gets all its content via file sharing.

if you want another rationale to ease your troubled mind, piracy is baked into the distribution model for media in a fashion similar to defaults on loan and credit card debt. it is expected that some percentage of borrowers are not going to pay back what they owe - if the banks were really concerned about those losses, they'd make the requirements for borrowing more stringent. if they did that, however, they'd be leaving money on the table - not as many borrowers paying that sweet, sweet interest.

if media streaming was priced and packaged in such a way that everyone preferred that route to pirating, it would mean that the media companies weren't extracting the optimum amount of money from their properties. by engaging in piracy, you are helping the capitalists calibrate how much to charge and what they should offer. you are performing a valuable service for the markets.
posted by logicpunk at 3:59 AM on May 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

by engaging in piracy, you are helping the capitalists calibrate how much to charge and what they should offer. you are performing a valuable service for the markets.

they should be paying us for that, then.
posted by chavenet at 4:03 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Given the various precendents everyone is naming, rather than some harbinger of a dark future, don't you think it's more likely that it's a simple business idea that will fail, like those before?
posted by treblekicker at 4:21 AM on May 16, 2023

"Yaaar... I be sailin' the High Seas and I got no use for no land-lubbin' sheep!"

Without advertising and marketing and such, episodes of Rick and Morty and The Wire and The Beverly Hillbillies would never have existed in the first place. Nor would 99% of the music anyone knows about and listens to. I mean, music would exist... live music. And various recordings passed back and forth among people. Hell, even Beethoven would only be known by a tiny handful of elites who could somehow attend performances... more likely his music would have been completely forgotten.

I get it, Capitalism sucks. But the fact that anyone here even wants to consume entertainment media is largely an effect of advertising and marketing. The equipment you use to download and watch and listen to this entertainment media would likely not even exist. Certainly not in its current form. Sure, I suppose you could cobble it together with a wind-powered soldering iron and make your own surround sound system and a rig capable of downloading large video files off of a digital file-sharing service created and maintained by a Commune, but good luck finding any kind of computer chip or motherboard without a hundred-plus years of advertising and marketing making it remotely possible for an average person to even obtain.

Ahem. That said, I don't think this is a good TV for me.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:45 AM on May 16, 2023

How can this device recoup its cost? Obviously it’s terrible, etc etc, but I don’t see how advertising data is worth the cost of shipping a free tv.

Just playing devil's advocate here but if you have a good set of cameras pointed at a viewer you could do a lot more than show ads. You could be running A/B testing on new ads, or even whole shows. Networks and studios pay a lot of money to run focus tests on groups. Now it can be done with willing (or unwilling) audiences from their couches. And you already know a lot about the test subjects.
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:48 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

what can it really tell advertisers that is worth the cost of this setup?

This was exactly what I thought about Facebook's IPO.
posted by hovey at 5:07 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]