Telly Starts Shipping Free, Ad-Supported 4K TVs, Will Charge Users up to $1,000 if They Violate Terms of Service
Telly Starts Shipping Free, Ad-Supported 4K TVs, Will Charge Users up to $1,000 if They Violate Terms of Service
Telly’s free 55-inch 4K dual-screen TV sets are set to arrive at users’ homes this week — but of course, there’s a catch. The start-up, which plans to ship some 500,000 free…
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free-pc beat them to the punch by two decades.
This business model has been tried before. It doesn't really work.
This time it may actually work though. All they need to do is just showing you constant ads in the extra attached screen based on contents currently shown on the tv as well as your profile data (that you voluntarily submit during registration). They already got your credit card so if you violate their term and causing them to lose advertising money, they'll just charge the tv cost to your CC (or send it to collection if the charge bounce).
Also, internet advertising was not as advanced as today. These days those ads companies can figure out how to make money just by collecting your online and media consumption habits. Something as intrusive as a tv with capability to inspect what displayed on screen will certainly worth a lot of money to the advertisers. And this tv actually have a camera and microphone too! An ideal customer data mining device.
Maybe. But people don't like ads any more now then they did back then.
And I have a tough time believing they can squeeze the cost of a TV out of an individual through ads, but I guess we'll see.
The TV cost would probably be paid off in a year with just $1 worth of ads per day. If they earn, say, $5/1000 impressions of ads (which is a bit on the low side for US citizens' eyeballs), they'll just need to show you 200 ads per day to earn $1 just from ad impressions. Assuming the TV is on about 8 hours per day, that's just 1 ads every 2.5 minutes.
They'll probably show more ads than this, and have deals with smart tv app makers to install their apps in the smart tv, and collect and sell customer profile data in the ad market as well, so I think it's not hard to imagine they can profit from the TV, as long as they run the service competently.
8 hours a day is a lot of TV, though I guess they wouldn't be aiming this at people with a regular 9-5 job. On the other hand, the folks in that demographic probably wouldn't be as valuable to advertisers.
1 commercial every 2.5 minutes also sounds awful, but between MythTV and Netflix I haven't watched ads for a very long time now, so maybe my sense of timing is out of whack and I guess it was ~8 minutes of ads for a 30 minute show for a long time which isn't too far off your proposed schedule.
Unlike regular TVs, this TV has a dedicated screen attached at the bottom that show nothing but ads, so it's not comparable with showing ads in a show. They'll be showing ads at the bottom of the show, constantly, like an ad banner in a website.