Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/walmart-buying-tv-brand-vizio-for-its-ad-fueling-customer-data/

by jameslk • 2 years ago

132 143 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

footlose_3815• 2 years ago

How many times will the same story make it's rounds on the frontpage from different sources?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440354

johnnyanmac3• 2 years ago

For future reference:

[dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440354 (optionally tagging dang depending on the severity)

That's all that's necessary. Mods here do have the ability to combine and collapse comment threads into the larger post, so this is a fixable issue on HN.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

(optionally tagging dang depending on the severity)

There's no such thing as tagging anyone on HN; if you want to get mod attention, there's an email address listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ooterness• 2 years ago

If smart TVs are spying on us so much that the ads are the most valuable part, should we start calling then telescreens? 1984 vibes.

echelon• 2 years ago

Margins are so thin that the only money to be made is in ads and tracking.

waynesonfire• 2 years ago

it's a race to the bottom. if your ad riddled, privacy raping tv isn't free, you'll go out of business. we need legislation.

wincy2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I’m amazed that such a ubiquitous brand is worth a scant 2 billion dollars, or 1/20th of a Twitter.

Hamuko• 2 years ago

That valuation of Twitter was just way too high. Even Twitter is worth like 1/4th of a Twitter.

TylerE5• 2 years ago

A brand is only valuable if the brand is valuable. What consumer gives a shit about the Vizio brand? No one says "Oh boy, I'm so happy I bought a Vizio!". It's cheap and nasty and always has been.

kredd2• 2 years ago

I wonder if there's any way to cause an oversupply of ad information and tracking so data itself would become useless? I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but was thinking in terms of supply and demand. If everyone's data is available for free and everywhere, would that anyhow affect the ad-tech companies?

dylanowen• 2 years ago

For your own advertising there's: https://adnauseam.io/

lupire3• 2 years ago

It would kill data brokerage and move the profits to advertisers. It would increase targeted advertising. It might make products cheaper by making ads cheaper, but would probably just lead to more advertising.

Selling all the data for $0 does the opposite of what you want. The data is still useful, you're just making it cheaper to acquire.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Do these spyware type TVs require an internet connection to start working? For example, can we just buy the spyware TV and connect a Linux computer to it, or will it refuse to function without exfiltrating data?

wmf• 2 years ago

No, they don't require Internet.

BTW Google TVs have a dumb mode if that's what you want. The other brands will probably annoy you with menus even if you don't want to use the smarts.

pyuser5833• 2 years ago

Apple TV is an option. Then all your data is going to Apple instead.

They have HDMI input. So you can pipe in what you want.

taneq• 2 years ago

Honestly, different parts of your life being snooped on and recorded in different silos is less of an issue. The real issue is when all aspects of your life are being collated by the same entity (dammit Google stop creeping) and so they can reconstruct your entire life in minute detail.

xahrepap• 2 years ago

I bought an LG over a year ago and haven’t connected it to any network ever. Works pretty great. Hasn’t asked me once to connect. Haven’t seen a single ad.

mschuster912• 2 years ago

It won't be too long until "cheap" TVs start to ship embedded LTE modems...

nailer3• 2 years ago

Goddamn. Vizio used to have a reputation as a good TV for people that don’t want unnecessary extras.

genocidicbunny2• 2 years ago

Really? It might just be my social circles, but we always thought of Vizio as basically the Walmart special that was somewhere, somehow, going to find a backdoor way to make up the profit margin.

bushbaba• 2 years ago

Vizio was known for good value on price. However tcl and other Chinese brands took over that spot lately and Vizio never managed to recover.

nailer3• 2 years ago

I think this may have been ten years ago. During the era of 3DTV and curved displays.

RF_Savage• 2 years ago

I thought they were reasonably well known to be cheap, so cheap infact that the hardware was sold at or below cost.

Thus the actual profit came from advertising and selling usage data.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

It was 15 - 20 years ago. For a short period of time tech reviewers where all Vizio fans. Basically all recommendation heavily favored Vizio, then they pretty much disappeared and now they are back in the press, but not for being amazing.

jldl8052• 2 years ago

I'm going to contest that statement.

wincy2• 2 years ago

Do people still let their TVs connect to the internet? I had to factory reset my LG tv to get it to stop trying to connect to the WiFi.

I’ve also got a block using my router, since my wife connected it to watch PLEX at one point, and it updated the OS, then it “helpfully” started showing ads in the bar AND auto connected to my network share that I had forgotten was sharing some adult content (luckily I caught it before anyone else did!)

I use a PS5 for a media center now, I figured it’s the most powerful commodity media machine you could get. Overkill but hey, it doesn’t lag, and it has PLEX on it. It’s a bit annoying that the remote has non programmable buttons for media services we don’t use, but you just can’t win them all these days.

johnnyanmac3• 2 years ago

My samsung TV's (one from 2018, one from 2022) are used for Youtube 99% of the time. I don't know if I'm just numb to them or something, but I don't directly see ads on them. I'm sure it's phoning home a buncha stuff though.

I suppose I tolerate it if it's in the background, but the moment random stuff pops up on me I'd definitely make sure the TV never connects to a wi-fi.

owenwil• 2 years ago

Disconnect that 2022 model as soon as you can. Samsung can and does deploy permanent, unremovable ads on the system menus that are cached even if the connection is lost. It’s terrible! The only way to avoid them is to not receive one in the first place.

elorant• 2 years ago

Who do you define as “people”? Because there are the HN people who probably could even install a separate firewall to block/monitor all outgoing traffic, and then there are normal folks who don’t even know that their TV collects data. The majority of people are technologically illiterate who certainly can’t go into all the trouble of blocking ads and changing dns servers and installing firewalls and what not.

scarface_74• 2 years ago

This is the same sort of feigned ignorance you use to see on Slashdot.

“Do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in 15 years “

Yes most people these days have a Plex setup, a PlayStation as a media player and their router configured to block ads…

navjack27• 2 years ago

I connect my TCL 4K HDR TV to the internet because that's how I use the remote. It has a Roku TV interface and when I turn it on it automatically goes to the input that has my m1 Mac mini (8gb RAM 256gb storage) connected to it. I hate using Plex and all I do is open up finder and go to my network attached storage (3950x with 32gb RAM and 9tb of solid state so far of mixed sata and nvme running rockstor) and load movies and TV shows and anime off of that. If I need to play PC games I use parsec to stream my windows desktop (5900x with 128gb RAM and 2080 Ti win11 pro for workstations) which is in my bedroom to the m1 Mac connected to the 4K TV and that all happens over lan and has zero latency essentially and I could play games at 4K for the most part sometimes I have to go down to 1620p. You most definitely can win these days. Having a full-fledged computer hooked up to my big TV lets me do everything from my living room with no compromises at all and my Smart TV doesn't do anything untoward. Most likely I'm not seeing anything going wrong concerning ads or excessive traffic because my router is my old retired computer, 9900k and 32gb RAM, running PF sense and I have PF blocker running on that.

userbinator2• 2 years ago

There are "universal scaler" boards which are free of this "smartness" and yet have a tuner and other multimedia features you'd want in a TV, and are also quite cheap:

https://mysku.club/blog/aliexpress/67872.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... (translation of above into English)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tst5Xmh3q-A

I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.

Mistletoe2• 2 years ago

Can't you just not connect it to the internet? I prefer Microsoft to spy on me on my Xbox.

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

In the days of 5G this is no longer a guarantee.

I don’t know if any tvs include this kind of thing yet but 5G modems and service are cheap enough for devices to not need your network to phone home.

CompuHacker• 2 years ago

Customers of various smart television brands have, over the past few years, reported that their newly acquired television will, given power, connect to nearby open wireless networks without user intervention or permission.

KerrAvon2• 2 years ago

Yes, with LG, you can apparently still avoid connecting it with recent models, which gives you have effectively a dumb monitor with (for OLED) a glorious picture. Can’t vouch for other makes.

magnetowasright• 2 years ago

If it were as simple as just not connecting to the internet as is often suggested, I'd have done that already! Also yeah, it can be a bit of diminishing returns on the privacy front when it comes to the things we do use to drive our media consumption haha

Go find a TV a few years old with android or whatever 'smart' OS on it and tell me how long it takes to boot and be meaningfully interacted with (like opening an app, like the TV app). What about how many times it randomly reboots in the span of an hour and loses all configuration including selected time and time zone configuration which in the case of a TV renders the electronic program guide literally unable to function (oddly specific, but bear with me...) or how many really weird bugs you run into like the top of the line Samsung 'smart' TV I once borrowed (which did lose time and time zone setting when it rebooted) where when you tried to set the time or time zone, it would set the time an hour or two wrong in a completely unpredictable pattern. Using it felt like I was living in The Good Place when Eleanor was making it all topsy-turvy, I swear

I was so lucky that I found a 4K TV with a big enough screen with absolutely NO 'smart' features. None. It has what appears to be the same firmware as the old cheapo 720p TV I got to replace my old faux wood panelled thing that was so old it needed a chain of adapters to run a PlayStation (1). The EPG just ...works. Not that I watch TV any more; it's always on HDMI. It boots up in seconds. It doesn't randomly restart. I don't have to tell it to not connect to the internet cos it doesn't know that the internet exists! Glorious. I might also have a chance in hell of repairing it if (fine, when) it does die. I'll have saved up enough by that point to afford one of those big screens meant for advertising displays or whatever that doesn't even have a TV tuner either lol.

Please excuse my light hearted rant on the plight of my OECD nation problem (it's a real burden /s), but temporarily borrowing a 'smart' TV drastically reduced how much I watched and played because it was TORTUROUS to just get the stupid thing to turn on and show the HDMI1 input. I really do mean torturous. The extra privacy that comes with not having an internet TV is obviously a bonus, but I run all my media off my laptop anyway (I use my consoles for games only).

I just don't want software like that existing on a device where all it does is cause complications that just don't need to exist (for me). The built-in obsolescence of these TV OSes is just awful. If it were as simple as just not giving it access to the internet (ignoring the general availability of open wifi or the potential of 4/5G shipping with the TV itself so it can always phone home anyway) I'd love that and I'd do that but good lord I will stop having a TV before I use a 'smart' TV ever again.

notaustinpowers• 2 years ago

My uncle recently got a smart TV (cuz it was on sale) but never uses the "smart" features, so as I was setting it up I declined to connect it to his wifi. The TV only showed the cable channels; trying to switch to HDMI, open the menu to change settings, etc were all locked out unless you logged onto a wifi network.

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

I assure you that the % of people that care about this to the degree that they’d go this far off the beaten track is far from being large enough for any TV manufacturer to care about, let alone for it to be worth it to them to change their product direction in any meaningful way. This is fanfic plain and simple.

herbst4• 2 years ago

I would love to replace the full hardware of my TV(s).

Starting times are horrible, it's like a bad joke where I wait up to 2 minutes to boot into netflix (boot horrible half smart OS, that boots into the MiTV stick (which sucks, and crashes) just to have a normal Netflix experience. You cannot control external speakers with the remote. They literally didn't put that in for their speaker output.

My full android TV is not better either, boots forever. Recently started to do HDMI only in BW until I factory reset it. I mostly use it with a Linux computer as that's less painful.

And the newest fun is that the remotes have constant connection issues on both TVs if they are more than 2 meters away. Which, why wouldn't it, blocks the whole screen until reconnected.

TVs at this point are literally the worst customer tech products I could imagine.

rob74• 2 years ago

My Android TV (from Sony) has the habit of randomly restarting every so often, most of the time while I'm watching something I don't want to miss of course - no idea if it's doing system updates or just crashing, but even the updates could wait until I turn the TV off? It also has some quirks that appear from time to time (buttons on the remote not working, sound or image not working etc.), then I know it's time to, as the saying goes, try turning it off and on again. And, most annoying of all, sometimes it just randomly "forgets" channels, so I have to do a full channel scan (or restore the channels from a USB stick) to get them back. Since a few weeks, channel 4 is one channel when I press "up" from channel 3 and a different channel when I press "down" from channel 5. I can't even start to imagine a way to implement the channel list that would allow this bug to happen, but it does...

askvictor• 2 years ago

I just bought a dumb tv (on clearance as I presume the manufacturer is moving on to smart models).

twojobsoneboss2• 2 years ago

Just plug into a regular PC media center with a full browser and use an air mouse (Wii like thing) to control

bb1232• 2 years ago

Just buy an Apple TV or similar and never connect the display to the internet.

noir_lord4• 2 years ago

Linux PC but otherwise yeah, I just laughed when TV asked for wifi and then set it to never ask again.

It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.

AndrewKemendo2• 2 years ago

Just get a projector

mamcx• 2 years ago

But which one? All the good ones I see have also android on them!

pyuser5833• 2 years ago

I was freaked out how nosy Vizios TV OS is. Got an Apple TV make it stop spying.

throwaway8481• 2 years ago

If it is internet-connected without the Apple TV, it's likely taking screen captures an identifying what you're watching.

bozhark2• 2 years ago

This kind of behavior seems entirely anti-consumer. There should be legislation that limits how much literal wattage can be used of a consumer’s device that does not serve the purpose of the consumption and benefits the company financially.

wildrhythms• 2 years ago

Why do you assume that would that stop it spying?

Spivak• 2 years ago

Likely because they took away the internet connection from the TV and got their smart features from the box.

NegativeLatency3• 2 years ago

Privacy concerns aside it’s problematic that a grocery store chain has enough money to buy a TV manufacturer. So many of the brands in our lives have become too big and powerful in my opinion.

jldl8052• 2 years ago

Calling Walmart a "grocery store chain" is like saying GE is a "light bulb company".

brudgers• 2 years ago

Or Amazon is a bookseller.

arrosenberg2• 2 years ago

Sort of the point, innit?

NegativeLatency3• 2 years ago

They're consistently one of the largest grocery sellers in the US, so I think it's fair.

gwbrooks• 2 years ago

They're paying less than one year's revenue from their ad business alone.

lupire3• 2 years ago

Companies don't really "buy" companies. That's just a mental model for a merger. At its heart, it's a symmetric operation. The wealth of both companies gets divided among the owners of both companies, in proportion to an agreed valuation. You could say that Vizio is buying Wal-Mart. Either way, the combined management forms an agreement on who will be on the board and management roles after the merger, and what branding to use going forward.

bozhark2• 2 years ago

why would you say such a thing?

M&A is not everything you’re saying and companies absolutely get bought.

elevatedastalt• 2 years ago

"When I go to a store and buy an apple, I am not buying an apple, I am just entering into a symmetric operation, where my money goes to the store and the store's apple comes to me, based on an agreed valuation".

squarefoot• 2 years ago

Vizio is among the TV brands that were already caught spying on people through their "Smart" TVs (1). I do my best to stay away from that junk as my Kodi box is more than enough, but if I had one, I'd either never connect it to the Internet, or do that through a huge list of banned IPs, as mere DNS filtering pi-hole style could not be enough. Also beware of Ethernet equipped HDMI cables and unprotected WiFi.

1- https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/02/08/shocking...

neurostimulant• 2 years ago

Now that iOS and even Android start to actually care about privacy, smart tvs are the last bastion of hope for advertisers.

e402• 2 years ago

And when will Apple enter the TV market? Seems ripe for them to make a killing.

TylerE5• 2 years ago

Enter? They've been marketing a physical device called the AppleTV for 17 years.

pauby• 2 years ago

Apple is not a poster boy for privacy.

avidiax2• 2 years ago

If it is really good, it will probably hurt their Apple Cinema Display market.

If it is not so good, what's the point?

There are also many regulations and market issues with making a panel TV, everything from standby power regulations, the tuner type (ATSC/DVB, etc.), warranty, accessibility requirements, etc. And even more issues with the ASICs that run TVs from companies like Amlogic/MediaTek/RealTek; Apple would either have to make a deal or build their own silicon IP for things like ATSC/DVB decoding, image scaling, audio decoding and processing (i.e. Dolby). And ecosystem issues like HDMI CEC, HDCP, etc.

If you side-step all of those issues and just bond a really nice display to an AppleTV and have no tuners, then you probably aren't adding much value beyond buying an LG/Sony and and AppleTV separately.

inputError• 2 years ago

if you own a vizio and its connected to the internet, disconnect it. mine made my pihole work overtime redirecting all its phone home requests. hate to think why it wants to call home all the time

Rudism• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm being cynical, but as long as it doesn't require me to connect to the internet and I can just plug an HDMI cable or two into it and treat it like a monitor, I guess I don't mind so much if the price of a smart TV is supplemented by other people having to look at ads. I get the lower price benefit without the negative side.

I've got a couple Vizios right now that are basically just glorified monitors because they stay offline, and they work just fine for me.

bmicraft2• 2 years ago

Please keep in mind that it might just be connected to the internet over HDMI, even if unlikely (see: HDMI Ethernet Channel)

Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data

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