Used to be a TV was a TV: a screen for viewing television channels and programs, delivered from stations and networks through a home antenna or a cable set top box. But in fact TVs have been computers for a long time. And, as computers, they can do a lot more than what you want, or expect.
Combine that fact with the current supply-side mania for advertising aimed by surveillance, and you get weirdness such as Doctor Beet‘s LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers. According to Doctor Beet, viewer activity is actually reported to a dead URL (which may not be, say some of the comments). The opt-out is also buried an off-screen scroll. And LG tells Doctor Beet to live with it, because he “accepted” unseen opt-out terms and conditions.
But wait: there’s more.
If you want to really hate LG — a company you barely cared about until now, watch this. It’s a promotional video for “LG Smart AD,” which “provides the smartest way to reach your targeted audiences across the borders and connected devices with excitement powered by LG’s world best 3D and HD home entertainment technology” and “enables publishers to maximize revenues through worldwide ad networks, intelligent platform to boost CPM and the remarkable ecosystem.” The screen shot above shows (I’m not kidding) a family being terrorized by their “immersive” advertising “experience.”
This promotional jive, plus the company’s utterly uncaring response to a customer inquiry, shows what happens when a company’s customers and consumers become separate populations — and the latter is sold to the former. This split has afflicted the commercial broadcast industry from the start, and it afflicts the online advertising industry today. It’s why the most popular browser add-ons and extensions are ones that thwart advertising and tracking. And it’s why the online advertising industry continues to turn deaf ears and blind eyes toward the obvious: that people hate it.
Clearly LG is getting on the surveillance-based advertising-at-all-costs bandwagon here. The sad and dumb thing about it is that they’re actually selling customers they already have (TV buyers) to ones they don’t (advertisers). Their whole strategy is so ham-fisted that I doubt they’ll get the message, even if bad PR like this goes mainstream.
The one good effect we might expect is for competing companies to sell surveillance-free viewing as a feature.