From their website:
Now, all smart TVs come with ads. But you still pay for the TV. All of that changes today. During the signup process we ask questions about you and your household to optimize your ad experience. Brands in turn, pay for the non-intrusive ad on the Smart Screen. That’s how you get Telly free. Plain and simple. It's time you got cut in on the deal.
They do have a point though. Is there any smart TV maker that don't put ads on their TV?
Meh, your TV cost money while this TV is free, have an extra screen (for ads) and have built-in camera and microphone too! All I need to do is to connect it 24/7 to internet. Such a great deal! No one would give free TV to me, except probably my brother, so you could probably say the company is like a big brother to me.
Yes, using pihole would violate their ToS: https://www.freetelly.com/terms-of-service
(a) Use the Product as the primary television in Your household;
(b) Keep the Product connected to WiFi and internet; and
(c ) Not use any software on Your WiFi network that with advertising blocking capability.
(d) Not make physical modifications to the Product or attach peripheral devices to the Product not expressly approved by Telly. Any attempt to open the Product’s enclosure will be deemed an unauthorized modification.
If we discover that You are not abiding by the requirements above or have disconnected the Product from an internet connection or WiFi for more than short periods each month, You will no longer be able to use the Service and You must return any Products in your possession to Telly. Failure to return Products to Telly will result in Telly charging the credit card on file. If you do abide by the Terms of Service, your credit card will not be charged.
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.
Reddit will mess up again, and when they do, those fresh batch of refugees will find plenty of alternatives to choose from thanks to the current batch of refugees accelerating developments of various Reddit alternatives.
Not just similar, it IS the Sync for Reddit with the Reddit part gutted off. Looking at the version number in the screenshot, the last version of Sync for Reddit was also v23. Which means it's going to be perfect.
a haptic suit that promises to "incorporate some exclusive sensations never felt before."
People are going to use it for porns, aren't they? Hentai game developers on Steam are going to go full throttle with it.
My body is ready
I think the discovery of intelligent life outside earth will cause existential crisis to a lot of people, and some of them would turn to (new?) religions to cope.
A few years ago, when the only award available was gold, I used to occasionally buy gold to award comments I really like. Back then buying gold was the only monetization in reddit so it was pretty well received. I stopped doing that around the time they implemented coins and ramping up ads.
Spez is following twitter's playbook down to the letter. Aren't twitter just starting to enable revenue sharing program with their most popular users?
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.