I can’t find any information on this online, but considering how cheap so many 4K Smart TV’s have been recently, I’ve been really thinking that companies like Google, Amazon, Roku, and more, have been paying TV OEM’s quite a bit of money to include their O.S/Software (Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast, Android Smart TV, Roku TV, etc) into their TV.
Is this true? Can anyone find actual sources on this?
When it came to Roku & network/wifi-enabled BluRay players several companies had paid for “buttons on remotes”, Netflix & Rdio had pushed the hardest in terms of co-marketing. You’d have to dig into individual company earnings reports to find how they spend their ad/marketing budget.
If I recall it depends upon the OEM’s Smart TV platform, since Android is “free” they have more incentive to ink deals with other companies to “share” analytics data compared to a closed Smart TV platform seen with earlier Vizio Smart TVs(Netflix, Amazon Prime, Yahoo News, Tune-In Radio, etc hard-coded into the TV’s firmware). Other TV makers have went the cheaper route via hardware deal of embedding Roku, Chromecast or Amazon FireTV into Smart TVs.
I know for cheap chinese TV like Vizio they are able to sell for ridiculously cheap because they will collect all the data on the users to sell it. They spoke about that once on L1T news because the like of Vizio have done it without the consent of the users.
So would not be surprised that all TV manufacturer sell various amount of information on users, you might check the user agreement to find some detail about that.