Telly Makes Splash With Can't-Miss, Cynical Consumer Proposition: Hey, We're Gonna Get Your Data Anyway, Might as Well Take Our Free TV (Frankel)
A sizable piece of the the NFL postseason just melted off the linear iceberg and into the streaming sea, Disney and Comcast seemed to finally come together on the ongoing fate of Hulu, and ESPN finally started making plans for an a la carte future.
But the "the moment" last week belonged to Telly, the smart-guy-backed startup offering free 55-inch televisions to any shnook willing to take six minutes answering questions about themselves they might not tell their gastroenterologist.
Also read: Telly Says 100,000 People Signed Up For Free TV Sets
We downloaded the Telly app Sunday afternoon and took a quarter-step into the rabbit hole. We gave Telly our old Hotmail address that's already overridden by spam, and clicked on the default "May 20, 2005" birthday suggesting we are, in fact, 18 and eligible to sign up for a Telly set when it becomes available later this summer. (Full disclosure: We were actually eligible to vote for Walter Mondale.)
On the next page of the survey, Telly wanted our home address ... and that, friends, is when we bailed. Life is too short to give it up easy and just like that. Even in Los Angeles, Walmart is too close, and the 55-inch TCL Roku-powered 4-Series smart TV ($238.13) is too cheap of an alternative.
On its privacy page, Telly concedes it wants to know a lot about you before it gives you hardware that, should you try to just walk away with it, they'll bill you $500 to replace.
Telly wants "identifiers." For example, are you a "skateboarder"? Maybe "a Green Bay Packers fan"? Are you an "environmental activist"?
Telly wants to know your gender, your ethnicity, and, of course, what you look at on the internet.
Of course, many of us who pearl-clutch about online privacy also live out loud on the social internet and have probably, in the collective sense over time, already given up all the data Telly is asking for upfront and all at one time.
I punched my birthday into Facebook back '07, back when many of us were still syntaxing our lamo status updates with revealing things like, @DannyFrankel "is taking his two kids and two dogs to the Nissan dealership to look at light SUVs..."
Forget Madison Avenue. Somewhere in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, the boys probably have us on our own dedicated bulletin board.
So, really, we're going to trip on Telly's little six-minute survey?
“Nearly all smart TVs today collect data on consumption and viewership,” Dallas Lawrence, a former Roku and Samba TV operative who now serves as chief strategy officer at Telly, told Wired.
Added Nathalie Maréchal, co-director of the Privacy and Data Project at the nonprofit Center for Technology and Democracy: “What this product does is lean into the idea that all of this is going to happen anyway, so you might as well get free hardware out of it."
Telly said Friday that 100,000 prospective users had already coughed up the goods in the 36 hours that its sign-up page had been posted. It aims to have 500,000 folks signed up this summer when it starts shipping out free TVs. And at that point, the Sherman Oaks, Calif. startup says, it'll be in business, offering its rich bounty to advertisers and measurement companies.
“Just from our initial data licensing agreements, the average revenue per user on this television is already more than twice what Roku's ARPU is,” Lawrence told Jon Lafayette of our sister pub, Broadcasting + Cable.
Beyond highly qualifying its users, Telly also ships with a rectangular smaller screen that fits on the bottom of the main screen. This second screen will do things like run additional advertising when shows are paused -- yet another way Telly will monetize its sets.
Beyond what seems like can't-miss early business fundamentals, Telly also packs an all-star list of TMT industry executive talent, including: founder and CEO CEO Ilya Pozin, who co-founded Pluto TV; LightShed Ventures' principal Richard Greenfield; Vayner Media CEO Gary Vaynerchuck; TelevisaUnivision CEO Wade Davis; and MediaLink Chairman and CEO Michael Kassan, among others. (Crunchbase has a full roster of Telly's backers here.)
None of this will seduce me into giving up my personal data, but I'm guessing the aforementioned group of media-tech power players could care less.
And don't be deceived, either, by the slippery-dangerous notion that they're somehow targeting a powerless demographic that can't afford a TV or anything else advertised on Telly's second screen.
We lobbed a call to the 20-year-old college student Sunday late-afternoon, as he was watching the Miami Heat drub the Boston Celtics on a 42-inch TV that belongs to one of his roommates ... who just got his undergrad degree and is packing up to head out of Dodge later this week.
My young consumer is in a primo audience demographic. He may not have tons of disposable income now, and 213 bucks at Walmart is a thing. But it won't stay that way forever.
I asked him if here cares that Telly wants to know who his favorite teams are and if he has pets. Also, is he freaked out about the fact that Telly can sense how many folks are watching the screen? And does the idea of that second screen bother him?
"If I'm being honest, no," he responded. "Can you send me the link?"