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SamsungFeature

Samsung has long been a giant in TV manufacturing, merely falling prices and shrinking profit margins take hit the company's bottom line. As a effect, it's reportedly testing programs that would add together new advertisements to the master bill of fare bar of its higher-end televisions. The program is currently but active in the United states of america but is expected to curlicue out to Europe too.

The Wall Street Periodical reports that this move isn't confined to acme-end televisions from 2022 or 2022; Samsung is exploring adding software updates to older models that would innovate advertising on those platforms as well. The push to monetize TVs in this manner comes from Executive VP Lee Won-jin, who Samsung hired away from Google, and is office of a button to shift away from hardware sales as a primary profit generator and towards other forms of revenue. The WSJ reports that these ads are displayed on the home folio side by side to prominent apps. When Samsung introduced advertising in 2022, the ads were but shown if the user starting time clicked the apps push button. Samsung claims it places ads "to evangelize relevant brands and content to consumers."

The dubious benefit of smart TVs

Once upon a time, smart TVs were hailed as the future of applied science, a seamless mesh of computing adequacy and consumer benefits. These new televisions were touted as potential game consoles, DVRs, and capable of displaying additional information about a game, picture show, or video. Instead, they've been used to gather data on consumers, offer terrible security, and now, are being sold as advertising platforms.

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"Now with more ads!" said no successful advertising entrada, always

These new changes are but another example of how tech companies have warped both privacy norms and adequate behavior. Xx years ago, no company would've dared launch a television that toll several hundred dollars and bombarded you with manufacturer-created ad. Samsung dodges this past claiming to offering "relevant brands and content," which means it's either monitoring everything you lot watch (in order to deliver "relevant" content) or it's just bombarding you with ads that make some minimal effort to calculate your likes based on domicile location and demographic information. The first is an invasion of privacy and the second is unlikely to be relevant and extremely annoying.

Samsung has no intention of changing its course. LCD sales have slumped badly this twelvemonth and are down xx% quarter-on-quarter and 6.3% year-on-year. 4K panels have not driven the upgrade craze that 1080p created. Quantum dot technology is yet adequately new and OLEDs are notwithstanding also expensive to bulldoze mass market adoption. Given these facts, Samsung no longer believes that amend technology is the cardinal to increased profitability.

"We're likely to see a host of new devices that allow users to consume video content in various ways, which leads to thinking that competition which has centered around motion picture quality, volition alter significantly." That's according to Kim Hyun-suk, the head of Samsung'south Boob tube business, who recently spoke at a press conference. Advertising options, not superior picture quality, is what Samsung thinks will differentiate its televisions.

I actually concur with Samsung, 100%. If information technology differentiates its products based on how much information it can gather on them or the advertising revenue they generate, it'll certainly put its TVs in the "Do not purchase" category for me. In fact, there'due south basically no reason to hook a television set to the Net, ever, without simultaneously implementing a firewall to cake advice with unapproved sources. Samsung'southward advertising servers, whatsoever they might be, are the very definition of "Unapproved."

Or but buy an sometime-fashioned "dumb" Television set without any of these groovy new features. That's an equally valid solution as far as we're concerned. And while Samsung is far from the only manufacturer including advertizement on their televisions, their status as a major player in the industry ways more than companies volition follow this trend if it catches on.