Want a free 55 inch TV? The Trick: Nonstop Ads, Less Privacy | CNN Business

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Meet Telly, the new company looking to give away free 55-inch TVs. There’s a catch: A second screen attached to the bottom streams non-stop information and advertising based on the household’s personal data.

The TVs, subsidized by these second-screen ads, will begin shipping to customers on its waiting list this summer. Telly has opened registrations for the first 500,000 of its dual-screen smart TVs, a 55-inch screen with a second smart screen integrated through a sound bar.

As with all TV monitors, cable and streaming channels are not included. However, Telly reports “overwhelming” demand.

“We’re ending the decades-old practice of consumer double-dipping, where the consumer is charged for TV and then the TV maker turns around and makes billions of dollars from advertising sales and the data from that. television without providing any value to the consumer,” Telly’s head of state, Dallas Lawrence, told CNN. “We believe the consumer should share this value proposition.”

Telly relies on a second source of revenue besides ads: data. “You’re giving us your demographics, your psychographics at the individual and family level before you even get your device, so we know who you are, we know where you live, we know your income, we know what car you drive, we know when the lease is up,” Telly founder and CEO Ilya Pozin told the Hollywood Reporter on Monday.

“Like other TV makers, we have viewing data, but we also have individual household audience data. When you combine those two things, the targeting is literally one-to-one.”

According to the company’s privacy policy, anonymous collected data includes contact information, cultural or social identifiers such as favorite sports teams, IP address, sexual orientation, gender and political opinions. Some data comes from a survey users fill out about preferences and lifestyle choices to maximize ad personalization, such as showering restaurant ads and offering coupons to people who say they eat out a lot.

While the extensive data collection may be surprising, Telly argues that smart TVs already do it with less transparency and no free TV.

“The reality here is that the only difference between the data we collect and what every other TV maker collects today is that we asked the consumer to share it up front, and then we give them a $1,000 TV for free in return,” Lawrence said.

On top of a square for ads, the smart screen displays information including news, sports scores, weather and stocks. Telly also offers AI-based recommendations for streaming content, zoom video calling (with a privacy shutter), video games, motion-tracking fitness apps, and a “Hey Telly” voice assistant. System updates will be frequent, according to Lawrence.

Although it ships with a 4K Android TV streaming stick, the technology is compatible with other major streaming devices such as the Amazon Fire Stick or Apple TV.

Telly will also collect data on TV consumption, using a sensor to gauge how many people are watching from the sofa. This anonymous data is intended to help media companies gain a better understanding of viewership and demographics.

Before launching Telly in 2021, Pozin co-founded Pluto TV, an ad-supported free streaming service bought by Viacom in 2019 for $340 million.