TV manufacturer Vizio makes more money selling data than TVs

Early this year, electronics company Vizio filed an IPO, and their newly-released third quarter earnings reveal an interesting business success: they made more than twice as much profit from their "Platform Plus" service, which includes advertising and data farming, than they did from actual TVs.

As The Verge explains:

When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand — 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. — Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program...

Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.

To be fair, television manufacturing also has a much higher overhead — as the company's earning reports note, they netted $502.5M from devices, compared to $85.9M from Platform Plus. In terms of profit, however, this translated to $25.6M from devices … and $57.3M from Platform Plus.

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Heh.

LOL

@aqua-letifer said in "That's a different subject":

placing blame at the feet of illegals for community spread is ridiculous

Placing some blame at the feet of over a million (per year) unvaccinated people is obviously a legitimate thing to do.

The fact that they are illegal immigrants is beside the point.

The fact that they are over a million unvaccinated people is the point. Giving them a free pass because of their illegal status is ridiculous.

The AAPS is a fringe group of docs, iirc.

Certainly politically conservative, but there are some...interesting positions that their members and leadership have taken:

In September 2009, St. Petersburg neurosurgeon and future president of the Florida AAPS David McKalip received significant public criticism for emailing a falsified photo showing President Barack Obama as a witch doctor with an exotic headdress, loin cloth, and bones in his nose.

HIV does not cause AIDS.

That there are possible links between autism and vaccinations

That's not to say what they're claiming is wrong, but it probably requires a bigger grain of salt than usual.

Their membership is about 5,000, as opposed to about 216K for the AMA (about 15-18% of docs).

Link gone!

What was that guy's name???

I saw this story, and was also surprised by the size of the payout. In the US, I'm guessing it would have been gazillions.

Yeah I guess the area thing would be intuitive and from there the circumference thing is also intuitive.

I’m a Nazi but I’m not sure which quadrant of Nazi I am.

@george-k said in SCOTUS hears Mississippi abortion law:

Did anyone listen today?

I did for about 30 minutes, and it was quite interesting.

The Solicitor General argued that since Roe was established law stare decisis applies. Justice Kavanaugh then pointed out half a dozen cases where stare decisis was not applied (Brown vs Board, Dred Scott), and the court revisited these rulings to overturn them.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4988908/justice-kavanaugh-questions-julie-rikelman-instances-court-overcome-stare-decisis

There was a discussion about viability of the fetus, particularly with respect to the 15 week cutoff. Roberts said that there were only seven countries which don't impose a cutoff for abortion. Among them are China, North Korea, and, of course the United States.

Run a poll and ask people if they believe our abortion laws should be closer to Europe’s or China and North Korea?

So they think "national security" is more important than individuals being abused. Meanwhile, they employ and cover up for people who are clearly going to be high-risk as far as blackmail is concerned, with all the associated security risk that entails.

Anybody who covers this stuff up should be jailed.

Or a backdoor.

Pretty cool. Hope it works. He seems confident.

Let’s just say there was plenty of strong swearing. Stronger than you can imagine. Russian is very rich in that way.

Non Fungible Taken.

That was a cool trip down memory lane. 👍

My experience with muscle cars was a 1970 Pontiac GTO, although it was not the "Judge RamAir" version. White exterior with a light blue interior.

Bought it used in 1972 for $2500 with around 21,000 miles on it. A 400 c.i. engine with a 4 barrel holley carb and an automatic turbo hydrostatic tranny that would lay rubber in all 3 gears.

That car was the fastest I ever drove a car at 122 mph on the interstate.

I loved that car.

@jolly said in Electronics & Whiskey:

Yeah, but did you use it with electronics?

I was drunk in the lab plenty of times.