"Back in 2023, Telly CEO Ilya Pozin came on The Vergecast and made a surprisingly compelling case for the existence of a TV that doesn't cost you a dime - but shows ads all the time. It's a reasonable business model, and a pretty good deal for consumers! But as The Verge's Emma Roth discovered, the reality of the situation is a bit different."
"After that, Emma joins the show and we get deep into life with Telly. Emma tells us about the TV's unusual hardware and impressive feature set, explains the deeply odd AI newscast that shows up every time you turn the Telly on, and walks us through how it actually feels to have a bunch of ads running all the time. We also wonder: what if, instead of being free, Telly was expensive? Could it be more compelling?"
"But first, The Verge's Jen Pattison-Tuohy joins David to go through all the smart home and smart speaker news of the week, from Amazon's many new Echos and Kindles to the handsome new Google Home Speaker. A lot of companies are currently betting that the current generation of AI tech can help make the smart home work for people, and the hardware involved is getting better fast. The software, though? Debatable."
Telly provides a free television model that runs ads continuously, pairing notable hardware and features with an always-on advertising experience. The device launches an AI-generated newscast on startup that many find unsettling. Continuous ads shape daily viewing and raise questions about user experience and whether a paid, ad-free version would feel more compelling. Concurrently, major smart home and smart speaker hardware updates from Amazon and Google show rapid hardware improvement while software lags in polish. Additional short topics include Sora deepfakes, Copilot Portraits, Ring cameras, Spotify taste profiles, Waymo rides, and a memorable segment called Chunk.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]