The TV of the future costs zero dollars

22:54And I think that's fantastic, right? But if you want to stay neutral, right, and you want to be able to do it across the board, you've got to do it on a device. And you've got to do it on a device that lets you do that agnostic of whether you have, you know, that opportunity with the media companies. You just named a lot of things that are very hard to execute, which I think is, again, part of why this is going to be really interesting. Like just to just to pull it one, right, this question of there's a lot of stuff on a lot of different services. How do you find this stuff to watch? Like everyone has tried that.

23:21That's not like it's not like an unknown problem. Right. And then Netflix just has no interest in playing nicely. And the metadata of all of it is a mess. And so like that alone, you could have built a big company trying to solve. And that's, you're just, that's just like one small feature of this thing. I guess part of what I'm trying to figure out is like, especially as you start thinking about building telly, you're like, okay, we're going to be a hardware company. We want to do a lot of stuff. A lot of it's software, a lot of it's hardware. We want to do a lot of things. Like how do you figure out sort of where to start?

23:53Like what's the, you need a way in that is compelling, that is new and different and going to like get people interested in a TV that isn't just like whatever cheap one I can find at Best Buy. How do you sort of pick those first couple of spots to try and press at? Yeah, no, that's a great question. And look, you said we're a hardware company. We don't operate like a hardware company. We're very much running this like a software company, right? And a media company where hardware is just, is a box obviously you have to check because we, you know, that's the product we're building, but we're very much treating it almost like a Tesla where, you know, let's overload it with extra hardware and sensors and computing power.

24:32And every two to four weeks, let's push updates to make this thing better and better and start unlocking capabilities that go beyond television, right? At a core, when we're building this, I mean, first and foremost, you have to build a good product. You know, luckily in the TV world, there's like four ODMs that make the majority of televisions. Like, so our screen is made by the second largest TV panel manufacturer in the world. They make 20 % of all the TVs, right? For all the major brands. So you don't have to kind of reinvent the wheel, right? Like that's kind of the position you're in when you're in a commodity business, right?

25:05Is there are a lot of support layers to help you build a product that's very comparable in the market. And that's why you see a lot of newcomers, like the Rokus of the world, for example, going into the TV space, right? I mean, obviously there's challenges, but there are also a lot of ways, a lot of things that have already been done where you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yeah, if your job is just like make a television that will display things that look pretty good, that's not that hard anymore. That's not. But that was our, like from a product perspective, TV 101 is what we called it internally.

25:35That was first and foremost our goal. This thing has got to work like any other TV, period, right? But then we started looking at what are the big problems that exist right now? Okay, well, first of all, TVs are so thin now because there's no margin and people want to make money from something else. So they're selling you a sound bar. Well, that's kind of like a shitty experience. Like, I just bought a TV. Now you're forcing me to buy a speaker. Like, let's include that, right? Like, let's make that part of it, right? And the same thing with a camera. Like, once again, like once you try tele and you do a Zoom call on a big screen where people look life-size, you don't want to do a video call on any other platform.

26:11It's just, it's completely game-changing. So that's kind of the way we looked at it is let's look at things that people are doing on other devices that we can bring to this device from a central perspective, right? Like video calling and gaming and having great speakers and having an assistant. Like there's no need for another device that plays your music or has an assistant where your TV literally should be doing this in 2023. So that's kind of the way we approach it. What are some kind of proven low-hanging fruit that have been already validated from other devices that people are spending money on that we can just package it all into this one device?

26:47All right, we got to take a quick break and then we will be back with more from Ilya Posen on the Future of TV.

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29:11All right, we're back. Let's pick up where we left off, talking about the job of the TV. I have to admit, I'm sort of taken by Ilya's vision for what a TV could be. It's the biggest screen in your house. It lives front and center in your home. It feels like it ought to be much more than a big blank black screen most of the time, right? But nobody's ever really tried to do it the way he's describing. And I don't think it's because nobody ever thought to try. Which is why I think the way Telly is planning to sell the TV is one of the most important things about it. So I asked Ilya, how early in the process did he decide that the TV was going to be free for customers?

29:51Oh, from the get-go, yeah. Our intention was never to go out there and become yet another hardware company and sell a TV. Right away, it was the idea of, okay, can we do the same thing that we did at Pluto? Free is by far the best way to market any kind of product, right? And this was proven even here. In our first week of launching in May, we had hundreds of thousands of people sign up. We had to sign up every second. They shared their data. They understood that their data is already being monetized by their TV makers, but here there's a real value exchange. And they're sitting on our wait list waiting for us to deliver a TV.

30:28And if you look at the kind of people that signed up and the kind of people that are signing up every single day, they're actually over index on income. They over index on education. They're savvy. They understand that this is a better, smarter TV of the future. And the fact that it's free is not because it's a low income, low budget TV whatsoever. Do you think you could have made the opposite case? Like if you had come out and said, we made this TV, it's better in every way. It's more powerful. It fulfills this vision of what we think a TV can be. and also it's a thousand dollars it's it's twice the price of your like piece of crap roku tv but trust us it's worth it you don't think so uh they would fall on our on our nose it would fail because once again consumers are like they're you walk into a store you see what's on sale and that's what you buy it's the the driver's price right there's a baseline of quality that you're looking for and then the next factor of how you make a decision of what of purchasing a tv is price So even the idea of making the TV$50 more by adding a camera to it, I don't think it would work.

31:30I think the majority of consumers are kind of driven by what the norm is and what the standard is. And I think the only way to introduce a disruptive product into the market in a category where it's commoditized and there's so many other players is to also disrupt the price point. Okay. Yeah. So this really is the same as Pluto in that way, right? It's two separate insights. It's this should be free and this should be better that just kind of crash into each other. Completely right. So what do you make of the reaction? I like when telly first came out, my reaction and I think a lot of people's was basically this is one of three things.

32:06This is either like a scam. This is either a horrifying dystopian, you know, surveillance nightmare that is just going to show me ads 24 hours a day. or this is the future of television because this is essentially the present of television and I'm just now getting it for free. Am I missing any? Did I go through the full range of emotions? What other ones were there? No, I think obviously when you're coming out with a free product, people automatically think this is too good to be true, right? Like what's the catch, what's out there? And I think they quickly realized that it's actually on the flip side that when you look at other TV makers, they're double dipping on the revenue stream, they're selling you a piece of hardware, they're monetizing with ads, They're selling your data, right?

32:47And that's the reaction we got from consumers. Like we've had little to no hesitation of people signing up, right? People understood that there's that value exchange, that they're willing to share their data because they're getting$1 ,000 TV completely free, right? And they understood that this is a product that is far superior than anything else in the market. And that it's proven not only in our sign-up rate and our wait list, but it's also proven in all the usage, right? Like we're in public beta right now. We're in thousands and thousands of homes. And this thing is working. And people are using it every single day, right?

33:24TVs are owned for six to seven years. And the primary TV in a home is used for many hours per day. And when you're a device and the biggest screen in your home and the most important device, essentially, in a home that's used for six, seven years, it's not just a TV. It's a platform, right? And that's the way we're looking at it. We're building it is let's shut the box on TV. Yes, he could do everything else here at TV can, but then let's start innovating and pushing updates. And there's so much more we could have built from the get-go, but we don't want to overwhelm the consumer like, oh, this thing could do this and this and this and this.

33:57It's coming, right? You might come home one day and you might see that, hey, you see a list of your friends that have Telly's online. You might be able to like, hey, David's online. Let's watch TV together. There's a game on, right? Or let's say, hey, Telly, take a photo of me and send it to mom. Mom comes home, sees a photo of her son, right? And pins it to the bottom screen in a cute little photo frame and lives there, right? There's so many things that we can do with this device. But because it's free, there's no barrier to entry, right? The idea of another TV maker coming out with a TV and trying to do something social is going to fail.

34:36Because, you know, let's say you're Vizio. You want to build a social experience. you have to make sure everyone else has a Vizio TV, but then that's, you know, that's not going to happen. But if telly is completely free, the idea that everyone now starts having a telly and you can actually connect them and create this network effect is absolutely feasible. And you'll bet that that's something that we're going to start rolling out more and more of in the coming months. Okay. What do you say to the people who look at what you're offering, both in terms of like the ad supported stuff and the camera and the data collection and see a total nightmare surveillance hellscape.

35:13Are you interested in winning those people over? Like, what do you, how do you make that case? I look, we're, we're a privacy first company or product first company, right? So even from our ad experience, it's not intrusive, not interrupting. You're not going to see a video ad with sound on while you're watching TV. To be fair, that's what everybody says about ads and most people are lying when they say that about ads. That's right. And the camera is closed by default, right? When you open up Zoom, we literally put up a message on the screen saying, would you like to open up the camera to do a Zoom call?

35:42The second you close the Zoom call, the camera closes, right? This is not the business we're in, right? When you're looking at, once again, other TV makers, they're monetizing your data with very little to no permission, right? They're monetizing in many different streams. We're just very upfront and transparent about it. We let consumers know everything is fully opt-in. Nothing is hidden in long terms of service, right? You're there. We tell you that you're opting into this. You're opting into that. This is how we use your data. This is how we advertise. And in exchange, we're giving you a free TV and all these other guys aren't, right?

36:12So I think it's a conscious decision. And we're seeing very little to no pushback from the consumer side of things, right? And even if you look at some of the interview we had in Wall Street Journal, for example, right they did i think the reporting was fantastic they obviously interviewed some privacy experts and they said yeah they could be a concern about this but then they interviewed consumers and said yeah you know what i signed up because i know all these other guys that i'm paying a tv for already do this and they do it with my without my permission in this case i'm getting a very clear value exchange so why not right yeah i think that is a slightly nihilist way of looking at the world and also i think absolutely true right and i think this is a thing we struggle with a lot is like, to some extent, it's really important to talk about privacy and how your data moves around the internet and what companies and platforms know about you and what they can do with that information, how it matters.

37:01And on the other hand, I think most people either don't care or think it's so far gone that it's not useful to think about. Like personally, I just, I struggle with that all the time. It's like, how much does being a privacy zealot mean anything to anyone anymore. I genuinely don't know the answer. And I think part of what you just said that I think is so interesting is like, you're basically just saying the quiet part loud, right? Like, you're like, you're like, yes, we are going to make money off of the data that you give us when you use our product. So is everybody else. We're just going to be much louder about it.

37:34And that's kind of, it's kind of a wild approach, but I kind of respect it, I have to say. But I think transparency is key. I think when consumers get upset is when something happens that was obfuscated, right? And that's when you see a lot of trouble in any kind of IoT companies is when people thought one thing, another thing happens, right? And for us, once again, we led this from a privacy-first perspective, right? If you go do focus groups, and if you're like a Samsung and you run a focus group, should we put a camera in our TV, right? There's already such a bad reputation and there's like some negative connotation about the product that most people will say no, right?

38:12And that's what a lot of focus groups are wrong from that perspective, right? Because they don't actually position it the right way. But if you understood the value ads that it gives you, that you can do the video calls and fitness and gaming and all these other things that a camera unlocks, but you make people feel comfortable, right? Because the shutter is closed and because you're very upfront about how you use the data and how you monetize. I think it's a very different kind of experience and relationship that a company can have with that consumer. And that's how we're positioning. It's when it's the other way that it becomes a challenge.

38:43Yeah, no, I think that's totally fair. And I think there is in there somewhere, though, still a bar you have to hold on your own, right? Like, I think the idea that everybody's going to like read the terms of service carefully and fully understand it and think about it and agree to it is it's just not true. Like, nobody does that. So you can come in and say, like, we are much clearer about it, the way that this works. And I think realistically, you're right that just by virtue of the fact that the TV is free, people are going to like inherently understand what the tradeoff is. is. Like, that makes total sense to me.

39:14I am curious what you think sort of your own internal bar for, like you say, you come from a privacy first perspective. Like, what does that look like practically, like on behalf of the users who still aren't paying enough attention to really know what's going on? I mean, once again, I think transparency is key. I do think there are a lot of people that overlook privacy, right? And as you said, they kind of just click, I agree on every terms of service and move forward. And maybe that's because they don't care, maybe. Or maybe it's because they already realized that it's gone too far and everyone, it's one of those things everyone already does and they're selling the data.

39:50So might as well get, you know, some value exchange for it. I don't really know. You know, like from my perspective, I know that there are a lot of software that I use and a lot of hardware that I use kind of obfuscates the transparency around privacy. They're absolutely out there selling my data. Right. But I also think there are a lot of laws and regulations in place. truthfully that make sure that if your data is sold, it's anonymized. And those things are absolutely real. Like, and anyone who violates those laws should not exist, right? So first and foremost, you got to stay above every state and federal law.

40:25Like that bar is already there. So even anytime we have any kind of data, it's anonymous, right? We're not attaching any personal level data to any ad targeting data. And that's how you have to operate a business. Like I've been in the ad world on both the buy side when I had an agency to the sell side when I had Pluto, right? To now with Telly, that is extremely important. You have to protect people's data and you have to build environments that enable those levels of protection. Those actually already exist, right? Even if you're working with servers and services like Amazon, they're built in to be able to, you know, have that level of data protection.

40:58So that's kind of my view. I think there's a few people that are really vocal, if you will, on privacy and data, but what are they going to do? Like, is there a TV that you can go out there and purchase that doesn't sell your data, that doesn't deliver advertising? Like, what are your options? Or do you just get, you know, no TV at all and, you know, run everything behind a VPN? Or, you know, I think you can complain all day or you can realize that people need to run their businesses. They need access to data. And at the end of the day, advertisers want to target homes effectively. Like, so, right.

41:33So for us, for example, we ask you at sign up, what car do you own? You know, Are you in the market for a new car in the next six months? If you are, an advertiser wants to know that. But frankly, you want to know that as a consumer too, right? Because you want to start seeing relevant advertising for things that you have intent to buy, right? But if you block all your data, cover your data, now you're seeing ads for stuff that doesn't even import. I think that's where people start having a negative association in advertising is when ads aren't relevant, right? And it feels like it's benefiting one side and not the other side.

42:06we've built our whole business to make sure that that benefit goes two ways, right? That you're getting ads that are relevant and advertisers are advertising to you because they know that you need this product. Okay, we got to take one more break and then we will be back with more from Ilya Posen on telly, Pluto, TVs, and lots more.

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45:13All right, we're back. Speaking about, you know, the moment and the market conditions, like we are in this moment where everybody is spending too much money on television and it sucks, right? And it's like, I think we have hit that threshold in a really real way. And I think your timing is super interesting as a result, because what you're doing is you're not just saying, we're going to make one part of this cheaper for you. You're like, let's just blow the whole thing up top down and start over. Like, it's going to be super interesting to see kind of how far that goes. Because I think like AVOD is having a moment right now, right?

45:43Like Pluto is growing really fast. Tubi is growing really fast. We're in this place where people are looking for a way to make things less expensive. and they will happily watch some ads in order to do so. I absolutely think you're right about that. How far that goes, I think is really interesting. And I think that goes back to the question of the reaction to telly and like how you think about the product itself. Because I think what a lot of people are reacting to is the idea that the second screen is basically going to be an always on billboard showing me ads. And from the way you're describing the product, it doesn't sound like that's the case.

46:13My initial impression is certainly like, it's just going to be a scrolling ticker of ads as long as my TV is on. And that just sounds like a crummy user experience in a lot of ways. Is it not that? Like, how do you avoid being so bad at ads that people hate it, even though they like the trend? Yeah, that's a great question. It's not that whatsoever, right? The majority of the screen is dedicated to widgets and content that actually is standalone amazing and then enhances what you're viewing, right? So we've got like things like time and weather and a new sticker and sports scores, right? stocks, right?

46:50Things that are very relevant. And people are buying, you know, they have assistants now from Google and Amazon that have a lot of visual additives, not just, you know, not just your voice assistant with a speaker, but they're actually showing you a lot of useful information. So that's built in. And that's like 75, 80 % of the screen is dedicated to that, right? And then because we understand what you're watching on the main screen, we're able to automatically adjust those widgets based on what you're watching. So if you turn on a movie, We show you actor information, right? We show you, you know, a description of the movie, maybe some trivia, some fun things to enhance that movie.

47:24You're going to look at your phone anyway for that, right? And we're saying, let's put that front and center. The best way to look at it is the bottom screen is almost like an iPad attached to the TV. Once again, you've got your family in front of this big device. Everyone's looking at their phones for different reasons. You're watching a sports game. You want to know how the other teams are doing. Maybe your fantasy team, you want to look at the stats. Why not put that front and center, right? Maybe sports betting, right? Why not a Fando or DraftKings integration right there natively? The ad is a small part of that screen, right?

47:57It's not there to distract you. It's there to obviously support this value exchange of being free and to connect with a consumer in a very transparent way. But it's not the majority of the screen whatsoever. In fact, once you use Tally, this is across the board. and you can look at our data and look at any customer feedback is people love it and it's very hard for them to go back to a single screen and they'll tell you that it's not a distraction. We haven't had a single consumer switch out of a telly and go back to a device that doesn't have that bottom screen because they're not looking at it in a negative way.

48:30Interesting. Okay. Have you tested to see like how many ads is too many ads? I would think that would be a really interesting experiment to run. Have you done that? Yeah, that's still data we're looking at every single day, right? And we've built a rockstar team. Our head of product, Sasha, was the head of product at Android TV for Google. He's running our product here. And the same thing across the board on the ad set and everything else. We've got just the right team that has industry experience and startup chops to make this work. And if you notice, we're in a beta program. What TV company goes into a beta program?

49:03Google launches Gmail and beta or whatever new product. That's the way software is done even by bigger companies. That's unheard of from a hardware perspective. And this is kind of going back to like my roots. I've been a software guy my entire life. We're very much running this like a software company and we're very transparent. We've been in private beta where we tested this with close family and friends just to make sure we've got like TV 101 and the core product done and stable. And then we opened up to public beta for people that we don't have a relationship with, but that agreed to kind of go on this journey with us and to kind of shape the future of TV and make this product better.

49:40and they're giving us feedback and they're sharing their data and they're telling us how to make this better and prove it. And it's working. Like the data is there. People are using this every single day. In fact, even our original business model of how many hours per day people will use this, we were wrong by almost half. So it's working, right? And people have multiple TVs in their house. We want to make sure that this is their primary TV and not get stuck in a basement somewhere. One way to solve that is to make it the right size, right? The average American family has a 49 inch TV. So we made a 55, right?

50:13So naturally it's going to go in a main room, but also people could just shove it in a, in a guest room or somewhere else, but they're not right. And the data shows based on, based on how often they're watching it. Yeah. What happens if they do? I mean, I think part of what's been interesting about telly is trying to figure out how to make sure people use the product in a way that works without being scary. And you have some scary sounding rules about like, you know, what you can and can't do to the TV without violating the terms of service? Like what balance have you found there where you're like, we need you to use your TV in a certain way for this business to make sense for us.

50:47But we also want it to feel like a thing that you own that isn't just like a box that we've put into your house that we can take back at any time. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a great question too. I look, we, we want to have a positive, transparent relationship with our consumers and we don't want consumers that fraud us, right? We don't want consumers that, you know, tell us they're going to do one thing and then do another thing, because that's, we're trying to be successful as a company. And if you have a bunch of fraudulent consumers that take advantage of you, it's not going to be good for business, right?

51:17So for us, we put policies in place, you know, to be able to have that opportunity to, in case someone is frauding us, to be able to take the device back and saying like, look, you're covering up the bottom screen or you're not using this in the main room, right? But first and foremost, we wanted to build the right experience. You can't even cover up the bottom screen, right? All of your settings, your volume controls, your HDMI switching, everything happens in the bottom, right? So we actually cleaned up the top to make it easier to watch in the bottom. Actually, that's where your control center is for your whole device.

51:47And frankly, you don't want to cover it up because that's where you're playing your music. That's where you're doing your Zoom calls, right? That's where your ring doorbell appears. That's where you're getting like news and weather. So first and foremost, you build a good product that people don't want to fraud, right? I think that's a that is there just for our sake from a business perspective, that's there to monetize and make ads. And we don't, and that bottom screen doesn't actually provide any actually valuable in inventory. Then of course, people are naturally going to say, okay, I'm just going to get this.

52:16I'm going to tell them I'm going to do that. I'm going to do something else. Cause I just want a free 55 inch TV. But then we failed from a product perspective. Right. And that's first and foremost, what our approach is, is let's build a killer product that people don't actually want to keep as their main TV because it's better, right? And if that's where you're playing your music and that's where you're doing your Zoom calls and everything else, why would you put that in a guest bedroom? Then your primary TV in your living room is now not as powerful, right? And I think that's the way we do it.

52:42And of course, we put things in place to give us the ability to take the TV back and things like that for people that fraud it. But we're not seeing that, like we're seeing everyone use it in the right way, at least so far. Yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised they didn't have beta test, right? Like you have a self-selecting group of people who are likely to use it. But I guess the sort of extreme example would be like the idea that I could go on vacation for two months and come home and my TV has been repoed. That wouldn't happen. We would never do that. We would never do that. And we don't have policies in place to do that.

53:12That's just not realistic whatsoever. Okay, fair enough. So all the software you mentioned, all the stuff you're thinking about building, you mentioned you're doing integrations and all that stuff. What's your sense over time of how much of this you're going to try and build versus like opening a platform? Like, is the Tele app store going to be a thing? Like, you want to build this giant corpus of stuff onto a big screen, right? Yeah. What's your sense of how much of that you need to do yourself? Yeah, that's a great question. So initially, we're doing it ourselves. We are built on Android, right?

53:43Which gives us a huge advantage and a big existing ecosystem, right? And similar to Amazon Fire TV, which is built on Android as well, right? It gives you an advantage because you can use existing apps. Like when we put Spotify into Tele, there was pretty much no work, right? Because Spotify already had an Android TV app. So we just ported it over, right? And those things give you an advantage as a startup, but also in potentially the future allow us to open up the app store and create experiences that go beyond streaming. And I think that's the key phrase here is beyond streaming, right? And if we do open up an app store, it will still be on an approval basis, of course, step we bring anything in is we don't want yet again, another kind of congested environment where there's like hundreds of apps and only five of them are good.

54:27But more importantly, we want people to build for tele things that they wouldn't normally build for another TV maker, because it's impossible to get that from another TV maker, because maybe they don't have a microphone. They don't have a camera. They don't have a second screen. They don't have great speakers. They don't have this computing power, right? Our remote, you know, it's got a, it's got a microphone. It's got some sensors in it that will also enable things in the future. Imagine this thing becoming a karaoke machine in a couple of months where, you know, words appear on the top, songs in the bottom, you pick up your remote, this has a mic, right?

54:57Or a gaming pad or whatever it is, right? So initially, we're going to kind of create these examples of different use cases that show how we can go beyond a normal television of what you're used to for the last 20, 30 years. And then eventually, we'd love to open it up to those that want to build for it. But once again, we don't want just another fast service to appear on this thing, right? Like there's plenty of those. We really want to take this thing and to become the main device in a home, just like your iPhone or your Android phone is the main device out of your home. What kind of appetite do you think there is in the world for folks who want to build that kind of stuff?

55:35I just think about like, it feels like every three years, Apple tells a story about the Apple TV being like an amazing game console. And it just isn't true. Like people don't play games on their Apple TV. That's just like not a thing. but Apple desperately wants people to. And there's also, I think like you talk about with the smart TV platforms, we've gone in this race to the bottom where all the apps are bad. Everybody has just given up on doing interesting stuff because it's pure commodity and it sucks and nobody cares anymore. Can you get to the point where you're big enough and cool enough and exciting enough that you think you can like win back some of these people who have been burned by building TV stuff before?

56:09I think you'll be surprised. We're already seeing it, right? Not not just from individual like kind of developers, but major, major companies who have already built platforms for TV, right? Or second screen experiences for TV that are so behind what we're doing and blown away by our two screen form factor that even though we're not yet at millions of homes want to build for us right now, right? Whether that's sports betting, which has a natural environment Or, you know, there are a number of startups that you may have seen that are trying to enable, you know, shopping. Like you're watching your favorite show and you want to buy that sweatshirt, right?

56:51Like the famous, you know, friend sweatshirt episode. But, you know, they've built second screen experiences, but they're struggling because getting a consumer to take out their phone or their tablet while you're watching TV is a huge hurdle, right? But they want to build for our bottom screen experience because it's right there front and center. It's almost like a dual second screen screen but on the main screen. And even knowing kind of our stage and where we are, they're very interested and a lot of them are already building for us. So you'll start seeing a lot of these partnerships that I can't yet speak to will be front and center and the developer feedback is there without us even soliciting it.

57:28I would think that building a future-proof TV is really important and also really challenging. Like I have this Roku TV behind me that I swear to God gets slower every day because the apps update, new things come in, and the processor just can't hang. Like you were saying, six or seven years, people are going to keep these. These are not devices you upgrade frequently. People, I think, would like to keep most of them even longer. Is it as hard as I would think to build something? What Tele wants to be six or seven years from now is so ambitious and so big that you kind of have to build a TV that works now and can get all the way there.

58:02I just think from a hardware perspective, that seems like it would be hard to do. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great question. If you're a TV maker and you're optimizing for the tiny margin that you make on hardware, you're not buying the best and fastest processor. Sure. But we are. You're buying the worst one you can find. Right. So because of that, you kind of have this natural obsolesion, if you will, where, like I mentioned earlier, even building Pluto for the most modern TV now is not, Pluto is a very heavy app. It's not easy. And if you're building an app for Roku, they're running almost like a digital billboard script to be able to develop for it.

58:37It's very challenging. For us, we're treating this like a computer. The power inside of the device and the sensors that we've put in, some of them aren't even utilized to its full effect now because we want to enable that future utilization in the future. And we even added a bunch of expansion ports on the device. So let's say later we want to add like a temperature sensor. So for whatever reason, like, let's say you want this thing to know what temperatures in your home and be a thermostat. I'm making it completely making it up. We've put expansion ports on there so that you can expand the TV and other means, but we're very much treating it like a Tesla, right?

59:12Where I'm on my third Tesla, even in the beginning, a lot of the autopilot hardware wasn't really enabled. And then how like delighted are we as Tesla customers where we get in the car, we turn it on and we see like, Hey, we updated your car and here's all the new stuff it can do. Like, that's awesome, right? And that's the way we're treating our software updates is it's not about fixing bugs and issues. It's about making this thing better and better and better. And the only way to do that is if you overload your device with extra computing power, processors, memory, storage, connectivity, and then you allow it to expand into additional sensors beyond potentially what you load it in because you can't get everything right out the get-go.

59:52So we believe we built very much a future-proof device. We don't want to get you into a new TV in two, three years like the other makers do. And I think that's the other big difference is if you look at the makeup of like the engineering team at any other TV company, the majority of them are supporting old models of TVs and building new models of TVs, right? Because TVs, like there's so many models of every other TV maker. We've got one, right? So we put this out and the whole team is focused on making this one better. And I think when you have that And when you're concentrating your team on improving the product rather than supporting legacy or building the next, you come out with a product at the end of the day that's far superior and continues to grow as people and consumers evolve.

1:00:35It would also be terrible business for you, right? If you had to ship me a new free TV every two years just to keep using telly. Yeah. It's not the way to do it. If this works, like if this hits, this really takes off, this becomes, you become like a real huge player in the TV business. Do you think others will start to follow, like play this sort of same game, start giving people substantially cheaper or even free TVs in exchange for some of this other stuff? Like, do you think others can come after you that way? Potentially, potentially, you know, you never know how the market's going to change.

1:01:04We've got a lot of, you know, patents that we filed on what we've done. And we're also set up in a way where we can enable these partners with us to be, you know, successful. So we're happy to work with others. And we've actually been in communication with some as well on these kind of things. So I think it's quite possible. I think for a very well-known TV maker to go out there and all of a sudden cut their prices to zero and cannibalize their core business would be probably detrimental to their stocks and not good for their business. But who knows? I think a lot of people are waiting and seeing what happens to us, which obviously also gives us a big advantage, right?

1:01:43Startups move quickly. That's the one advantage that we have over every big company. We don't deal with the bureaucracy and the politics. We're a small, nimble team. Speed is our only advantage. It's not our pocketbooks. We're not going to outspend a big company, but we're going to outspeed, and we're going to outperform them. That's exactly what we're doing. By the time the others realize that, hey, this is working, and this is something we need to do, we'll be years ahead, like Pluto. right where we're still by pluto's by far the leading company in the space we had a head start we maintain that head start through just great execution fair enough all right i could talk to you about this forever i find this totally fascinating but i should let you go i know i've kept you a long time thank you for doing this this was incredibly fun appreciate it thanks all right that's it for the verge cast today thank you so much to ilia for being on the show and thank you as always for listening like i said we have three more episodes to come in this series We're going to be looking at connectivity from all different angles.

1:02:40It's going to be really fun. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with episodes on Wednesday and Friday. There's still tons of news to cover this week and a bunch of gadgets we haven't gotten to talk about yet. We'll be back next Monday with the next episode in our connectivity series. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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