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Some of the world’s biggest tech companies have begun plotting out their next pivot—and it’s all taking place on your TV screen. Earlier this month, Google announced that its Photos app would be accessible on Samsung’s smart TVs, letting you display your images easily in widescreen instead of forcing you to project them from your phone. YouTube brought its formerly mobile-exclusive Gemini-powered summaries and timestamps to its megapopular TV app in March. Music streaming services, newsletter platforms, and even Instagram are reshaping their products—in the latter’s case, short-form Reels—for the biggest screen in your house. The trend is clear: Your TV is becoming more and more like your phone each day.
TV versions of smartphone apps aren’t new. (Maybe you’ve seen Doodle Jump hit your smart TV’s app store recently.) But the sharp reconfiguration of apps on TV comes as these data-mining, privacy-invading companies realize just how much more real estate they can command on the one household screen that otherwise has the (occasional) ability to divert you from your phone. Your TV and smartphone are far more interoperable and indistinguishable than ever before, and an inescapable user-tracking singularity is developing, accordingly, in your own living room.
It’s the maturation of a habit. The TV-hardware manufacturers seem to believe the only way their product can keep viewers’ eyes away from their smartphones is to be more like those smartphones, just bigger; meanwhile, the software companies are always looking to maximize shareholder value. The two sides have a useful new partnership here, but its success comes at the expense of your wallet (and your sanity), while sticking a knife through the very concept of casual watching as more ads, interactives, and online-purchase prompts crowd your screen(s).
For how much Americans fret over the privacy settings on their phones and wearables, few ever seem to consider their TVs within the same radar. But smart TVs sit in 77 percent of U.S. households, and they don’t act like your grandma’s Nielsen: The flatscreen that houses your Netflix app also keeps track of your viewing habits, from rapid-fire screenshots to records of time spent watching to audio of the search requests you barked into the remote’s microphone. It can even clock what time of day you’re watching, as well as the obscure Criterion print you’re spinning in your not-smart DVD player.
“We still think of them as passive devices: We sit, we watch, that’s about it,” Or Goren, editor-in-chief of cord-cutting advocacy publication Cord Busters, wrote to me in an email. “We don’t really grasp the TV as something that can follow us around and learn about us.”
All that info is compiled and compared to other viewer profiles to spawn a complete accounting of you-as-TV-watcher. Then, that data slab feeds off other sources to grow into a full-on digital dossier of your consumer attributes, bandied from advertiser to vendor to advertiser. “The data from your connected television platform is melded into a single ID, with your social media use and your mobile use and other online profilers,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told me. “You’re able to harvest sufficient data to create a representation of their identity.”
After Vizio settled Federal Trade Commission charges in 2017 that it harvested such data sans user consent, fellow TV-makers just made customers opt in by default through verbose terms of service, while obscuring the technical opt-out processes for the most common data-mining practices. Thanks to the lack of any real accountability, smart TVs can still play the data game for a key revenue source, just like smartphones and their most popular apps.
But, even though TV and smartphone user data contribute to the same advertising profiles (and even though companies like Samsung and Apple specialize in both forms of tech), the two pieces of hardware remain at competitive odds with each other. In recent years, a majority of younger viewers have come to prefer smartphones over TVs as default hubs for visual entertainment. And despite YouTube TV’s dominance among living-room screens, Meta is projected to finally take over Google’s spot this year as the top corporate recipient of global ad revenue, thanks in significant part to the mobile-native Instagram app. TVs desperately need to command customers’ attention at home, and not just as glorified speakers for podcasts that play in the background.
Lucky for the TV world, they can flex built-in advantages over phone- and app-makers. Smart TV systems “command much higher ad rates than mobile video,” Casey Oppenheim, co-founder and CEO of the digital-privacy company Disconnect, wrote to me. “Getting a user into a vertical-video scroll on a 75-inch screen means longer sessions, more ad impressions, more immersive ads, and more behavioral signals. On a TV you’re locked in to content and ads in a way that you’re not on mobile.”
So the monetary incentive is there for even something like Pinterest to have a TV complement to its standard app, joining the many other free social apps grabbing for TV space as consumers tire of streaming-service costs, and as advertisers spend more money on digital TV spots year after year. The game now for smart TVs is to engage viewers wholly enough on their bigger screens that they feel less tempted to look down at their smaller ones. That means, in part, becoming more and more of a closed ecosystem, discarding customization methods that might take you away from official big-name apps or, worse, leave a cash-generating option on the table. Recently, both Amazon’s and Google’s TV apparatuses have cracked down on sideloading—the practice of downloading apps from third-party providers—by exclusively permitting downloads from their parent companies’ authorized app stores.
Adding formerly phone-exclusive features to those TV apps also helps disincentivize sharing anything from your device to your screen, a common habit for Reels users and Chromecast lovers who gather their friends around their Sony boxes at home. “Chromecast gets phone-side engagement but no data from the TV,” said Oppenheim. “A native TV app tells you the device type, session length, IP address, and even the context of what was watched before and after. Casting gives them none of that.” TV makers may not go as far as Netflix has in scrapping Chromecast compatibility altogether, but they earn more from when people don’t just cast out whatever’s on their phone screens.
Customers may, increasingly, become less agreeable to all this. TV divisions of major corporations profit far more from ads than they do from device sales, a business gap that’s likely to widen due to disruptions from the artificial intelligence rush, chip shortages, and the persistence of global business instability, thanks to trade barriers and war. Once-affordable smart screens are about to be much more expensive to make and to purchase because of hardware costs, not because of added experiential innovations. The most effective way for the sector to pad its margins is to double down on looking, and functioning, like a sizable version of your phone. Market research indicates that the physical-TV industry will keep erasing differences between phone and TV apps in the near future, as those apps tack on more interface features like specialized games.
So in case you were already frustrated by the saturation of your TV’s blaring “digital billboards,” here’s some bad news: It’s about to get more invasive. TVs and streaming subscriptions are hiking their prices while more A.I.-enhanced tracking metrics and ultrapersonalized ads are embedded into otherwise-free social media apps. Not to sound all Yakov Smirnoff here, but it really is the case these days that your TV is watching you more than you’re watching it. And if it needs to resemble your smartphone to keep you seated, so be it.
There are ways a concerned viewer can mitigate these effects on their own, by consulting thorough guides for turning off their TV’s most egregious tracking patterns. And states are showing some initiative in the legislative realm. In Kentucky, lawmakers recently passed a bill classifying TV-viewing patterns as “sensitive data” deserving of broader legal protections and transparency measures. Following a lawsuit from the Lone Star State, Samsung reached an agreement with the Texas government to make sure its products explain their tracking methods to new buyers from jump, and explicitly grant them the chance to opt out. California enacted a law 11 years ago that mandates user consent before smart TVs can enable voice-recognition systems. Since further federal regulation is increasingly unlikely after that 2017 Vizio-FTC settlement, more states are likely to take up local laws.
The simplest solution, naturally, would be to unplug altogether, ditching your smart TV for an old-fashioned antenna system and turning back to physical media players instead of streamers. As Chester told me, “The system is so extensive, it’s impossible for the average person to opt out of” all the means of tracking afforded by TV-as-internet. Maybe the youths’ next analog status symbol could be a cathode-ray tube.
