Inscape
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Vizio makes nearly as much money from ads and data as it does from TVs
Vizio monetizes its cheap smart TVs and free video options by collecting viewer data and selling ads.
Vizio tracked and sold your TV viewing habits without consent (updated)
A settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General will cost Vizio $2.2 million. That sum will settle the charges with both the state and federal agencies after a complaint that Vizio installed software on 11 million smart TVs to track viewing histories without consumers' knowledge. As part of the settlement, a federal court could order the company to disclose its data collection and sharing practices and get express consent from customers before doing so.
China's LeEco buys Vizio in a $2 billion deal
Today at an event in Los Angeles, Vizio announced that it will sell to China's LeEco (formerly LeTV) for $2 billion. Don't expect to see much change on store shelves, as the company plans to continue operating under the Vizio name as a wholly-owned subsidiary. The exception to this is its viewer data business Inscape -- we learned about it last year when Vizio filed plans for a now-unnecessary IPO -- which will spin off and operate as a separate privately-owned company controlled by Vizio founder William Wang. Wang will own 51 percent of Inscape, with the rest going to LeEco attached to a 10 year license for the technology, which monitors what people are actually watching on their TV to help with things like targeted advertising.
Vizio's cheapest 4K TVs are on sale starting at just $600
Worried that Vizio's $130,000 120-inch Reference Series TV is a bit out of your price range? For the budget-constrained buyers among us, Vizio has recently launched a new series of 4K TVs that are cheaper than any it's ever offered before: the D-Series. The smallest one is a 50-inch television (D50u-D1) that slices an extra $30 from its M-Series counterpart to sell for under $600. The largest 4K version is a 65-incher (D65u-D2) that costs just $1,300, $100 less than the step-up M model. Of course, to meet those price requirements something had to give, and I think those compromises mean the M-Series is still a better option.
Vizio IPO plan shows how its TVs track what you're watching
While the past few years have been tough for many TV makers (Panasonic, Pioneer, Toshiba, Sony, just to name a few), Vizio has continued to grow its business, and now it's ready to go public. Vizio has made its name with impressive value-priced TVs that don't skimp on features (it's also a leader in the soundbar market, and has made attempts at selling tablets and phones too). According to the filing, Vizio has sold more than 15 million smart TVs, with about 61 percent of them connected as of the end of June. While viewers are benefiting from those connections, streaming over 3 billion hours of content, Vizio says it's watching them too, with Inscape software embedded in the screens that can track anything you're playing on it -- even if it's from cable TV, videogame systems and streaming devices.
Balance Board becomes interactive storytelling tool
Okay, it's kind of hard to figure out exactly what the Inscape software is -- the website describes it as "a unique integrating collaborative tool supporting a wide range of devices and media formats to enable digital content creators to plan, build, experience and publish interactive multimedia stories." We think it's software that allows you to import content and build an interactive framework for presenting it. We're imagining a PowerPoint with more stuff to do in the presentations, basically. Which means that it could be used for anything from visual novels to self-guided presentations to games.Immersion, who is part of the consortium that works on InScape, has now added a Balance Board interface to the software, enabling whatever these interactive stories are to maintain a new level of, well, immersion. It's cool to see our little toy scale being used in what seems like a serious program. And it's especially cool to see any program "officially" supporting a Wii peripheral.
