The Vergecast - The TV of the future costs zero dollars

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

In episode one of our miniseries all about connectivity, The Verge’s David Pierce talks with Ilya Pozin, founder and CEO of Telly, a new startup promising to give you a free 55-inch TV with an additional second screen for ads and apps. Before founding Telly, Ilya Pozin also founded PlutoTV, one of the first and most successful ad-based streaming services. There are many similarities between these two companies, and Ilya has a grander vision for how he sees the world and how he thinks he can revolutionize the TV hardware and TV show business. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the second screen experience. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the first episode in a new miniseries we're doing about connectivity. But I don't mean connectivity in the like 5G

will change everything sense or the let's test some Wi-Fi speeds sense either. Those are fine, but that's not what we're talking about. For the next four Mondays, we're going to talk about how we connect online. how we connect to each other, how we connect to the stuff that we care about, how we make connections that are private and personal and safe and make sense. It's a big digital universe out there and connecting all of it and us is hard but important work. For our first episode, we're going to talk about content.

Obviously, the internet completely changed the way that we watch, listen, read, and everything else. I mean, really, it wasn't that long ago that the only way to access something was to, get in your car and go to a store and buy it. Now the whole universe of content is available like from your phone. You don't even have to get up off the couch. But that has its own set of challenges. We're all signed up for a million increasingly expensive subscriptions. We spend way too much time scrolling through streaming services instead of actually watching the content on them. You're stuck upgrading your TV, your phone, your everything every couple of years just to keep up with it all. I'm pretty sure making you go to Blockbuster and Sam Goody back in the day was not

the perfect solution, but I'm not sure this is either. Over the last few years, I've talked to a lot of people with ideas about how the content ecosystem might change, but I don't think I've met anyone with ideas quite as big and quite as wacky as this guy. Hey, I'm Billy Opposin. I'm the founder and CEO of Telly. Telly is a new startup. Like, it hasn't officially launched any of its products yet, but I think you might have heard of it. It's the one promising to give you a free 55-inch 4K TV with second screen below it that Telly thinks it can sell ads and apps on to make up for the money

it loses by giving you a TV. Telly is either the best or the worst idea I've heard in a really long time, and I sincerely don't know which one it is. Before he founded Telly, I also founded Pluto TV, which was one of the first and is still one of the most successful ad-based streaming services. His big idea was people don't have infinite money to pay for streaming, let's make one for free and it worked. There's a lot of similarities between those two companies and those two ideas. And there's a bigger vision in there for how Ilya sees the world and how he thinks he can change both the TV hardware and the TV show business. That is what we're going to talk about today. The future of the biggest screen in your house and the way that we find and connect with the content

we care about. But before we got into that, I wanted to start the conversation with Ilya by going all the way back to the Pluto days. So back in 2013, when we saw the entire kind of streaming ecosystem change, right, everyone started going on television to open up their apps, right? You had publishers like Netflix that went from mobile and desktop environments to the TV, right? And the idea that everyone was launching a subscription services was great, but there was an opportunity, I believe, to have a free television experience.

Like when you went on YouTube, that was free, right? You were able to browse, you know, various videos. But there was nothing, no curated experience, nothing that felt like TV, nothing that served you up content when you didn't actually want to think, right? And we always had this theory at Pluto where from an on-demand perspective, on-demand is really, really good if you know what you're looking for. But if you don't know what you're looking for, it's a horrible experience, right? Because how do you search for something where you don't know what to search for?

So that was the theory behind Pluto's. Can we create a linear television experience and deliver it completely free? Can we go out there and find content that maybe isn't on, maybe it's third window, fourth window, right, isn't on television anymore and isn't being monetized anymore, but it's still valuable and people still want to see it. And can we create a revenue model where maybe it's a refshare type deal, similar to a YouTube play with short form videos,

but we do that with a long-form content and recreate this kind of TV experience. And we did just that, right? Initially, we launched on WebMobile, but very quickly we built an experience that, you know, on television, we quickly became the number one free app on platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire TV and so forth. So is that two separate insights, the idea that there is a way to do this without charging a subscription fee and people need something that isn't quite linear TV but also isn't quite on-demand? Like, is that two separate things that you built the company on, or is there an overlap of that

Venn diagram? There was two separate things, but they kind of convermed. So the idea that cable companies were double dipping, where you were paying for a cable subscription fee, and then you were watching content with advertising. That to me was always one of those kind of mind-boggling instances that was right for disruption. We proved that at Pluto, right, where we said you can run a very sustainable business on just one of those modernization streams alone, right, on just advertising. And if you look at Pluto today, you know, fast forward, you know, 10 years, it's done over a billion dollars in ad revenue alone with, you know, million plus consumers, right? So, and then the other was the curated linear TV experience where, you know, my original idea of Pluto was actually with my daughter sitting on my lap and I was

working on one monitor and I was on YouTube picking out, you know, kids videos on the other monitor. She was two years old at that time and I just learned how to change diapers and I didn't know anything about kids' content. I didn't know what to search for. So I was like, all right, let me, let me try to find this kind of linear TV experience with internet content and it didn't exist, right? that was the original hypothesis. So I built a prototype. I put it out there, and we then drove some users to it. Right away, we saw like 36 or 40 minutes session durations.

And at that point, YouTube was getting three and a half minute sessions, right? So we knew that this curate experience worked. And I said, okay, well, we were living in this era of cord cutting. Everyone's cutting the cord. The writing's on the wall, right? Because consumers didn't want to pay twice, right? So can we create an experience where it's actually monetized on a single revenue stream? Right.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that's been very, funny since then is the world has kind of come around to that way of thinking, right? Everybody now has an ad supported thing as an ad supported tier of their subscription. They still want to also charge you money for it and also show you ads, which is very funny. Like, we're still in the old cable world. But also now we're in this place where this idea that it's hard to find stuff to watch and actually maybe we should just curate it for you so that you can turn it on. And like one of the good things about cable was channel surfing. Like we got away from channel surfing for a long time. And

everybody's kind of coming back to it. But 10 years ago, I kind of feel like the industry thought you were just wrong, that like this was not the future. You can't make money in Avod. You can't make money from curation. On demand is the future. Like, not a chance. Am I overstating kind of the forces against you?

No, it was spot on. For a long time, I didn't think Pluto was going to happen. I've never felt so rejected in my life on all sides, right? We went out to capital to get capital from investors. I think we had 93 knows before we had a yes. Wow. Because look, we're entering the market that seemed like it was going subscription on demand. And we said, no, we're going linear and ad supported.

And everyone thought we're completely crazy. And also a lot of the people that are writing checks from an investment perspective, they have the means of the capital to go out there and pay for service and remove ads. And they're like, ads are bad, right? So naturally, we just didn't fit within that mold. And then on the other end, from the content perspective, right, as you mentioned, all the content owners now, all the media companies have ad-supported tiers. But back then, we went to them to get content. They also laughed this out of the room.

They're like, no, we're licensing our content. There's no way we were giving to on a ref share basis. And ad support and forget it. We're going subscription. So they thought we were crazy, too. What was the point it started to turn? Like, do you remember like a thing happening where you were like, okay, we were not wrong about this? Yeah, I mean, so the data was there from the get-go, right, where consumers showed us that they actually loved this curated linear experience.

And we were doing this with like two, three-minute videos from YouTube at that point, right? We're just short-form content. But when we stitched it together until a long-form experience, it worked. And people loved the whole channel surfing idea. They loved the curation. They loved not thinking. And we even went out of our way to remove the ability to restart a show. If you came in at 8.08 p.m. to Pluto, you watched the same.

same thing at the same time as everyone else, even if it was like four minutes into an existing clip, right? And we brought that kind of nostalgic thing back and it worked from a consumer side. But then I remember, I think it was Linesgate that gave us a chance, right, and said, all right, let's give you some older content. We're not monetizing it currently. Let's put it up there. We'll do a ref share deal and let's see what happens, right? And we started writing a bigger check. And the bigger check we wrote, right, the better the content they gave us, the better. The content they gave us, the more people watched. Then we started getting into this flywheel, right? And then, you know, and then the industry kind of started to hear that,

hey, like, this is actually happening. Consumers are growing. Revenue is growing. This is becoming a size of opportunity. And others started giving us a chance, right? And once again, it started with older, older content. And then as the content got better and newer, everything kind of started going up and the flywheel started turning in a faster way. Got it. Okay. So draw the line from that to telly for me because I feel like there's a bunch of like the market condition stuff you described in the like tv content industry that is also true of the tv set industry you're also making a similar bet on ads versus you know money but like how do you get from from Pluto to telly yeah yeah yeah no great question so at Pluto we partnered with every TV manufacturer out there right because

and and then we saw the writing on the wall they they came to us and and we quickly realized they don't make any money selling TVs. Right. There's like TVs I've hit this commodity state where there's no margin in the hardware. It's a race to the bottom on price. And when you don't have any margin in the hardware, you also have no innovation. Right. So right now when you're looking at a TV in your home, I'm sure you have one on your wall and everyone else does, but you don't really know. Is it three months old? Is it three years old? Has it been there for 10 years? It looks exactly the same, right? And that's when when kind of the light bulb hit, if you will, right? Where if everyone's coming to us to get a piece of our ad revenue because they don't make any money selling

hardware. And if you can't make any money selling hardware, why fight for that tiny margin anyway? Why not build a product in a way that you can give away and quickly take the market like we did with Pluto? So wait, so just hang on, explain that part out really fast. Because if I'm understanding you correctly, basically, when you're at Pluto, you're, you know, building an app for all these TV operating systems and such. But part of the appeal of working with Pluto is that the that the TV manufacturers can figure out how to get a cut of your rev share. And that's the only way they're making any money. And I actually feel like, like, I pause on this because I think this is a part of the TV business.

People don't understand that, like, there's money in outrageously expensive, like, 100-inch Samsung televisions a little, but this like TCL behind me, like, TCL is not making any money that's interesting to anybody on here. They're all making money on, like, the weird spyware stuff that they put on. And they're all making money on the ads. that they show you, right? Like, that is what the business has become, even for the people who make the hardware. Completely. And it's no different than the double dipping I mentioned on the cable side, right? Where they're, right now TV makers are selling a TV. They're monetizing your data.

They're selling advertising. They're getting a cut of advertising from streaming services like Pluto. And they're selling, they have their own programming. Now they're selling their own ads. So they're double dipping, right? So once again, if you're in a business where you're not making money on the hardware, similar to Pluto, we feel like if you could take away one of the, the revenue streams, you can quickly take that market. But you're absolutely right. It's part of the deals with Pluto. Every TV maker, you know, got a cut of that revenue. Okay. So then I can imagine the leap from there to, well, if this is the business already, why don't we just make this the business? That's right. That's right. And, you know, the way to the way we also looked at is it was very

difficult to build Pluto for every TV manufacturer. And that's because they're all trying to optimize the tiny amount of margin they had. So the processors, the processors, the memory, the stuff that goes inside the TV that's on your wall now is very weak. And the way we looked at is it's 2023. TVs are the biggest screen in your home, but they're the dumbest, right? They're drastically underpowered, right? There's very little that they can do to go beyond streaming, right? Like you even saw like Netflix and others try to get into gaming.

And it's so hard to do gaming when your processor is like as weak as an ATM machine. Right. So when we looked at building, Telly, like, don't let the price point fool you of free, right? This is not a budget TV. We said, let's build actually the smartest TV on the market, right? So let's disrupt it from a TV perspective. What would we, if we were to build a TV right now in 2023, what would it do?

And if you look at the market, look what happened because TVs have an innovator, right? There's no margin to innovate, so there's been no innovation whatsoever. So what happened? We had speakers pop out. We had assistance. We had, you know, mirror coming. out with a fitness device for $800, which is literally a screen and a camera. All of these different devices popped out into the market. And frankly, we believe that a TV should have been doing that

all along, right? And if there was any room for innovation, and if TV companies were actually figuring out how to drive an actual improvement of their product, rather than just making the screen thinner or making it 4K to 8K, I think they just missed a mark of what consumers actually want, right? And if you recall when the iPhone came out, it killed a bunch of other devices very quickly. There used to be cameras at Best Buy. Those went away. Used to buy like a TomTom or Garmin GPS. That went away, right?

So like music players, portable music. So the iPhone killed a bunch of devices. We expect the same thing to happen here, right? So Telly is the smartest TV on the market, right? It's got great speakers, right? You've got a camera that lets you do Zoom calling, fitness, you know, gaming, motion tracking, gaming. It's got a full assistant built in.

So you can say, hey, Telly, put on Spotify or whatever. whatever you want. You're playing music through it. It's got all your extra widgets from like sports scores and news and whatever. And it's so much more than a TV, right? Imagine like somebody rings your ring doorbell and their video appears in the bottom or you do a Zoom call with your friends or family across town. Then their videos are on that bottom screen and you're watching the same, let's say, football game on the top screen and now you're watching together, right? And there's some really other interesting things that like we're building and innovating that goes well, well beyond TV.

Right. Yeah, and I want to get to that in just a second. But I think the last version of the like, why on earth are you building a TV question I have is basically like the iPhone example is really interesting, right? And I think where we are in the TV market is essentially like deciding to build a camcorder 20 years after the iPhone comes out. Like this market is dead. Everybody agrees there's no money in it. Everybody is like desperately trying to find something else to do. Like I've been a proponent the last several years of like bring back dumb TVs. I think there is a compelling case to make that all of the interesting stuff should happen in set-top boxes. It should happen in sound bars, whatever, because you can buy a big display that is going to keep being good for a very long time, put all the smart stuff somewhere else, and then upgrade the parts that you need while this still very good 4K display gets to sit on my wall for a decade, even though all of the parts inside are going to become outdated. So for you, even as you come into this saying, you know, we want to figure out how to disrupt the space, you look around, Why build the set itself? There's so many other ways you could have attacked the TV market rather than building big screens. Why decide to build big screens? Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the market, it's even from a streaming perspective,

it's so fragmented, right? And people are using different apps and different services and cables kind of taking a nose dive, right? There's people are switching apps and HTML ports and from gaming to everything else. I think the TV is really the glue of the. the entire home, right? It's the way you really connect not only all the smart devices that are external, but also the family. And it's where people stay together, right? People come home with their families, they sit in front of the TV, and it's kind of like the last part that keeps everyone together. And when you live in this kind of fragmented environment with content

living in different places, there's a conflict of interest between the consumer and those content owners, because everyone wants you to be within their app, they don't want to promote other apps. but the one, you know, kind of Switzerland, if you will, neutral place that can keep all those things together is the actual hardware and the television, right? So I think that's where we see the opportunity is we can build a content recommendation engine that is agnostic of what services you're subscribed to, right? We can help you find content or services that are like for you that, based on your profile, that are different than someone else.

So I think that's really the opportunity. and with so many different options for hardware and different devices and smart home and IOT kind of growing. And once again, these different services, you need something that glues together. And the hardware and the kind of TV becomes that central point. That makes total sense to me. And I think is kind of the central question of tele for me, which I think is part of why this company is so fun, because you're either dead right that this idea that the TV should be much more than it is has only not happened because of essentially like lack of incentive and innovation. or it hasn't happened yet because you're wrong.

And smartphones are going to be that thing or glasses are going to be that thing or like Alexa everywhere is going to be that thing. And essentially the TV's job is only going to become less and less over time. And only time will tell. But I think like for people who live in the world, it's actually one of the most interesting technology questions at the moment is like, what is the job of a television in the next decade? I think it's such a fascinating question in a way that we've never really asked before because the job of a television has been to watch things, right? Like it was a furniture piece

that you watched stuff on and then it became smaller and then it got flat screen and then it got higher res. But it's fundamentally like we watch shows and movies and what you're talking about is like a fundamentally

much bigger, broader, wider, cooler vision for what a TV could be that no one has ever really all the way tried to execute before. Why don't you think anyone has tried that to the full extent of what you're talking about?

I think it's timing. It's product market fit. You can have the greatest idea. but release it at the wrong time and it won't work. And I'm sure there's been plenty of attempts at Pluto before Pluto's time. But it's all about coming in at the right time when different parts of the market are kind of right for disruption. And in my view, there's no better time to disrupt a category when it hits that commodity state, when there's very little brand loyalty to purchasing a TV.

When a consumer walks in at Costco and there's 8 55-inch TVs in front of them and they're all good. they're all the same specs and they look at what's on sale and that's what they buy and that's when something really has an opportunity to be disrupted right and i i think that timing is there i think broadband connections are are now obviously a normal state i think it took time for that to happen and i think because we live in this kind of court cutting you know a different app ecosystem fragmented world with a bunch of different devices popping up it's becoming very difficult from a consumer perspective to know what to get to know what to you know to what to subscribe you know to what to subscribe to where's my favorite show here?

You know, should I get this assistant or that assistant? I need a speaker. I need this. I need that. It needs something to glue it all together. At the end of the day, as I said earlier, the TV has the perfect opportunity to do it because it is the biggest screen in the home. It's what keeps the family together.

Of course, we've got our iPhones and they're more than capable of doing what our TVs do, but it's a single use experience with one consumer. No one's gathering around around their iPhones, right? So I think the TV is more than capable of doing that. And if you look at telly, it's, I always kind of make this analogy to a car in a weird way because the top screen is kind of like your windshield, right? That's your main focus. That's what you're, you know, that's where your content plays. That's your driving.

But imagine a car without a dashboard. Imagine you didn't have a speedometer, a radio, a nav, right, all the other things to kind of enhance your viewing experience. We have to accept that right now we live in a multi-screen world, right? And if we're watching a football game or a movie, everyone around us is on their phones, right? That's a huge distraction. They're taking their phones out. They're looking at scores. Maybe they're betting on a game or whatever it is, right?

Let me see what actors in that movie. Let's check out your Rotten Tomatoes reviews before you pick something. But imagine doing that right there on that single screen right in front of you, right? You're browsing Netflix titles and the Rotten Tomatoes reviews just show up right there below you. That's what a Cars dash does, right, as you're driving. And that's why we believe this kind of dual. screen approach solves so many problems, right? Because if you're a TV maker, you can't overlay someone else's content, right? Unless you're, maybe you're Amazon, you've got the device and you've got

the content, you have some opportunities to enhance it. And you could see a lot of what they're doing. And 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 the 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. 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. That'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 your 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 its software, a lot of its hardware. We want to do a lot of things like, how do you figure out sort of where to start? Like 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 it 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 overloaded with extra hardware and sensors and computing power. And 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, is 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 Rokos 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. That was first and foremost, I go, let's, 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 and they're 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 forced 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 telly 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. It's just, it's completely game changing. So that's kind of the way we looked at 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 20. So that's kind of the way we approach it. What is some kind of proven low-hanging fruit that have been already validated from other devices that people are spending money on that we could just package it all into this one device. All right. We got to take a quick break and then we will be back with more from Iliaposen on the future of TV. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

It can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.,

from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today.

You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle.

Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft,

then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All 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. 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? Oh, 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 is, okay, can we do the same thing that we did at Pluto? Free, free is by far the best way to market any kind of product, right? And this was proven even here. Like, we've, in our first week of launching in May, we had hundreds of thousands of people sign up, right? We had to sign up every second. They share 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. And 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 overindex on income. They over index on education. They're savvy. They understand that this is a better, smarter, you know, 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 $1,000. It's twice the price of your, like, piece of crap, Roku TV, but trust that it's worth it. You don't think so? They would fall on our nose. It would fail. Because, once again, consumers are, like, you walk into a store,

you see what's on sale and that's what you buy. It's 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 purchasing a TV as price. So even the idea of making the TV $50 more by adding a camera to it, I don't think it would work. Okay. I just,

I think the majority of consumers are, 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 commodity. 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. 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. This 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 president 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, I think obviously when you're coming out with a free product, that 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? And 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 a $1,000 TV completely free. And they understood that this is a product that is far superior than anything else in the market. And that it's proven not.

not only in our sign-up rate and our wait list, but it's also proven in all the usage, right? We're in public beta right now. We're in thousands of thousands of homes, and this thing is working, and people are using it every single day, right? TV's our own for six to seven years, and their 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 check the box on TV. Yes, he could do everything else here 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 can do this and this and this. Like, it's coming. Right. Like there's like, like you might come home one day and and you might see that, hey, like, you see a list of your of your friends that have tellies online. You might be able to like, you know, hey, David's online. Let's watch TV together. there's a game on, right? Or let's say, hey, hey, Telly, take a photo of me and send it to mom.

Mom comes home, sees a photo of our son, right, and pins it to the bottom screen in a cute little photo frame and that lives there, right? There's so many things that we can do with this device, but because it's free, there's no barrier or entry, right? The idea of another TV maker coming out with a TV and try to do something social is going to fail because, you know, let's say your 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 tele and you could 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. Are you interested in winning those people over? Like, how do you make that case? Look, we're a privacy first company. We're a 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? The second you close, a 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 you 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? So 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 like the interview we had in like Wall Street Journal, for example, right? They did a, 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 without my permission. 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 and how it matters. And 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. That's right.

Yeah. That's kind of, it's kind of a wild approach, but I like, 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 and another thing happens, right? And for us, once again, we, you know, 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? There's already such a bad reputation and there's like some negative connotation about the product that most people will say no, right?

And 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 could do with 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. Yeah. 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 work. 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. Like that makes total sense to me. I 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 realize that it's gone too far. And it's one of those things everyone already does. And they're selling the data.

So might as well get 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've got to stay above every state and federal law. Like, 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 cell side when I had Pluto, right, to now with Tully. 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. So 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. So they need access to data. And at the end of the day, advertisers want to target homes effectively. So for us, for example, we ask you at sign up, what car do you own? 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, you know, stuff that doesn't even important. And I think that's where people start having a negative association advertising is when ads aren't relevant, right? And it feels like it's benefiting one side and not the other side. We'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've got to take one more break, and then we will be back with more from Ilioposen on tele, Pluto, TVs, and lots more. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process, from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.

And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

you got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database.

start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All 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. Yeah. 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 Avat is having a moment right now, right? Like Pluto is growing really fast. Two B 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 were 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. My 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 trade? 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, things that are very relevant. And people are buying, you know, they have assistance 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, description of the movie, maybe some trivia, some fun things to enhance that movie. You're going to look at your phone anyway for that, right? And we're saying, let's put that front center. The best way to look at 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 Fandoah, Draft King's integration right there natively? The ad is a small part of that screen, right? It'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, you know, TELI, this is across the board. 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 Tully and go back to a device that doesn't have that button. screen because they're not looking at it in a negative way.

Interesting. 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, you know, a rock start team. Like our head of product, Sasha was the head of product that Android TV for, you know, for Google.

He's running our product here. And the same thing across the board in the ad set and everything else. We've got just the right team that has industry experience and startup chops to make this work. where, you know, if you notice, you know, we're in a beta program. What TV company goes into a beta program, right? Like, Google 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, you know, close family and friends just to, you know, make sure we've got. got like TV 101 and the core product done and stable. And then we opened up to public beta from 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. And 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.

Wow. You know, so, 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? So naturally, it's going to go in a main room.

But also, people could just shove it in a guest room or somewhere else, but they're not, right? And the data shows 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 tele 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,

but 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. I think that's a great question too. Look, 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? So for us, we put policies in place, you know, to be able to have that opportunity to, in case someone is fraudging 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 or 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 HTML switching. Everything happens on the bottom, right? So we actually cleaned up the top to make it easier to watch. And the bottom actually, that's where your control center is for your whole device. And 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 prerequisite. If we built a product 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 inventory, then of course, people are naturally going to say, okay, I'm just going to get this. I'm going to tell them, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do something else because 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 are 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.

And of course, we put things in place to give us the ability to, you know, 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, it's, I'm not surprised in a beta test, right? Like, you've 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. We, that's just not realistic whatsoever. Okay, fair enough. So the, all the software you mentioned, all the stuff you're thinking about building. You mentioned you to doing integrations and all that stuff. What's your sense over time of how much of this, your, 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 we are built on on android right which which gives us a huge advantage in a big existing ecosystem right and similar to amazon fire tv which is built on on android as well right it gives you an advantage because you can 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 port 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, that 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. But 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 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 months where, you know, words appear on the top, songs in the bottom, you pick up your remote, this has a mic, right? Or a gaming pad or whatever it is, right? So, 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, there's plenty of those. We, 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? I 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 on 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 win back some of these people who have been burned by building TV stuff before? I think you'll be surprised we're already seeing it, right? Not just from individual like kind of developers, but major, major companies who have already build platforms for TV, right, or second screen experiences for TV that are so behind what we're doing and blown away by our, you know, 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, you know, 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 on, like you're watching your favorite. show and you want to buy that sweatshirt, right? Like the famous, you know, friend sweatshirt. Sure. 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 experience, 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. I 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 and 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? Like, what telly wants to be six or seven years from now is so ambitious and so big that, like, you kind of have to build a TV that works now and can get all the way there. I 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 obsolution, if you will, where, like I mentioned earlier, even building Pluto for the most modern TV now is not, it's a, Pluto is a very heavy

app. It's not easy. And, you know, if you're building an app for Roku, they're running like almost like a, like a digital billboard script to be able to develop for it. It'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 utilized, right, to its full effect now, because we want.

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 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 in other means. But we're very much treating it like a Tesla, right? Where I'm on my third Tesla.

Even in the beginning, a lot of the autopilot hardware wasn't really enabled. And then how delighted RBS 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 loaded in because you can't get everything right out the get-go. So 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 TV is like, there's so many models of every other TV maker. We've got one, right? So we, 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. It 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 tele? Yeah. 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. We've got a lot of, you know, patents that we filed on, 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, you know, not good for their business. But, you know, 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? Startups 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, and speed is our only advantage. It's not our pocketbooks, right? We're not going to outspend a big company, but we're going to outspeed and we're going to outperform them, and that's exactly what we're doing. And by the time, you know, the others realize that, hey, this is working and this is something we need to do will 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 maintained that head start through just great execution. Fair enough. All right, I can 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, David. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you so much to Ilya 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. It'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.