Beet.TV’s Post

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So we like to say it's the smartest TV ever produced and I think that's true. If you take a look at what's going on with normal TVs, just, they're labeled smart just because they plug into the Internet. So when we came out of stealth mode about a year ago, a little bit over a year ago, everybody focused on the free concept that we were giving away free TVs. And that's really focused on the business model more than on the actual device. And I think what we're seeing now, over the last couple months is now people are starting to focus on the beyond TV applications that we're delivering both to consumers and to advertisers. Which is really exciting from a consumer perspective. Ilya [Pozin], the founder, basically said, this TV's on my wall, but it's largest screen, but it's the dumbest device I have in the house. How do we make it smarter? Why do I have to go out and buy $1,000 mirror when it's just a TV and a camera? Why are there, the sound quality is so poor because of the speaker. They've cut costs and taken prices out and make them cheaper. So we really focused on making the best possible television. So it's a 55-inch TV, it's a high-end sound bar, and we've developed with the second screen underneath, and we've developed a bunch of beyond TV applications. So we have a fitness application, we have zoom on there, we have watch party on there, we have music on there with this high-quality sound. And what we're seeing is usage of that device double what normal TVs are getting. >> So it acts as almost like a complete entertainment and information hub with all those kinds of content that you correct. >> If you think about the phone, when the phone came out, I was my first phone, I was still carrying a camera and I was still carrying a music device. And now all of a sudden, the phone destroyed all those. So I think there's an opportunity to put more technology, more applications on this biggest screen in your house and be exactly that, this hub. >> So you mentioned advertisers. What could you tell us about advertisers? >> Yeah, so advertisers. So we recognized that the branding component, the upper funnel component of TV, does one thing, and it does it really, really well, but there's no performance on TV. So what we've developed is a bunch of new ad units that are starting to collapse that funnel. So if you think about what we can do on our devices, you can have a tier one auto add on the top screen, and you can have a tier three, dynamically linked, tier three auto ad on the second screen. You can do the same thing, making it up for an insurance company walking around with a little lizard or whatever, and they could have a business card on the bottom screen. So we recognize that we are the combined technology. The interaction between the two screens enables advertisers to do a lot more with a device than they would with just putting a 30-second spot on a big screen. So we're really focusing on that. A couple things. We also have the data, too. So to get a free television, I think we talked about this the last time. To get a free TV, you got to give us some demographics, some psychographics about your household. And enables us to target to specific households, whether that's defined demographic, geographic, or psychographic, or even behavioral. And then we have data, because we have no restrictions on what we can take off the glass. We know what you're watching even in the walled gardens, and that's good for advertisers. And for example, if you're an ad seller in a fast service and you want to know your share of voice in the insurance category, there's nowhere to get that. There's no competitive intelligence on what's going on. We're able to do that. >> Yeah, that is one of the difficulties with everything becoming a walled garden now. And you hear advertisers, they want to get a holistic view of the consumer, but it's very hard to get it through Facebook, through Amazon, through Google. But you have a more unified view. >> Yeah, I think, you're absolutely right. If you wanted to manufacture a household level, a cross platform, household level impression file. So an ad for making up Mercedes, whether it's in linear TV or whether it's any of the streaming services, that's really, really complicated. We get it in a single source, it comes right off the device, and we could put it into a file and send it to an advertiser. And that's very unique in this space. >> Yeah, I mentioned mostly those digital companies, but actually, the streaming apps are also walled gardens, too. I should clarify that. >> No, exactly. >> [LAUGH] Well, looking ahead, Bob, is there anything that we should look out for with Telly? We've got the holiday season coming up. It's always a big time for consumer electronics and gifts and whatever else. >> No, we're ready to scale. We're seconds away from scaling. We've done a pretty significant round of financing. We've used the last six nine months to really harden our business model, which enabled us to get financing. And we're about to hit the gas pedal and we'll scale. So I think when you think about the next year, currently we're in a couple thousand homes, we're gonna more than triple that and then we'll scale after that. I talk about we're the size of the Beacon theater in New York today. Soon will be the size of the sphere in LA and then Michigan football stadium and then the 10th largest cable company. So that's what we're excited about doing, and I think we're in a good spot. Like I said, the advertisers are adopting what we're doing. They think that we're adding a lot of value from the data side. I think we thread the needle between panel-based measurement that lacks precision and long tail visibility on long tail networks and some of the hair that's on smart TV data. You have no first party information like that. So I think we're really in a great spot for advertisers, whether it's data targeting and measurement.