'Black Mirror' Bargain: Your Privacy for a Free TV
Ilya Pozin cofounded Pluto TV. Now Telly, his new startup, gives away TVs in exchange for always-on ads, your data and sensors that count people in your living room. You in?
This Ankler Feature is a 13-minute read
The journey to Ilya Pozin’s house is perilous. Ascending the artery off of Beverly Hills’ Coldwater Canyon requires negotiating several hairpin turns up a steep, winding road. Without knowing what’s around that next bend, nerves fray.
It’s a fitting location for Pozin, a serial entrepreneur who has shown a knack for seeing what’s around media and entertainment’s bends.
Not too long after Viacom acquired the last startup he cofounded, Pluto TV, in January 2019 for $340 million in cash (smart move getting cash rather than stock), Pozin plunked down $30 million for this hillside mansion. When I arrive for our interview, I’m met at the gate by an assistant who leads me through a massive motor court that’s populated with a clutch of Teslas. Once inside the five-bedroom, 10,278 square-foot house, I’m led down a floating, elliptical staircase into the great room that offers jetliner views of the city, compliments of floor-to-ceiling walls of automated glass. A motorized replica of the helmet worn by Tony Stark in Iron Man is perched on a nearby table and a waterfall splashes into an indoor pond.
Pozin, 41, is casually dressed in white sneakers and jeans, a look that might as well be called “Silicon Valley disruptor.” As the son of Russian immigrants who grew up modestly in Maryland and attended Florida State University, where he studied information technology, he now marvels at his self-made fortune and his new Bond-villain digs. “I moved in here about a year and a half ago, so I’m literally beta testing this place,” he says. Then he tells me that even $30 million homeowners have problems just like us. “The roof is flat which is great until water comes down,” Pozin says. “My bedroom is where the water comes in.”
I’m here to discuss Pozin’s latest and boldest venture yet: Telly, a two-year old startup that offers consumers a free 55-inch television with just one catch — the TV has a second “smart screen” below the speakers that streams an uninterrupted flow of advertisements (as well as time, weather, news and other data). Oh, and all your viewing habits are captured, and that data is used to optimize the ads Telly shows.
In other words, Telly is what you get when you drive up the long, winding road of surveillance capitalism, where tech companies offer “free” and “smart” products in exchange for information that once upon a time was private, including what one watches in the comfort of their homes.
Telly is not the first smart or “connected” TV in the market: Roku and Vizio are its most prominent competition, but their televisions cost actual money (about $300). Pozin has previously claimed that if a Telly were for sale, the set would retail at around $1,000, although it’s unclear how he came up with that figure.
Pozin’s rivals still harvest all your viewing data, too, but the Telly difference is that second screen cannot be turned off. If a Telly owner wants to opt out of being tracked, they can do so . . . by returning the free TV. Recall the adage: If you don’t know what the product is, then you likely are the product.