[simoncion]

> I do believe they claim that they use inaudible sounds...

The odds that a television manufacturer [0] has designed most of its TVs with speakers that can reliably reproduce either ultrasonic or subsonic frequencies are near-zero.

The odds that the marketing arm of a niche tech company will be dreadfully (some might say fraudulently) imprecise with their marketing copy are really, really high.

[0] Let alone most-to-all of them.

[floatrock]

...unless they're starting to design TV's exactly for these "enhanced viewing experiences" and opening up a side-channel of profits to marketers and folks like Nielson.

Wasn't there one of the asian manufacturers the other month (I wanna say... Samsung maybe? please correct me if I'm wrong) that got caught building a SmartTV that recorded audio and sent those packets up through the network to who-knows-where? They eventually rolled that feature back, but not before they got enough press that they had to make a statement saying it was only for diagnostics or testing or something like that.

If you're, say, a multinational with a large mobile device division and a strong corporate mandate to make sure the mobile device ecosystem stays strong so profits keep flowing, is it too far fetched to think you would start looking for cross-division synergies that, lets say, grease the flow in this ecosystem? Perhaps you could introduce an extra component (or optimize an existing one for different parameters) that if, say, it saw a signal of a certain form, it might reproduce it in an invisible and obtrusive way. And if it helps major players in the device ecosystem, well, great, the ecosystem stays strong and mobile devices continue to roll off the shelf.

Complete speculation, but not an unreasonable line of thinking?

[simoncion]

> ...unless they're starting to design TV's exactly for these "enhanced viewing experiences" and opening up a side-channel of profits to marketers and folks like Nielson.

This presumes two things:

1) Enough TVs are made with speakers that can reliably reproduce actually ultrasonic or subsonic vibrations.

2) Enough microphone ship on devices that can reliably detect actual ultrasonic or subsonic vibrations.

I don't see this happening any time soon.

Hell, it'll be easier [0] to get this sort of information from the cable company by way of the cable box attached to the TV, or easier and (probably) cheaper to get this info from video playing software [1] that runs on the TV, or the inbuilt CATV/OTA tuner. [2] Maybe mix in an approximate headcount from the camera embedded in the TV to "enrich" the data.

[0] From a market coordination perspective.

[1] YouTube or Netflix "tuners" or whatever.

[2] Assuming TVs even ship with those anymore...

[brbsix]

Cameras embedded in TVs? Apart from the Samsung "smart TVs" with an obvious camera that can be rolled in/out of use, are there really cameras on television sets? I've heard people talk about hidden cameras in set top boxes and tvs for at least a decade, but it always sounded like nonsense. It has the potential to go really bad if people discovered something like a camera hidden.

[simoncion]

> Cameras embedded in TVs? ... I've heard people talk about hidden cameras in set top boxes and tvs for at least a decade, but it always sounded like nonsense.

I never asserted that the cameras would be hidden. :)

Like you said, cameras are embedded in at least one model of "modern" television. Either laziness or "gamification" can be used to get many folks to keep the camera in the in-use position.