FTC Fall Technology Series: Smart TV Workshop

December 7, 2016

Segment 1

Transcript

KEVIN MORIARTY: Good afternoon. On behalf of my colleagues here at the Federal Trade 

Commission, I'm happy to welcome you to our workshop on smart TV, which is the final 

installment of the fall technology series. My name is Kevin Moriarty. And I'm an attorney with 

the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection here at the Commission. Ad my co-organizer for 

today's workshop is Megan Cox, who's also in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. 

Before we get started with our program, I need to review a few administrative details. Please 

silence any mobile phones and devices. If you must use them during the workshop, please be 

respectful of the speakers and your fellow audience members. Please be aware that if you leave 

this building for any reason during the workshop, you will have to go back through security 

again. Please bear this in mind and plan ahead, especially if you are participating on the panel so 

we can do our best to remain on schedule. 

The restrooms are across the hall just outside the auditorium. The plaza east cafeteria is located 

inside the building. So you can use it without going through security again. And it is open until 3 

PM. Most of you have received a lanyard with a plastic FTC event badge. We reuse these for 

multiple events. So when you leave today, please return your badge to the event staff. 

If an emergency occurs which requires you to leave this room but remain in the building, follow 

the instructions provided over the PA system. If an emergency occurs that requires the 

evacuation of the building an alarm will sound. Everyone should leave the building in an orderly 

manner through the main 7th Street exit. After leaving the building, turn left and proceed down 

7th Street and across the East Street to the FTC emergency assembly area. Remain there until 

instructed to return to the building. If you notice any suspicious activities, please alert building 

security. 

Please be advised that this event may be photographed, and it is being webcast and recorded. By 

participating in this event, you are agreeing that your image and anything you say or submit may 

be posted indefinitely at ftc.gov or one of the Commission's publicly available social media sites. 

We're happy to welcome those watching via the webcast. We will make the webcast and all 

workshop materials available online to create a lasting record for everyone interested in these 

issues. For those of you on Twitter, FTC staff will be live tweeting today's workshop at the 

hashtag #smartTVFTC. 

Both panels of the workshop today will leave time at the end for questions. You can ask 

questions. You can submit questions by tweeting them with the hashtag #smartTVFTC. Or you 

can fill out a comment, card, which was available at the desk walking in. Or Matt Smith will be 

patrolling with blank comment cards that you can get from him. And he'll also pick up completed 

comment cards with questions on them and will bring them to the moderators. 
Finally as a reminder, the public comment period will be open after the workshop through 

Friday, January 6th, 2017. I urge anyone giving thought to these issues to submit comments by 

visiting our website. Lastly I want to thank our panelists for taking part today. We are grateful 

for your time and consideration of these evolving technologies and consumer issues. 

Aside from the folks you will see onstage today, this program will not be possible without the 

great work by Crystal Peters, Fawn Bouchard, and Bruce Jennings, alongside our paralegal 

support today from Carrie Davis, Matt Smith, Jonathan [INAUDIBLE], Bianca Morris, Joseph 

Kennedy, and Jennifer Yadu. Thank you all. Now it is my honor to welcome the director of the 

FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, Jessica Rich. 

[APPLAUSE] 

JESSICA RICH: Well, good afternoon. And welcome to the Federal Trade Commission's 

workshop on smart TVs. This is the third installment of the FTC's fall technology series, 

following our events on ransomware in September and drones in October. We thank you for 

joining us in person and through the webcast. Just got to get this mic right. 

So consumers are increasingly turning to the internet rather than traditional television services 

for video entertainment. Long gone are the days of watching only the major TV networks. And 

even cable is fighting for its share of the pie. Still adjusting the microphone here. 

Today we're also watching Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Crackle, Vivo, iTunes, 

Google Play, and many others. And I'm sorry if you're in the audience and I left you out. 

Millennials in particular seem to be migrating to these newer services at a very rapid pace. 

Among those that watch internet video, a full 40% of time in front of the television is spent on 

these streaming services. And 30% of that time is spent watching ad supported streaming 

services such as YouTube. Streaming devices like Apple TV or Amazon's Fire TV deliver these 

internet services directly to consumers' TVs rather than their computers. 

Manufacturers have added internet connections to their TVs-- now called smart TVs-- to allow 

them to display these streaming services. And now the innovation is happening in the other 

direction too, with purveyors of traditional TV services providing their subscriptions over the 

internet. For example, Comcast's Xfinity app allow subscribers to display their traditional TV 

subscriptions through streaming devices like Roku. 

These changes provide enormous benefits to consumers. We're all using these devices. 

Consumers now have access to a diverse array of content from a variety of TV providers. 

Internet connectivity also permits fine grained audience measurement, which can help niche 

video content programmers get ad dollars for programs that may not otherwise have registered as 

popular using more blunt measurement tools. The tracking of video content also allows services 

like Netflix to record where you are when you pause a video on one device so you can start it up 

on another. 
However smart TVs are also testing the privacy expectations that consumers developed in the era 

of traditional television. Many consumers have a fundamentally different relationship with their 

TVs than with their computers. From the moment we bought our first personal computer, there 

was data collection and data driven advertising. Internet use and online data collection evolved 

simultaneously. And consumers have come to expect some level of data collection when they use 

their computers. 

By contrast the television industry did not evolve with data collection as a critical component. 

Broadcast signals traveled to households anonymously over the airwaves. Unlike the internet, 

which requires two way communication, consumers' TV viewing information the something that 

remained inside the home. So it matters whether consumers think of their smart TV as a 

computer or a television, and whether they recognize that today it may be both. The incredible 

number of choices consumers now have in their TV viewing also raises privacy issues. 

In the 1950s when TV first became prevalent in American households, consumers could only 

watch two or three channels. As a result there wasn't much to learn about individual consumers 

from their TV viewing habits. With the arrival of cable and VCRs in the '70s and '80s, consumers 

had a variety of choices about what to watch on their TVs. And the choices they made became 

much more interesting to marketers. 

This information also became much more sensitive as it could provide insight into consumers 

religious beliefs, political views, and other potentially sensitive topics. In the 1980s Congress 

recognized that consumer viewing habits were sensitive and passed two laws to protect them. 

In 1984 Congress enacted the Cable Privacy Act. Then in 1988, following the disclosure of 

Judge Robert Bork's video rental history by his local video shop to a reporter-- some may 

remember this-- Congress enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act. These statutes were drafted 

to apply to the media providers of the day-- cable companies and video rental stores-- and they 

required consumer consent before any of these entities could control disclose personally 

identifiable viewing information. I hope panelists today will address the implications of these 

laws for smart TVs. 

So what is the role of the FTC here? One role is to highlight the benefits and risks of smart TVs, 

which is what we're doing here today. Another role for the FTC is to bring law enforcement 

actions against manufacturers of smart TVs that engage in unfair or deceptive practices. We've 

been watching this area since its infancy. And we've made clear that basic consumer protection 

principles apply, just as they do in other sectors. 

For example, back in 2001, a US Senator asked us, the FTC, to investigate the data practices of 

TiVo following a public report that raised concerns about the types and amount of information 

that TiVo boxes were collecting. In a letter to the senator, our then Chairman Pitofsky stated the 

collection of customers' TV viewing information in a manner that's personally identifiable could 

raise serious privacy concerns, especially if the practices are deceptively represented. The letter 

declined to take action, concluding that TiVo either received consent or collected and stored 

information in a manner that was not personally identifiable. 
More recently in a comment to the FCC, we highlighted the FTC's potential role in preventing 

unfair or deceptive privacy practices in the set-top box marketplace. The FCC had proposed a 

rule making-- I"m sure this crowd is very familiar with this-- to require cable and satellite TV 

providers to allow access to their content by third party set-top boxes. As part of its proposal, the 

FCC suggested requiring the third parties to commit to abide by the same statutory privacy 

requirements that applied to the cable and satellite companies. 

In our comment, FTC staff stated that if the set-top box companies made their commitments to 

the public, the FTC can enforce them under its authority to prevent deceptive practices just as we 

enforce other commitments companies make to consumers. 

Now let me turn to today's terrific program. This afternoon, we'll explore the benefits and risks 

as the internet and television continue to merge. And we've got a number of top flight panelists 

to help us do that. We'll start with a presentation about the marketplace from Justin Brookman, 

policy director of our Office of Technology Research and Investigations. 

Then our first panel will examine the current and potential benefits of advanced analytics in the 

smart TV ecosystem and efforts to provide transparency and choice. Finally the second panel 

will examine consumer protection concerns and how these issues are addressed by the current 

regulatory landscape. 

Before we turn to Justin's presentation, I've got another round of thank you's. I want to thank 

staff from the FTC's Privacy Division and Office of Technology Research and Investigations for 

their work in organizing today's hopefully amazing event. In particular, Kevin Moriarty, Megan 

Cox, Justin Brookman, Joe Calandrino, Aaron Alva, Tina Young, and Ian Klein. And I'd also 

like to thank all of the speakers who are here to share their insights. So thanks again for joining 

us. And enjoy the program. 

[APPLAUSE] 

JUSTIN BROOKMAN: Thank you very much, Jessica. Thanks to all you all for coming out 

today and for watching on the webcast. Joining me on stage today is going to be Ian Klein. Ian 

Klein is a grad student researcher at Stephens. He worked with OTEC this summer and spent a 

lot of his time in our tech lab looking specifically at smart TVs. 

So a quick summary of what I'm going to cover. First I'm going to generally describe what smart 

TVs are, what they can do, and some of the different types of entities in this ecosystem. Next, I'll 

tee up for discussion some of the consumer protection issues that we are specifically thinking 

about here at the FTC with regard to smart TVs, focusing primarily on privacy and security. That 

may thinking about a couple others as well. 

And then Ian is going to walk through some of the research that we did this summer and then on 

into the fall actually looking at smart devices in our lab for first, what they disclosed to 

consumers about data collection, what sort of controls and defaults were available. And then the 

data flows themselves will be actually observed in the lab about the TVs transmitting 

information back to manufacturers or to third parties. 
So what is a smart entertainment device? When we say smart TV or smart entertainment device--

and I'll probably use those terms interchangeably-- what we're generally talking about is 

something that allows a television to take advantage of internet connectivity, either to display 

internet content through the applications or to add features to broadcast television like easily 

sharing screen shots on social media. 

For at least a decade, consumers have been able to access streaming content over the web. 

YouTube was founded in 2005. Netflix started streaming video around the same time. At least in 

my experience, it was a gaming consoles there were some of the first devices that, at scale, let 

consumers access internet content on their TVs. I remember using mind Nintendo Wii to access 

Netflix in 2010. So these sort of things have been around for a while. 

So that the potential benefits of smart TVs, Jessica mentioned some of these. And I think a lot of 

times, they're pretty obvious. First and foremost, to get access to just an order of magnitude more 

content on a smart TV, and putting user generated content on open platforms like YouTube and 

the web. I think this democratizing effect is good not just for consumers, but also for artists who 

have more opportunities to reach an audience at a larger screen format. 

Many smart entertainment devices also are developing interactive features to allow viewers to 

engage more with what they're watching. It could be voting in online polls, learning more about 

actors in a particular scene if you're curious. If you're like me and you miss VH1 pop up video 

where they would occasionally insert little facts and snippets in the screen as you're watching, 

this could be a desirable thing. 

Personalized recommendations, if you watch and maybe rate things on a particular service, it can 

develop a knowledge base about you. It may offer recommendations for shows or movies you 

might not otherwise have known about. 

And then these last two are alternative options depending on how these platforms evolve. One, it 

may just be that people see fewer commercials on streaming applications. A lot of streaming 

services are paid today. There was a recent study saying that kids today actually watch 150 fewer 

hours of commercial, because of relying on streaming content instead of Saturday morning 

cartoons. 

Alternatively if the ecosystem does become more ad supported like the web, perhaps consumers 

might start paying less for content. Or maybe there will just be clearer options that consumers 

can make a choice about what sort of experience they'd prefer. 

So the focus of a lot of today's workshop is going to be on some of the new ways that smart 

devices can collect and leverage consumer data. So this is a very high level summary of some of 

the reasons that companies might want to take advantage of increased data collection. 

Some of them, I think, are fairly obvious, others maybe less so. Delivery is probably the most 

straightforward. When you ask a service to show you a movie, they're obviously going to be able 

log the fact that they showed it to you. Research and product improvement, a service might want 

to know how you're navigating a menu to see if it's intuitive for consumers. They might want to 
learn why the device might crash, all the name of making the service more efficient and work 

better. 

Measurement is a big potential reason for data collection. We're seeing new models for recording 

and reporting what content is being watched. This can be challenging as entertainment options 

get a lot more diverse. That's, I think, a good thing for consumers. But from a ratings 

perspective, when the offerings are more diffuse, it can be more challenging to get reliable 

ratings. 

Companies that engaged in targeted advertising online since the '90s, like Jessica was talking 

about, for a variety of reasons developed them so much slower for television advertising. For at 

least a decade, we've been reading press reports about bringing behavioral and other targeted ads 

to TV. We're starting to see some of that. I think we'll probably talk about that in some of the 

panels. And then cross device tracking, we'll talk about that a little more specifically later on. 

So how does tracking on smart devices work? To visualize this, I've constructed a smart 

entertainment den here. I'm going to walk through some of the various entities and talk about 

some of the data use cases, and some of the related privacy concerns as these devices get a little 

bit smarter. 

So we'll start with smart TVs. Now historically, TVs have just been a passive screen that just 

delivered the signal sent from your cable box. Now in addition to making more entertainment 

options available, smart TVs, in many cases, have the ability to actually monitor what you're 

watching on the screen in new ways and potentially report that back to the manufacturer or to 

others. 

So for example, the last several years, a number of smart TV and manufacturers have embedded 

chips that allow the TVs to engage in automated content recognition or ACR. And what they do 

and one way to do it is they can periodically take little snapshots of what is playing on the screen 

and then send it back to their servers or maybe to a vendor services for them to try to figure out 

what it is. And so in this way, manufacturers sometimes have the ability to log all the things 

you're watching on your TV, whether it's delivered by a cable box, an application, or even 

potentially a DVD or Blu-ray disk. 

Cable providers have long known what shows they delivered to the households. Increasingly 

they're looking for ways to leverage this and other data to more precisely target content and ads. 

Traditionally when a cable provider showed you an ad, it was the same to everyone in the 

geographic region. 

Now newer cable boxes have the ability to deliver specific ads targeted at a household by 

household basis. This is what people refer to as addressable TV. It's probably something we'll 

hear more about today. This could be based on cable viewing habits, could also be based on 

offline data. So cable providers tend to have names and addresses and emails with their 

customers. An advertiser could simply provide the cable provider with a list of who in the area 

they want to reach. And then the cable provider could deliver a specific addressable ad just to 

those households. 
Smart peripherals, so even if your TV is not particularly all that bright, you can sometimes 

access streaming content through other peripherals like smart Blu-ray player-- that's what I use--

a gaming console, or a dedicated streaming device like Roku in this image. And these really 

range in how much they facilitate data collection and use. Some, like my old Wii and I think like 

my current Blu-ray player, they don't really seem to be designed with that in mind. Others have a 

really fully developed ad framework, including standardized device advertising identifiers for a 

third party ad ecosystem. 

And then smart TVs and the peripherals then allow us to access a wide variety of applications. 

These are like websites and the web, or applications or apps on a mobile device. And these apps 

can use data for a variety of operational purposes. They also might embed advertising or 

analytics from third parties. And those companies may have the ability to generate user profiles, 

potentially across different applications, potentially across different platforms and different 

devices. 

And so here is an image based on the classic LUMAscape. These are some of the companies that 

may be engaged in data collection in the smart TV ecosystem. This was put together by Wide 

Orbit, which is a company that's trying to take some of the internet targeting techniques and 

applying them to television. There are other companies who have made similar graphics. I know 

TubeMogul has one as well. And I include it here to show you that this is not as intricate as the 

web space. The web LUMAscape has maybe an order of magnitude more companies. But there 

are a lot of ad tech companies are definitely interested in getting involved in this phase. 

Some of these companies may not just partner with applications. It could also be smart TV 

companies who have to rely on an ACR vendor or maybe an ad or analytics provider. It could 

also be cable companies too. Measurement companies like Rentrak are often embedded at the 

set-top box level. 

So what can be collected about users? One initial question is how do companies keep data on 

users over time? Do they create and use cookie files like you see on the web? Can they leverage 

persistent device identifiers, like you often see in the mobile operating systems? Do they have to 

rely on other things like IP address? Obviously things like viewing habits are one of the things 

that might be interesting to marketers and measurement firms. 

There might be other sensors on the device as well. So a lot of smart devices have cameras and 

microphones built in for video calling or for voice commands. There might not always be a 

commercial reason to access that data but access to those sensors could potentially constitute a 

sensitive security risk that vendors may have to consider. And we'll talk about security 

specifically a little bit later. 

A smart device might also be able to probe a local network to see what other devices are 

connected to it. This could be for cross device tracking. It could just be looking for Bluetooth 

speakers or some other plug and play device to make consumers set up a lot easier. 

Companies also might be interested in trying to tie what you do, what you watch on TV to 

offline data about you. So for example, someone could use a data broker service to look up 
demographic attributes associated with a name or email address, or even potentially an IP 

address in some cases, to try to maybe target ads that might be of more interest to a user or 

maybe just to assign that household a particular demographic profile for measurement purposes. 

They also might try to tie viewing data to offline data to see if an ad was effective. If I see an ad 

on TV and then go to the store two days later to buy that, the marketer might want to know that, 

to know that their ad was effective. 

And then offsetting all that, what sort of countervailing policies and procedures are in place to 

mitigate some of the privacy concerns around this new data collection? How identifiable are the 

data sets? Are there data deletion schedules in place? What sort of controls do users have to 

make affirmative choices about how their data is used? 

And so just like some companies are interested in correlating smart TV data with offline activity, 

companies are also interested in linking TV data to what you're doing on other devices. So some 

of y'all may have been here last year around this time for our crossed device tracking workshop, 

where we went into a lot more detail about how some of these things work. 

I think it's fair to say that this is certainly a focus of a lot of ad tech companies now that user 

activity is fragmented over more and more devices. Some are certainly very intuitive, like the 

example that Jessica gave about watching a Netflix device across different devices and picking 

up where you left off. There's also a lot of potential third party use cases. 

Re-targeting is something that we've seen a lot online over the past few years. If you abandon a 

product in a check out online shopping cart, you might see that product following you around on 

the web in ads the next few days. Companies are looking to find ways to incorporate that sort of 

targeting into smart devices. Purchase attribution, similar to merging offline data, if you see an 

ad on your TV and later by it on one of your other devices, people might want to know that. And 

then just linking behavior across devices can just give a broader, more holistic perspective into 

the user. 

There are a few different ways this can be done. We're not going to get into them in any great 

detail. The methods people generally refer to are probabilistic or deterministic. Probabilistic is 

based on similar attributes that devices share, if they maybe share the same local network or 

location. There have been industry reports of smart TV apps that are serving ads to users based 

on the browsing behavior on another computer sharing the same IP address. Alternatively this 

can be done deterministically, if you log into two different devices using the same email or login 

credential. 

So I think one fundamental question that Jessica started to raise was how do we think about 

consumer expectations for smart TV privacy? The ability to automatedly monitor activity is 

relatively new. Before, TVs just passively transmitted information, kind of like a computer 

monitor does. If this is changing, how does that need to be messaged to consumers? Is it 

sufficient to put information in a privacy policy? Should it be some sort of standalone notice or 

permission? 
Online you've seen ad tech companies using the ad choices icon to signal that an ad may be 

targeted. How could something like that work on a TV where there's not really controls set up to 

allow people to interact with logos online? And then how the controls structured? Are there 

straightforward ways to control data sharing, both at the device level and then the application 

level? What are the defaults? And then how should those controls apply across different devices 

and platforms? 

So security, so like with a lot of other internet of things devices, security is an incredibly 

important issue for smart TVs. Think about, do smart devices regularly get firmware updates to 

account for new threats? How can we make sure that gets done? How frequently are devices 

updated? And for how long after sale should a consumer reasonably expect to get security 

updates? 

TVs can last for a pretty long-- apologies. TVs can last for a long time. My last TV was one of 

those CRTs. I had it for 15 years. My flat screen monitor I've had for about 10 years too. can we 

reasonably expect to retain that longevity of consumer devices when there's software and 

connectivity and security involved? 

There's also a lot of different kind of threats to account for. An attacker could try to intercept 

communications with a device. An attacker could try to exploit a vulnerability to attack a 

network and get access to maybe other devices that are attached to that network. A smart device 

to be used as part of a distributed denial of service attack, as was in the news this fall with DDOS 

attacks through IOT devices on security researcher Brian Krebs and the Dyne domain name 

service. 

This is obviously an area where the FTC has done a tremendous amount of work with several 

dozen data security cases. Security is a major focus of our 2015 internet of things report. And 

last summer we announced that we are doing a study with the FCC on how security updates get 

developed and deployed for smartphones. So I think this will continue to be an important issue 

here as well. 

And then another support question is how long should consumers expect that they will be able to 

access applications through their smart device? So this is actually a picture of my own smart Bluray that I use to access things like Netflix and Amazon. And it's a pretty old device. But you see 

that some of the apps in the upper left corner are just grayed out. There used to be things there 

when I bought the device. I remember YouTube was one. I can't even remember what other one 

was. 

But at some point, because the API has changed or because the tech requirements changed, or 

someone stopped supporting Flash or something else-- I don't know-- I stopped being able to 

access those services. In some ways maybe this is more predictable, because TV operating 

systems are pretty fluid right now. They're not as standardized as certainly the web or mobile 

operating systems. But I think it's important to think about what expectations and maybe 

obligations should be to continue to make apps supported like the apps that are advertised on the 

box that you buy over time for devices that could potentially last for a while. 
This is another area where the FTC has a continuing interest. We recently sent a closing letter to 

Revolve, a smart device manufacturer, that sold a smart home hub to consumers. Then 18 

months later, after its last sale, they shut off server support for the hub. So it just didn't work 

anymore. In that case, Revolve offered a complete refund to anyone who had bought the product. 

We declined bring an action in that case. But I think this is going to be a real important challenge 

for how connected devices in the future and for how consumers expect them to last. 

So just a couple of words about the legal framework here, some the laws that apply. Section Five 

of the Federal Trade Commission Act, prohibition on deceptive and unfair practices, it's the core 

statute that we work with in the Bureau of Consumer Protection. It's been applied to privacy, 

security, support substantiation, a whole range of issues. 

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act may apply, especially given that it's easier to 

collect personal information and to collect persistent device identifiers. And obviously a lot of 

television content is aimed directly at children. Cable Privacy Act, Communications Act, civic 

rules for cable providers and IFPs in the ecosystem. Jessica mentioned the Video Privacy 

Protection Act passed in the 1980s, before internet streaming was really a thing. We're seeing a 

lot of emerging and sometimes contradictory case law about how that should apply to these sorts 

of services. 

And then ECPA and the Wiretap Acts. You have all these different entities in the ecosystem that 

have the technical ability to monitor a lot of communications. Are all those entities always 

entitled to the view every transmission? Or might it be unauthorized in some situations? And 

with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ian to discuss some of the things that we saw in the lab 

when we looked at the smart devices. 

IAN KLEIN: Thank you, Justin. And thank you to the Federal Trade Commission's Office of 

Technology Research and Investigation for letting me do research with you this past summer. I 

had a great time. 

And so for all of you guys who don't know, basically I looked at three different smart TVs in our 

lab. And what we wanted to look at was what information was made available to the consumers 

about privacy and how it was displayed to them. And also to look at what actual data flows were 

available and were coming off of the device, like internet traffic and things of the like. And we 

also wanted to see what kind of controls the consumer had over these types of data collection. 

So with transparency and control, we saw that the privacy policies that these TVs-- they all 

reserved extensive rights to collect information about the television viewing habits of the user, 

including for the purpose of delivering targeted ads and sharing information with third parties. 

When setting up each TV, the default settings were in favor of that type of data collection and 

usage. But the way that the TV's policies were displayed to the user varied. 

One of the TVs had a dedicated screen during set up to display the specific behavior. One had it 

mentioned in the process, albeit the user had to scroll pretty far down to actually see the privacy 

policy. And for one of them, it was mentioned in the privacy policy or in the settings. But you 

had to go there specifically to see it. 
Now they all offered different controls to limit the device level data collection and targeting. But 

they didn't have a mechanism like limit ad tracking or controlling data for controlling data 

sharing from third party apps to their respective third parties. 

Now this third party data sharing is not as widespread as it is on the web or through a mobile 

device. But there was some third party data sharing that we were able to see. When we set up the 

TVs in our lab, we used Wireshark to monitor the internet traffic to see what was going on from 

the TV under various different conditions. 

For example, when we decided to watch some DirecTV on the televisions, we didn't really see 

any calls to third parties to their servers at all through Wireshark. But for two of the three TVs, 

we did see regular communications back and forth to and from a manufacturer's server, which 

could potentially be for something like content recognition, which Justin talked about previously. 

It could have been for something else, some sort of cloud based function. 

The other TV, the one that didn't do that, despite reserving the right to monitor viewing behavior 

we didn't see any evidence of this type of data collection being sent back and forth to and from 

the manufacturer of the TV. It is possible that this data could have been batched or sent after the 

test that we conducted. Or it was sent to a proxy that we just didn't detect. But nothing that we 

saw indicated that they were sending anything to the manufacturer themselves. 

Now it is also possible that once data was sent to the manufacturer that the manufacturer 

themselves could be sending things to the third party. But there's obviously no way for us to 

detect that, since we don't have access to their servers. And all three of them did offer somewhat 

controls for data collection. And when the data collection controls were on, there was pretty 

much-- two of them just completely cut off regular communication to the manufacturers 

themselves. And for one of the other ones, it was just dramatically reduced. 

So if you look at this graph of our findings, as you can see the left side, the y-axis is packets per 

second of internet traffic. And then the x-axis is over time in seconds over 40 minutes. So this is 

actually Wireshark capture from one of the TVs specifically. 

And there's two different colors there. There's red and there's blue. The red packets are strictly to 

a server that has the name ACR, which we think is likely that it could stand for Active Content 

Recognition or Automated Content Recognition. And then the blue packets are all other traffic 

out and to that TV specifically. 

So as you can see, every 60 seconds, there's these little bumps. And then when you would do 

something drastic like turning on the TV or pausing a DVD or switching the input of the TV, 

there would be bigger spikes. And if you look, the red outweighs the blue completely. And the 

ACR server, it looks like, was getting more traffic than anything else. 

Now this chart was from the summer. And interestingly enough, when we reran these tests last 

month, we no longer saw communications to that specific domain name that had ACR in its 

name. Although there was still some traffic to the manufacturer, it was certainly less regular. It is 
possible that they renamed the server or found a more efficient way to do content recognition. Or 

they could have just stopped doing ACR altogether. 

So we did see from the smart TV apps embedding communication with the third party ad 

companies. But it was generally a lot less traffic than you would typically see with web or 

mobile applications, like I said earlier. For example, one of the popular applications connected to 

27 third party applications on the web, four on mobile and none on the TV. 

So we've only looked at a handful so far. So there's only a couple of outliers that we saw. But 

there was one outlier that did connect to more third party services on the TV than on web or 

mobile. But for the most part, it seemed like there was less sharing directly from the TV 

applications. It is possible that there will be additional sharing down the line that we just couldn't 

see. But there's definitely less as of now. 

As mentioned, none of the TVs we looked at had platform level controls to limit how apps share 

data with third parties like you can see on mobile devices. And most of the traffic we saw for the 

apps to and from third parties was completely encrypted. 

Some of the smaller third parties, we did have questions about whether the encryption was

sufficiently up to date. But it is possible that they were commentating for controls that we just 

couldn't evaluate. Also it was interesting that a lot of the applications that we looked at were 

using cookies to keep state on a user instead of device identifiers. This is possibly because of the 

operating system environment for smart TVs might be more diffuse. Or there's less of a 

standardization on these operating systems, which could be the reason for this. So I'm going to 

hand it back to Justin, who's going to talk about the future of this technology. 

JUSTIN BROOKMAN: So I think from, given what we've seen, we're still in relatively early 

days for some of these smart TV platforms. Obviously data collection and use might get more 

web-like, if the content then becomes more web-like. I think it'll be interesting to see how this 

market continues to develop, what sort of controls we'd be able to expect. What sort of selfregulatory structures might begin to evolve? And how will consumer expectations in 

understanding evolve as well, and whether we'll start to see maybe some pushback like we've 

seen in the web ad space, in order to block some kind of tracking. 

So with that, we're a little bit over time. So I will now invite our first panel to come to the stage. 

Kevin and first panel, come on up. And thank you very much for your time. 

[APPLAUSE] 

KEVIN MORIARTY: Thank you. Thanks to Justin and Ian for that. There you are, right there. 

Thank you for that presentation. That was great guys. Welcome to the first panel of the day, New 

Frontiers in Media Measurement and Targeting. In this panel, we're going to talk about what's 

new in measurement, analytics, and ad targeting. We'll also talk about the challenges of 

transparency and notice in this area and talk about some preliminary self-regulatory efforts. 
So I have a few questions that I'm going to ask to get the conversation going. As I've mentioned 

before, we are planning to take questions from the audience. So you can tweet at us, 

#smartTVFTC. And also Matt Smith is going to be patrolling the audience during the panel. And 

he has blank comment cards. You can fill them out with questions. Hand them back to Matt. And 

Matt will make sure that I get them for the end of the panel. And we'll try to ask some audience 

inspired questions. 

So we are very excited to have a great panel of experts to weigh in on these issues. We're very, I 

think, lucky to have the actual folks that are thinking about these issues, that are doing the data 

collection, that are doing the using consumer data. And we are truly grateful that you guys have 

taken the time to come to the FTC to speak about your work. 

So I want to start, maybe we can just start with Mark at the end and have each of you introduce 

yourselves and talk about how your work relates to this area. 

MARK RISIS: Thanks Kevin. Mark Risis, up until November, I was head of strategy and 

business development for TiVo research, which is a subsidiary of TiVo that specialized in 

working with set-top box data and using a set-top box data and first and third party data to 

improve the way television advertising is planned, bought, and measured. And I spent a total of 

eight years at TiVo. So a lot of that was spent on interactive television and advertising and other 

dimensions. But the last three was specifically focused on the data side. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Hello everyone. My name is Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of Samba 

TV. We're a company headquartered in San Francisco with about 180 employees across five 

states of the US and four countries outside the US. 

Our company is a software company. We develop applications for smart TV that provides 

content, content recommendations, content recognition. We're supported by advertising. We 

provide the service free to the consumer. Excited to share more details about what we do, both 

for consumers as well as for businesses. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: Hi my name is Shaq Katikala. I'm privacy counsel and data scientist at 

NAI. We're a self-regulatory group. And we focus on privacy and online advertising. Our 

primary role is to create and enforce codes of conduct that protect consumers' privacy. We're 

focused on third parties, so the pipes in the ecosystem and interest based advertising. And we, in 

the past year, we've been focusing on smart TVs more and more. And we started a working 

group about half a year ago. So I'm relatively new to this space. But I've been working with a lot 

of big names in the industry. 

We've been discussing how to tackle a lot of the privacy issues from compliance standpoint and 

from self-regulatory guidance point of view. So I hope to provide you with some of my insights 

that I've gained from a diverse group of players in the industry. 

JANE CLARKE: Great, I'm Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director of the Coalition for 

Innovated Media Measurement, or CIMM, as we call it. CIMM is a coalition of buyers and 
sellers of advertising media, including all the broadcast and cable networks, all the big media 

buying holding companies, and the Association of National Advertisers. 

We have two sides to our mission. So one is to basically push along innovation and speed the 

pace of innovation through proof of concept pilot tests, through RFPs, in the area of cross media 

measurements. So being able to add up, particularly for video, the total size of an audience 

unduplicated across all platforms. Because the audience measurement is not only how content 

providers figure out what content to make for consumers, but how their rates for advertising are 

set, depending on how many people saw an ad. 

And the second area is bringing more granular, or should I say census-based measurement to 

television. So we can talk a little bit more about the way that television has been measured up 

until now. But CIMM is really pushing for more census-based measurement to be more fully 

representative of everyone across the country. 

JOSH CHASIN: Hi, my name is Josh Chasin. I'm a Chief Research officer at comScore. I've 

been a comScore almost 10 years. You probably know the name comScore as the digital 

information/audience measurement source. 

Earlier in the year, comScore and Rentrak integrated, became one company. Rentrak was 

mentioned. Justin mentioned Rentrak earlier in his presentation. Rentrak was in the business of 

TV audience measurement, the ratings, generally based on collecting and projecting audience 

estimates from set-top box data. The Rentrak brand name has essentially been retired. So now 

the Rentrak TV measurement is comScore TV. So I'm a chief research officer of comScore, 

which includes both comScore and what used to be known as Rentrak. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: All right, well thank you again for being here today. And I thought it 

might be helpful. We got a bit of an overview from Justin, which was great. But I thought it 

would be useful to have the folks here on the panel talk about what are the new analytics that we 

have. And Josh, you're from Rentrak. And comScore's integrated into set-top boxes. And 

Ashwin, your ACR technology's integrated into smart TVs. So I thought the two of you could 

give us that overview of the scope of the data that's being collected and the type of data that's 

being collected. Josh do you want to start? 

JOSH CHASIN: Sure, just going to write down scope and type so I remember it. So once upon a 

time, the TV landscape was simple. There were three networks. And we all had the Nielsen 

ratings, which told us how many people were watching one of three networks. And it was 

simple. 

And you could do a really good job of creating the ratings, measuring audience, describing the 

audience in terms of age and gender, which was all that you needed to do to facilitate the 

commerce that was necessary, with a sample, a panel, a group of people impaneled with meters 

on their sets to tell us how many people were watching. But as with all things, digital technology 

tends to fragment TV viewing. 
I remember in the '90s, we heard talk about the 500 channel environment. Now 500 channels 

sings charmingly quaint. So you can no longer measure television audiences robustly or 

accurately with a sample or with a panel of people. 

So what I often say in the audience measurement business is that technology takes with one hand 

and gives the other. So at the same time, the technology has led to fragmentation of platforms 

and fragmentation of content sources. It has also created tools that facilitate measurement. 

So Jane talked about census assist. So on the digital side in internet measurement, publishers tag 

for comScore. And that lets us collect a census view of all the activity at that publisher's website. 

If I visit cnn.com, which tags for us, whether I visit it from my phone or my tablet or my 

computer, that visit will send a ping to comScore's server. So we get a census of activity at the 

site. 

In the television business, set-top box data and now increasingly smart TV data has become the 

census version or the census style version. What I've often said is that if you were going to 

zerobase, a TV measurement service today, and say how can I measure and report on television 

audiences today with no legacy. In other words, I'm not going to be burdened by the conventions 

of industry that have come before. Without question, you would begin that system with these 

census style assets, with a MVPD or cable satellite operator set-top box data, and increasingly 

with smart TV data. 

At comScore, formerly Rentrak, we use set-top box data from about 22 million households 

around the country to create television audience ratings in each of the 210 VMAs. And then the 

210 VMAs are additive. So we report on the total US by summing up the audiences in the 

individual markets. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: Thank you. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: I guess I thought it was a very, very good introduction. The types of things 

that we see looking forward for the audience measurement business predicates on the idea that 

samples are showing signs of weakness. Advertisers are finding it challenging to address an 

audience which is no longer consuming media the same way that they have in the past. And a lot 

of the devices that we have available to us for consumption are decidedly difficult to measure 

within a pound. 

For example we've observed that the audience for a prime time TV show that's watching the 

show outside of the television on a mobile device, on a tablet, could be as high as 25% for a 

popular prime time show. Because the broadcasters made a mobile app or website available with 

their shows or might have licensed that show to a third party for consumption. 

The audience might not be watching it live. In fact, most of the audience isn't watching it live. 

And the industry is built on a standard of consumption within a window of time. The audience 

for that show might be consuming that show for months after the broadcast. Also difficult for 

legacy measurement approaches to capture. 
And then it's really no secret that people really aren't paying attention to commercials that much 

anymore. While you're watching commercials, you've got the ability to do other things. You're 

multitasking. You're checking email. You're looking at the hashtag #smartTVFTC to see what 

people are saying about what's going on. That sort of division in your attention presents a lot of 

challenges to advertisers. 

And so one of the most compelling things that our clients say about the analytics that Samba TV 

provides is that we're trying to describe the audience much more holistically. We're much more 

content centric and not governed by legacy arbitrary lines in the sand on when someone can be 

consuming something for the broadcaster to get credit for it. 

JANE CLARKE: And just to also give a little bit of color to this discussion with a couple of 

examples. So on the set-top box side-- and these data have been in the market for a little while 

now with the operators starting to use it themselves back in the '80s. But it wasn't until really in 

the last 10 to 20 years that the technology has been upgraded. So more and more of them can do 

this. 

But for instance in the New York market, extremely diverse, the panel that's operated for the 

Nielsen television measurement that's the currency by which all the advertising is bought and 

sold and all the content is measured, it has about 1,000 people in the New York market, I think. 

This is a market with like--

JOSH CHASIN: Households, not people. 

JANE CLARKE: Yes households, 1,000 households. And then this is a market with just 8 

million people in the five Boroughs of New York and 20 million in the surrounding area. So 

basically the two providers the set-top box, the cable providers put their data together in the 

market and standardized the way they did it. And this is not an easy task, also I should say. And 

they discovered that over a third of the viewing was to non-English language channels not 

measured by Nielsen. 

And so you can really see the implications here for how we really don't understand the diversity 

of what's happening in terms of viewing across the country and the kinds of content and the 

kinds of advertising that could be developed that's not being developed, because it can't be 

measured. And people don't know about it. So Cablevision, one of these providers, has 400 

channels. And 160 of them are measured by Nielsen. So you really start to see why this more 

census based measurement is really critical in terms of getting an accurate representative picture 

of really what Americans are viewing. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: Ashwin, can you just give us a little more detail on how-- Samba's 

obviously not selling televisions. So how do people end up with Samba software in their house? 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Yeah, good question. So we, as I said before, we're a software company. We 

license our software to hardware companies who bundle the software with the hardware and sell 

that as a bundled product into the marketplace. Our software resides on that television latent until 

the TV is plugged in, connected to the internet, at which point consumers can activate it. It's not 
activated until a specific action of the consumer to opt in to turning Samba on. At which point, 

we can provide recommendations to the consumer based on past viewing behavior. 

That's our path to market. It is bundled with nine different brands of TV manufacturers. Brands 

like Sharp and Toshiba are brands that are sold in the US. But they're also sold in Europe. 

They're sold in Asia, South America. We've seen traffic from many different countries. 

Our handling of data is informed mostly by European law, where there's fairly clear rules of the 

game. And we've done a lot of work to make sure that we believe we're in compliance with 

European data privacy rules. And that's been helpful, because it's informed even our policy here 

in the United States. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So is the nature of how the software works to identify what's on, does that 

address the kind of problem that Jane just mentioned, which is the only 160 channels versus 400 

available? 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Yeah, it absolutely does. Because we're able to recognize content based on 

its visual characteristics, we can actually increase the amount of content that we can recognize, 

simply by increasing the size of our database of what we can recognize. Currently we're focused 

on the most popular things on television. But we could add. For us, that would be the top several 

hundred channels in the US. But in total, we were approaching 1,000 channels, because we do 

this in other countries as well. 

On demand programming are things that we try to recognize the most popular shows, things that 

may have been off the air, things like Friends, which are those titles that are perennially popular 

even years after broadcast. We would like to be able to describe that audience for both consumer 

recommendations, but also for the benefit of the media industry that is measuring that audience 

for sponsorship. 

JANE CLARKE: And the advantage of the smart TV did is since they see everything that hits 

the screen, as long as it's in their reference database, they can measure Netflix. They can measure 

anything on an [INAUDIBLE]. So if it's a video game, as well as linear television. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So we started to get into this a little bit, but comparing what this world of 

TV analytics to the traditional age, gender, Nielsen panel approach. I was wondering if we can 

get a perspective from Mark on what is possible with this approach that wasn't possible before. 

MARK RISIS: Sure Kevin. Just a quick aside, though. The fragmentation that the rest of the 

panel is referencing and certainly the presenters before really pointed to smart TV and streaming 

content. But I would say that the fragmentation happened a decade before the launch of 

streaming apps, which was about 2007, with the advent of the DVR. The ability to time shift 

television, record a program while watching another program, really is the point at which 

simultaneously the viewers became empowered and the programmers and distributors began to 

rapidly expand the options available, because there is now a mechanism for consumers to 

consume more. 
And so I think that's the point where all the things that we're talking about really started to come 

to fruition. And the byproduct or nice coincidence with DVR technology is the devices had to be 

smarter than the traditional cable boxes. And so there was a duality that the set-top boxes start to 

get smarter and more powerful, faster chips, and the ability to process more data. And that 

opened the opportunity to do more with that data. 

And the use cases, specifically I'm going to speak to the advertiser perspective, the sellers of 

television media and the buyers of television media, as Jane said, the old Nielsen panel and the 

measurement of an audience based on how many people watch, worked for a long time. But with 

the improvement in measurement and targeting in digital media, certainly internet, there's 

massive data sets being utilized every fraction of a second to track where consumers go, what 

they do on sites or mobile devices, project the intent of the consumers and try to predict what ads 

should be served to them. 

It just makes what happens on television pale in comparison to a staggering degree. And the gap 

simply can't be sustained, given the fragmentation and the decline in ratings. So there is a need to 

improve how television-- linear television-- its simpler and smart TV OTT apps because of the 

infrastructure and certainly video on demand. But there's a need to improve how television is 

planned, which programs are better for advertisers, given what they're experiencing in other 

digital channels. 

So some of the things that we looked into is can we connect what viewers tend to view. And just 

an aside, everything is done in a privacy compliant manner. And there is a complete separation 

between the individual identity and the viewing behavior. And the two shall never meet, if you 

will. 

And we connect-- or TiVo connected-- viewing behavior from TiVo devices and devices from 

several cable companies with other data sets, such as what products certain consumers 

purchased, what locations they visited with geolocation data, what they purchased through their 

credit cards through certain credit card aggregators. And we were able to utilize this information 

to help sellers of media look at their inventory through a lens that's much closer to the objectives 

that advertisers truly have with their media investment. 

Advertisers, at the end of the day, are interested in selling more of their products. They're not 

really interested in reaching numbers of viewers. It's based on the return on their investment. 

And so the ability for sellers of media to now express their inventory, which is under constant 

duress through ratings decline and fragmentation, in a much more nimble and much more 

relevant way really helps stabilize the market. 

And the ability for advertisers to look at their media investment through the lens of the actual 

consumers that they want to go after, as opposed to a proxy based on age, sex, demographic or a 

number of people that watch, is a very powerful and additive force to the market. It aligns well 

with what was said earlier, as far as aiming towards a census like nature of measurement. And 

that really can only be accomplished if you're, from the get go, using a large set of viewership 

data as a starting point. 
Can I amplify? 

KEVIN MORIARTY: Please. 

JOSH CHASIN: So I want to build on Mark, what Mark's saying. So traditionally television is 

planned and bought and sold based on age, sex demography, women 25 to 54. And again in the 

'60s, when you had three networks to choose from and maybe five stations in a local market, that 

was great. 

So my premise going in is that more money in television is good for consumers. Because 

somebody's got to pay for all these programs. And who better than advertisers? So what happens 

is there's clearly a migration in the television business away from age and gender demography 

and towards what we call advanced targeting or advanced demographics, which are things like 

Mark is talking about, purchase preferences. 

In election season, you see that advertising is targeted based on voting. So what happens is a 

program-- so before, here's a program with this much audience and a program with this much 

audience. This program has very little value compared to this program because of the sheer 

number of eyeballs. And you cut you cut it from persons two plus to women 25, 54. But they're 

still going to have roughly the same ratio. 

But what happens is all of a sudden, a piece of inventory, one impression, one ad served to one 

box or one household has different value to different advertisers. If the women 25 to 54 in this 

small audience, if 80% of them own foreign cars and half of that 80% are going to buy a new 

vehicle in the next six weeks, all of a sudden they're extremely valuable to marketers who are 

selling foreign cars. 

So the more we understand the more we understand about consumers, the more demand there is 

to reach them. You're stimulating demand for the advertising. Information facilitates commerce. 

I think that's a really important point. The more information we have about audiences, the more 

demand is created to reach those audiences. So we bring more information. And more advertisers 

are now competing. And the value of that audience can be articulated in many more ways than 

just raw size and age and gender. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: If I can build on that, so from a consumer's perspective, there's a study by 

someone named Catherine Tucker, who looked at optimizing advertising and found that there's 

essentially two mutually exclusive ways to optimize click through rates. One of them is to serve 

obtrusive ads. This is mutually exclusive. So either go serve as many ads as you can. Just be 

dumb about it. You're just caring about the sheer numbers. So non-standard ad formats, annoying 

sounds that play when the ad loads, that's one strategy. 

The other is to make the ad relevant. So there you can have standard ad formats, side of the page, 

top of the page. And the more information you know about the consumer, the more value you get 

from that ad. So in that sense, you have a battle between do you make ads annoying? Or do you 

make them more relevant? And I think consumers, more often than not, would choose the latter, 

just speaking on the consumer side. 
JANE CLARKE: Yeah, and I think we'll get into this in a little bit, Kevin. But I just wanted to

point out something really important that Mark said about this is all being done in a privacy 

compliant manner, obviously. So the industry is very aware of not doing this in a way where PII 

is separate from segmented and from information that can be used to segment consumers into 

meaningful groupings for advertisers. 

So on the cable operators side, they have one file that has your name and your address and your 

billing information. And they use that for-- that's all the PII. The viewing information is in 

another file. And that's the file that goes to Rentrak, for instance. There's an ID for the household 

that can be used behind these privacy compliant firewalls, if you want to call it, with third party 

companies that can match those IDs against each other and append this information that can be 

used. 

But we're talking about data that's, really, then anonymized, aggregated, grouped together in 

meaningful groupings for advertisers. So industry is trying to do it in the way where they really, 

in a self-regulatory way, feel that they are not violating privacy concerns and trying to make the 

advertising more relevant. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So this gets to a question that I was watching Josh after an IAB comScore 

event. And it was a discussion of what they had discussed at the town hall. And you were having 

an interesting discussion, where you observed that at the town hall, they had discussed had more 

money in digital ad buying is focusing on age and gender, where television is going rapidly in 

the other direction to try to go away from that and trying to get into how digital has been doing 

ad buying. 

And I'm wondering as people who are collecting the data and selling the data, how do you 

distinguish between more information and better information? And is there-- I guess the follow 

up question is, is there a bias for just always wanting more information with the expectation that 

you'd be able to get something out of it that maybe you don't have now, without considering the 

implications of collecting all that information? I don't know if you want to handle that or anyone. 

That's to anyone. 

JOSH CHASIN: I can certainly address it. I'll speak to it. I'm sure other people want to speak to 

it as well. There's a bunch of stuff in there. So A, I do think it's ironic that at the same time that 

TV is moving past the age, gender to advanced demography, digital is moving from advanced 

demography to age, gender. 

Part of that is because in the digital space, publishers are trying to go after TV money. And there 

may be a year and a half or a three year lag year, because they're trying to go after TV money. 

And they see that TV money is spent on age and gender. So they think they ought to do that, too 

so they can study [INAUDIBLE] that spend. So if they keep going after the TV money, pretty 

soon they'll hit on the fact that they should do what they were doing all along, which was selling 

off advanced demography. But they're probably 18 months behind that. 

I'll answer the second part of your question by sharing something that I said recently on a panel 

also, which is I worked at Arbitron in the '80s, TV and radio ratings. And when I was at Arbitron 
in the '80s, we used the term data as a disparagement. When we talked about something-- when 

we said that's just data, that was an insult. We looked at our job as to turn data into insight, data 

into information, information into insight, and then to have that insight drive action. 

So I do think there is a bias. Quite frankly-- and I'll see what you guys think. I do think there's a 

bias towards the direction of data. and we talk so much about big data that we lose sight of the 

question of good data. So I'm constantly urging people not to get-- yeah, it's great to have big 

data sets. But don't think that you can remove human beings and thinking and strategy from the 

equation and just let the algorithms do your job and punch out early and have a beverage. The 

data is a tool. And let's make sure that we're interested in good data, not just big data. 

MARK RISIS: I want to build on that, because I remember some months ago being at an event 

for a large data management platform. And this is a data management platforms are companies 

that aggregate data from different first and third party sources and combine them together to 

make it easy for primarily digital buyers and sellers to transact. And they underscored that they 

have a serious quality problem with their data. That is, they have massive amounts of it. But they 

don't know how much of it is valid and how much of it is real. 

And what happens when you use bad data, no matter how good your algorithm is, you're 

throwing rocks at a wall. And it makes no difference. And so I think one of the trends affecting 

this embrace of more traditional demography on the digital side is the quality and stability of it. 

Stability is one of the key attributes that advertisers seek for their investment. These are a large 

Fortune 500 companies that can't function in environments that are unstable and lack quality and 

lack transparency. 

And so I think the digital ecosystem is embracing something that has proven long ago that 

demography works. Demography is stable. And I think it's a narrowing of the gap and that TV 

has for too long neglected the advanced demography. And at the same time, digital was too fast 

because of the underlying infrastructure that allowed it to just grab everything under the sun 

without much regard for, what does this really mean. And is it even useful to layer on 20 data 

sets for a single campaign? What does it actually get you when it comes to the ROI for your 

dollars? And I think a lot of folks are finding out that more data doesn't mean more dollars spent 

by consumers. It just means more data. 

JANE CLARKE: CIMM's all about accuracy, transparency. There's a lot of-- the regulatory 

bodies are concerned about what the consumers know. But also just the buyers and sellers of all 

these services are very concerned amongst themselves about the accuracy, the transparency, the 

data quality issues. And also I should say that the overall picture here is as all media are starting 

to be bought more in an integrated way, the industry is searching for these common networks 

and these common measurement tools that can be used across media. 

So there's a lot of-- CIMM plays in this area. And there's a lot of work being done to 

standardized the metrics and standardize the measurement, because it's all grown up in these 

silos. And so that's another reason why digital is looking to how television's measuring. And 

television's looking to how digital is measured. 
Because an advertiser comes in, and they have an integrated campaign. They want to run across 

all media. And they want to basically get a number for, did I reach my target audience across all 

this in an unduplicated way? And then what happened? What was the result? So putting all that 

together is quite a complex task and involves a lot of issues related to data quality, data 

comparability, comparable measurement, comparable metrics. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Maybe I'll add just to your question, Kevin. As the panel was set up, before 

we came on stage, the lines between television and digital, between TV and other devices is 

getting very blurry. You may start the experience on one device and continue it on a different 

device. The media industry has actually a pretty significant gap between digital and television. 

That exists within the media production and distribution business. It exists in the agency and 

sponsorship community. Teams are different. Measurement is different. And that line is quite 

distinct. 

We think that needs to change. And what I think you may have read into Josh's statements earlier 

was that there's a bit of envy. The digital players want the magnitude of media and advertising 

that's happening on television. Television is still primarily how the world is informed and how 

it's entertained and, by virtue of that, gets maybe double the amount of sponsorship dollars, if 

you exclude search compared to digital in the US and even more in other countries. 

And then the digital guys want to get a piece of that. But the TV guys now see digital coming. 

And they look at search. And they look at social and different forms of sponsorship online. And 

they see the way that digital platforms sell advertising. They sell it on a performance basis. They 

say, you only have to pay for what converts into traffic for your website or what converts into 

business for your product. And by virtue of that, their revenues are growing really fast. 

And so what I think the TV guys want to do is be able to position their TV advertising much 

more accurately. They want to be able to position it on an ROI basis so that advertisers feel like 

TV is a good investment and that they want to be able to justify the magnitude of those dollars. 

JANE CLARKE: Which gets to the census data, because if you can link these data across all 

platforms and you can do it in a privacy compliant manner that works for everybody and 

provides a good experience for everyone, because obviously consumer experience is huge here. 

These media companies and these advertisers want to keep good connections with their 

consumers. So they obviously, the consumer experience is a major aspect of this. 

But if you can do all of that, the way the advertisers look at it, they would love to be able to plan 

their media buy their media, and evaluate their return on their investment using the same data set 

across all platforms. It's not there yet. There's issues. But that's what they would love to see. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So just to shift gears a little bit, we'll accept the premise that it's good for 

consumers to have more efficient allocation of ad dollars. What else do consumers get out of this 

increase in the amount of data that's being collected from smart TVs and set-top boxes? And this 

is really a question for anyone to answer. 
ASHWIN NAVIN: Do we have any Arrested Development fans in the audience? A handful. 

Mindy Project? These are shows that were canceled from broadcast television and picked up by 

companies that had better data, Mindy Project picked up by Hulu and Arrested Development by 

Netflix. And that's simply because they're looking at the content. They're looking at the 

popularity of those shows across a broader set of end points, devices, and saying, well, maybe 

the Nielsen ratings were low. But we think that there's a real business in having those shows. 

That's a clear benefit to the consumer. If there is better data, we'd have better programming, 

better investment, more conviction behind that investment. Speaking to our heritage as an app 

developer, what we decide to show first in the list of search results on a TV interface or what we 

show first in a gallery of content that you can play is entirely dependent on the quality of our 

data to recommend you know shows that we think you might like. 

And the most stressful-- it's funny. I appreciate Josh's statement that I remember when I was a 

kid, you could find all the content on television by twisting a knob on your TV. It was all 

broadcast or VHF UHF. And today we've gone past scrolling through 500 channels. And now we 

have these search boxes. And I think that's the most stressful thing is having to search with your 

thumb. It's actually quite a terrible experience. 

JANE CLARKE: Or type it in. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Typing with your thumb, it's quite annoying. And so with data, you can start 

to get past that. You can start to surface things that matter to people much quicker with less 

intervention through these clunky interfaces. 

MARK RISIS: The original use of data that TiVo had from its inception was actually to inform 

TiVo suggestions. So all the hard drive space on the TiVo boxes that wasn't utilized by 

recording's that the consumer set, the TiVo device would actually record things that it thought 

that the consumer would enjoy. And to many people's surprises, they found things that they 

didn't expect and very much enjoyed discovering and then become loyal fans of because of the 

data that was used to analyze the recording pattern that folks set. 

So it was immediately a massive consumer benefit that had helped navigate this increasing mass 

of choice, without the consumer having to scroll through everything and read TV Guide or its 

successors and figure out what it is. It helped them figure out how to navigate this massive 

amount of choice. 

And I think the other dimension to it is something that the Shaq mentioned earlier, which is as 

advertisers continue to have the need for television to reach their audiences and drive their 

businesses, with declining ratings, we've seen an increase in the commercial loads that networks 

pump into their programming. The commercial loads are now approaching up to 18 minutes per 

hour, if not more. And I think that's a horrible experience for the viewer to sit through that. 

And conversely if you look at somebody like Hulu, they're peaking out at about two, maybe 

three minutes from a commercial load. And they're able to do that because of the precision with 

which the ads are served. They're much more relevant they're much more aligned with the 
viewer. And they control for the frequency. That is, you don't see the same thing over and over 

and over again. 

And I think from a consumer standpoint, use of data and improvement for the way that the ads 

are planned and bought and sold, and in turn measured based on the return of investment would 

ultimately lead to a reduction in commercials and improve the overall experience for the viewers. 

Because as, I think, Josh said earlier, the advertisers still underwrite a large share of content 

production and distribution. And so if you give them tools to get to their business objectives 

more efficiently, they won't have to run the tonnage that we currently see on television that's 

driving viewers away. So I think there is a duality to it. 

JANE CLARKE: And it gives more options for the content owners too. So subscription models 

can work for the content owners as much as advertising models. So with improved sorts of data, 

you can have a variety of ways of delivering your content to consumers. You can have much 

more niche content for much more niche groups, who might be willing to pay a subscription for 

it. It gives you so many more options when you have intelligent use of better data. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: Aside from content discovery and advertising benefits, there's also benefits 

in once you find the show you like, being able to interact with it in more ways. So my TV has a 

Twitter box on it. So if I watch a football game, I can see what people are tweeting about. And so 

it makes the whole experience a lot more funny. 

JANE CLARKE: One of the things that Ashwin hasn't really talked about-- and maybe he could-

- is that by making the television content aware, it also enables second screen experiences. So 

you can then-- see right now, it takes Nielsen 15 days to figure out what was on the television to 

report those ratings back to the buyers and sellers so they can make their trade on the media. It's 

unbelievable in the world of digital advertising. 

And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't know the programs that are on. That 

programs don't call out to them as they're going to the Nielsen box. What they do is that meter 

collects the time and the station that it's on. And they have to do this elaborate process of 

mapping back to the program logs to get what was on. And then they have to calculate the 

minutes that had commercials. It's this incredibly legacy process. 

Whereas with automatic content recognition, you can actually get real time ratings. And you can 

have the content, that ACR on another device that can deliver some secondary content as well, 

some additional content or even related to the ads. So I don't know if you want to--

ASHWIN NAVIN: Shameless--

JANE CLARKE: Did I say it all? 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Shameless plug here. So if you do go to samba.tv, our home page, we do 

have real time data. There's actual real time ratings of the most popular shows on TV right now. 

You don't have to wait until tomorrow to figure out what the rating will be. We'll tell you what 

the rating is at this moment, instantaneous, with a few seconds delay. And that relies on having 
basically a connected device, basically being able to pull millions of households and aggregate 

that data for the benefit of the audience at samba.tv. 

We have an application, as Jane mentioned, that's called Spotlight. I think we've all been in front 

of a television watching a movie or watching a TV show, and there's an actor or actress onscreen, 

and you just can't remember her name or his name. Or where did I see this person? Or what else 

have they been in? 

Spotlight is a mobile application-- it's in the iPad app store-- that lets you, for any show that 

you're watching right now, see the full cast and crew, episode synopsis, photos that they've 

posted recently to social media. It's a much more immersive experience across screens. So you 

don't feel like you have those moments when you're wondering. It's all there. It's pre-integrated. 

So it's nicely connected to your television. You don't even have to search on your iPad. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So based on some of the early questions I've gotten in, I think there's a lot 

of interest in moving to our transparency and choice section of the panel. And so I just wanted to 

start by just asking Shaq to talk a little bit about what NAI is up to in this space. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: Sure, so for the past year, we've been hearing a lot about addressable TV, 

smart TVs, from the online advertising ecosystem. So we start investigating it. And I'm going to 

distill down a lot of working group talk just to shorten it. But basically what we've seen is a 

convergence of three separate industries with different personalities. So there's the cable TV 

industry and addressable TV. The set-top box, that's number one. 

Number two are the app companies or companies that have experiences creating app ecosystem. 

So Apple with iOS, Google with Android, Microsoft with Xbox and Windows phones, Samsung, 

Amazon, those type of companies. And then TV manufacturers, who are like Panasonic and 

Sharp, and they may include apps too. But they don't really have the same history of creating app 

ecosystems that the app category does. 

So from these three categories, each one has a pretty unique history with privacy. So the cable 

industry has been dealing with the FCC for a long time. And the rules there are fairly onerous 

and different than what the mobile sphere's been dealing with. So they have one approach. And 

the technology is also a bit different there. So they deal mostly with households as opposed to 

individual devices. 

And then in contrast, there's the app the app category, where it's a fairly mature group. And 

they've been guided a lot by the FTC. And so they have advertising IDs a lot of times and robust 

notice and choice mechanisms that fit along the guidelines of what the FTC's looking for, from 

what I've seen. That's another category. 

And then the TV manufacturers their focused on different law all together. Right now, I think a 

lot of them are focused on the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is really in flux. And it really 

affects a lot of what ACR is possible and what kind of notices need to be given in that 

atmosphere. So each one of these companies, they all have very different approaches, different 
identifiers, different ways of dealing with things. But at the end of the day, the weird thing is that 

they're all competing. 

So Netflix-- I think Comcast most recently is going to start including Netflix into their set-top 

boxes directly. But you can also download Netflix onto your Apple TV. Or your TV you might 

have Netflix built in. So essentially they're literally providing the same content in three very

different ecosystems of laws and regulations. 

So there, I think, what we've heard is there's a strong appetite for self-regulation here, just 

because I don't think one regulatory body can operationalize how to deal with all these things. 

And keeping in mind that these categories are fairly arbitrary. There's a lot of companies that fit 

into multiple categories at the same time. 

So we've been thinking about notice and choice in a few ways. And as a disclaimer, I'll tell you a 

few things about it. But it is a work in progress and things are subject to change. But first I'll say 

from a smart TV standpoint, I don't think there's any surprise that TVs are connected nowadays. 

When you switch from an analog to digital TV, it's pretty jarring to see a privacy notice for the 

first time on your TV and click through, and terms of service and those types of things. And the 

app ecosystem is not a secret. 

I think education's the main piece remaining, where consumers may have questions about what 

types of data are collected. And the along the lines of consumer expectations, I think people are 

gathering a lot of expectations from the mobile app world. So from what I've heard from a third 

party ecosystem, they are looking to draw models from there and hopefully apply them to smart 

TV space. I'll throw it to the rest of the group. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So just to follow up, what is the goal? What is the dream of the 

workshop? What is the end result? 

SHAQ KATIKALA: So just to give you an idea of what our process is, so going back, say, to 

mobile. So we started a working group first to investigate what the technologies are, what are the 

best practices in the industry, and coalesce around the rules that would work for the majority of 

players without excluding certain business models arbitrarily. So that's what we're doing right 

here is figuring out what would work as a set of privacy principles. 

And we're drawing-- in this case it's unique, because previously there's a lot of FTC related 

guidance. And now you're looking at three different regulatory bodies. And it's a little more 

complex. But I think the goal is the same, is to provide some sort of guidance to the industry to. I 

think in this case, ideally find a way to bridge these three distinct players and put them on the 

same equal footing in terms of privacy. I think it's an aspirational goal. But that's something that 

you would hopefully try to do in at least two out of the three or one out of the three, and provide 

rules on how they could communicate with each other. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So Ashwin, you were saying that your software, you're integrated into a 

lot of different manufacturers' television. So you don't-- well tell me if this is wrong-- but I 

would assume you don't own the interface with the consumer. How do you address the fact that 
you're working with different companies that have different ways that they might want to get a 

consumer on board? 

ASHWIN NAVIN: It's a good question. I guess to address Shaq's point, there is, I guess, a price 

for a consent form that shows up on your television. That is jarring. But what's more jarring, I 

think, is if you show up to the US Senate for a confirmation hearing, and they know what you've 

rented from Blockbuster Video or something like that. Not a price I think-- I don't know. Maybe 

America, I don't think-- I think a good number of Americans do care about that stuff. And I think 

they would like to have that disclosure. 

Although we don't make TVs and we don't own a TV platform, we insist that there's sufficient 

levels of disclosure. If a manufacturer wants to pre-load our software into their TV, we want to 

see that they're willing to take the steps necessary to make sure it's clear, that our software is 

there before it's activated, and that you have a clear choice to turn it on, and that the data will be 

handled by us with some care. And that if we aren't providing sufficient value to the consumer, 

that they have a very easy way to turn it off. 

That, I think, is table stakes. It may not be clear in the US, in terms of either rules that we've set 

as an industry or rules that we've set as a country. But when you put yourself in the consumer's 

shoes, we just feel like that's just common sense. 

And not only that, but if the data that's been collected in the past isn't providing value to me then 

I should be able to clear that, not only from the manufacturer's servers, but anyone else that may 

have it. In fact, I would even go further and say that before that data can be pressed to anyone 

else, there should be disclosure of the consumer at the time that that data becomes available to 

any third party and consent from the consumer. 

So that, I think, is table stakes to do business in Europe. And it's certainly what we expect of our 

partners in the TV manufacturing business when they want our software. And we've negotiated 

ways that that appears within a screen that doesn't become too intrusive, whether it's branded by 

the manufacturer or branded by us. We don't really care. But the core principles have to remain 

intact. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: I agree with you. I just think that with notices, they can get a little bit 

complex. So you want to provide education to consumers as a key goal and make sure they 

understand what's happening. But too much information can be hard to process. 

And I've seen recently that ad blockers have started including blockers from EU cookie notices. 

So people just find that intrusive. So they are just blocking the notices altogether. I don't know. 

So that's a result we don't want either. We want people to just be aware. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: Awareness is good. And we don't use jargon much. We try to avoid. I have a 

jar on my desk for anyone that uses the word ACR. You have to put a dollar in the jar. Because if 

you go to Best Buy or you go to Wal-Mart or Costco and you ask the average TV buyer, do you 

want the TV with ACR on it, I am pretty sure most people would say, what the heck are you 
talking about. Do you want a TV that's more personal, that makes it easier to find content, that's 

easier to navigate? Absolutely. 

And that's what we think is also table stakes you know for anyone in this business is to figure out 

what does this do for the consumer. What value providing, and how is that making your TV 

more attractive at Best Buy or Costco or Wal-Mart? And if that's true, then there's other benefits 

from having a more accurate understanding of the consumer in the audience. But it's predicated 

on consumer value first and foremost and consumer disclosure. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So Shaq, you mentioned mobile devices. And it seems-- and we already 

touched on this a little bit-- but it seems like one of the big differences between mobile devices 

and televisions is that, well at least two differences. One is that with your mobile device, you're 

used to interacting with it. You're used to, it tells you something. You touch it. You make a 

choice. There is a very well-developed user interface. 

And then the other difference, of course, is that there's essentially two platforms for mobile 

devices. And everybody's on one platform or the other. So there's an ability for just two 

companies to essentially control at least the baseline of how information is going to be conveyed 

to consumers and what it takes to get in their app store. 

And I imagine this creates a lot of problems in the TV world of how you're going to address 

those issues. And I'm wondering if, in the working groups, you've talked about those at all. I 

know I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here. But if you've talked about those specific 

problems and how they might be addressed in the TV world. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: So the first issue is about not being able to interact directly. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: It's the point you were making, which is that it's jarring to see something 

on your-- it's arguably jarring to see something on your television that expects you to click a box 

and say OK. You used to just turn on your television. And there's content playing. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: That is certainly one of the big challenges and one that we're actively 

thinking and talking about. In the web and mobile environment, we push to have icons next to 

the ads, so you can easily access for more information about your privacy options. 

But in the TV world, we found that it may be possible that a few companies. For the most part, 

that's not possible as an overall policy, because not all TV manufacturers have that option yet. 

We're still doing research to figure out where the TV industry is headed. So maybe in three 

years, every TV will have some sort of mouse that you can use on your TV and click on things. 

That still remains to be seen. 

And as far as app ecosystems, I mentioned earlier that there's a group of companies that have 

dealt with app ecosystems in the past. They're trying to translate that to smart TVs. I think they're 

really thinking about that. And from the TV manufacturers who may not have dealt with app 

ecosystems as much, one thing to note there is that a lot of times the apps are not talking to each 

other. 
Usually with the mobile environment, you have an advertising ID, which allows cross app 

information to be conveyed with each other. And all of these TVs, every app is treated in its own 

ecosystem, in its own publisher. So it's more first party data and third party. 

JANE CLARKE: But I would also say to give credit to the TV manufacturers. I think there's 

some LG folks here. I have an LG smart TV. I've had it for four or five years. You get used to 

that interface. It's a little weird, trying to use this remote control to type out letters of the movie 

that you're looking for. But having that app ecosystem on a big screen versus on a small screen is 

not that difficult to adjust to, I think. They're working on improving the ability. I personally 

would rather have a keyboard than the thumb. 

I think they've been experimenting. You go to CES, and you see lots of different options for how 

to deal with that app ecosystem on a smart TV. So I think there's innovation coming in that area. 

MARK RISIS: So we've been talking about the app ecosystem. But I just want to underscore that 

there are two very severely different tiers of the app ecosystem. And there are certain apps that 

are absolutely mandatory for a connected device to sell. And those are Netflix, and Amazon, 

Hulu, YouTube, and maybe some of the, like HBO GO and things like that. 

And having some exposure to the way those negotiations go, there's very little that a 

manufacturer of a hardware device can do to affect the policy that the app developer and 

distributor enforces from a data collection standpoint. it's a blind spot. A TiVO device, when it 

pivots to a Netflix app, it sees nothing. It's completely blank. App launched is literally the last 

piece of information that is received. And at that point, the hardware manufacturer is blind in 

many ways. 

And then there is everyone else. And they're trying to get onto the connected devices. And I 

think they will certainly abide by quite a lot to have a presence and the distribution that the 

hardware manufacturers afford. 

And so I think it's important to think of them as two different ones. There is the tier one app 

developers who dictate what they do with the data completely, pretty much. And then there's 

everyone else that, I think, are more amenable to how they work with data traction and things 

like that based on what the carrier of the app dictates. So I think that there is no one that can tell 

Netflix what to do is the bottom line, with regards to their data. And so that needs to be 

considered. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: How does TiVo approach, if you know, how they approach the consumer 

interface as the consumer's booting up and--

MARK RISIS: Yes so speaking as a consumer, I have five TiVo's. Been there long enough. So 

there is a very explicit opt in as you're booting up, saying that your information will be collected. 

And then there is a secondary opt in that says if you do not wish for this information to be added 

to our anonymised aggregated panel, here's your option to opt out. 
And then subsequent to you setting up your device and playing with it, any privacy policy update 

is messaged by a fairly intrusive and annoying but nevertheless prominent screen that pops up 

when you pivot out of live programming and into the guide. Any update is messaged there. It's 

also messaged via email to your account. 

And the opt out from having your data in an anonymous fashion, an aggregate fashion, sent to an 

entity like TiVo research, you're able to opt out from the Settings menu right on the box. And 

you're also able to opt out on the web account portal. And that's front and center and right next to 

where you would go as a consumer to, essentially, manage your recordings and things like that. 

So I'd say there is at least three prominent points and an ongoing mechanism to message any 

changes in the privacy policy. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So this question relates a little bit to an audience question, which is asking 

about would it makes sense to have an external device with some option to control ACR make 

sense. And I'm just wondering-- maybe this is just terribly old fashioned to suggest that 

consumers are still using remote controls-- but why couldn't you just put a button on a remote 

control that instead of just the Settings button, but a privacy button that would give people a 

menu of the kind of tracking that a television or a set up box is doing? 

And maybe even, having additional information about what tracking is going on for that 

particular program? Is that something that you talk about? 

JANE CLARKE: You know how may remote controls most people have in front of their 

television set? Which one would you use? And which one would override the other one? It's an 

interesting concept. And I don't know if any of MVPDs or OENs have tried to work together on 

something like that. But they all do different things. I've got four of them sitting there. They all 

do different things. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: I know people tend to want fewer buttons on the remote control rather 

than more buttons. But they don't tend to be shy about adding single use case buttons to remotes. 

So it seems like this is something, if it were sufficiently important, that a manufacturer or a settop box maker could choose to put on that remote. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: I think it just comes down to, like I said earlier, disclosure, choice, and 

control. And I don't know if we need to be specific in saying, hey, it has to be a button. Or it 

could be part of an app. Or it could be part of the UI of the television. But the core principals 

need to be clear. And I think we could do a better job as an industry putting those together. 

JANE CLARKE: And benefit, too, because I have a pet peeve that allowing your data to be 

collected, opting in, is like voting. That if you want to get good content in this country, you've 

got to let people know what's being watched. So if you're just going to hide, then your content 

will not be counted. Your content viewing will not be counted. And we can't help it if nobody 

makes any more content that you're going to like. it's just a pet peeve that I have about that. 
I don't really think people understand. They think when they are opting that it's something having 

to do with the government or Jason Bourne or whoever it is. But they really don't understand that 

there are benefits to having your voice counted. 

MARK RISIS: I think it comes down to, going back to the example that Jessica gave about the 

senator and their rental history, it wasn't their rental history itself that was the issue. It was that 

the senator's identity was revealed. To Jane's point, viewing information in itself, if it's 

completely depersonalized and anonymized, is a consumer benefit. It informs. 

And to a lot of the points Ashwin and others made on the panel, it helps the consumer experience 

in a tremendous way. I think it's the re-personalization and letting the consumer identity be 

exposed that really is much more of the issue at hand. I don't think the two should be lumped 

together. It's not the data. It's the person that really should be protected in the most strenuous way 

possible. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: So to address what the suggestion was from a self-regulatory standpoint, 

we're technology neutral. And I think the end result is our rules will generally tell you, you need 

to provide this kind of notice. You need to provide this kind of choice. It needs to meet a certain 

level of prominence. 

But at the same time the Apple TV remote doesn't have any buttons on it at all. And it's not in 

our place to tell them your design is wrong. Because it doesn't have a button like this other 

manufacturer does. So we don't like to pick winners and losers in terms of design and technology 

and that sort of thing. But we have flexibility for companies to innovate. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So to again put you on the spot about what the working group is up to--

and wasn't my intent-- but this was another audience question. And it relates to what Mark was 

mentioning about we're not touching the PII. 

And I guess the question is have you considered whether the option of not requiring any 

transparency and choice, if a company can somehow certify that the data that they're collecting 

does not include any PII from consumers? If it's just a pure-- I don't know how you make it deidentified at that point that it comes from someone's box. But you could imagine it being deidentified shortly Is that a situation where a manufacturer, some ACR provider wouldn't have to 

tell consumers what they're up to? 

SHAQ KATIKALA: Well, we don't have the code yet for smart TVs. But what we have for Web 

and mobile is a three tiered system. One, we require a certain consent a higher level of consent 

for what we call PII distinguish from device identifiable information like cookies or mobile 

advertising identifiers, those types of things. So to the extent you don't know the person's name 

or e-mail address, we think there's good reason to provide incentive for companies to avoid using 

those types information where possible. 

And if you're de-identifying them all the way, then in that case, if you don't have user level data, 

then it doesn't really pose much for a privacy threat. It's more aggregate and statistical 
information. But for the other two categories, we do require notice and choice. And it differs 

based off of the sensitivity of the information. 

JANE CLARKE: There's a lot of complexity here in terms of which data you're getting at a 

household level, which is smart TV data, which data you're getting at an individual level, which 

is device level data. Set-top box data is at a household level. The different identifiers, if you have 

PII if you have a subscription relationship that you can get IP address. You can get device ID. 

You can get location ID. I think there's been some concern raised that as you put together all 

these things that are non-PII, they can all of a sudden start to become PII. 

And so I think industry is really being very cautious about that, about putting together too many 

pieces, because that's been raised as an issue, as a concern. But it's a complex environment, 

where some people are covering it by only having household data. They don't have individual 

data. It really depends on which combinations of data people are putting together. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: So we're getting right to the end here. So I thought I'd give everybody a 

minute or so to have any concluding thoughts. If you have any, we can start, I guess, the opposite 

way than how we started the panel. Start with Josh, if you have anything to share. 

JOSH CHASIN: Yeah, I don't know that I have anything new to share. I think that all of us, of all 

of the companies involved in this particular ecosystem, we all have chief privacy officers. We all 

understand the laws about consumer privacy. We're all diligent about that. 

Information-- and I said this, I think, twice already-- information facilitates commerce. And 

commerce is good. Information makes marketplaces more efficient. Efficient marketplaces are 

good for producers and consumers. So I think that as I said, one of the fundamental natures of the 

environment we live in today is the fact that there are so many digital environments. And by the 

way, smart TV and MVPDs, set-top boxes, those are digital technologies. That's why the data is 

created in the first place. 

By nature, it creates data. We need to govern the data. But the data is, I think, helpful for 

producers and consumers. 

JANE CLARKE: That's a good one. The data is helpful for both producers and consumers. I do 

think that, as an industry, we could do a better job explaining the benefits of how data can help 

consumers and that it's not just to send them a re-targeted ad that will follow them everywhere 

they go across screens, which is probably what people fear. 

So I think there's a lot of opportunity for education. There's opportunity for better 

standardization. But it's such early days that I do think we have to allow for some innovation to 

keep happening here and how to make this work better for consumers, how to get the consumer 

experience out there that's optimal. 

SHAQ KATIKALA: I'd echo that as well. So the industry is really new, especially the TV 

manufacturers side. And I think every player is new to one aspect of the space. So either a new 

manufacturer dealing with, or a new privacy law they're working with. But the thing is, I haven't 
met a company yet that's not thinking seriously about notice and choice. They are putting a lot of 

effort into it. So we'll keep working with them and trying to build something standardized for the 

industry. 

ASHWIN NAVIN: I'm actually really glad this is happening, this workshop. And I appreciate 

the effort that went into it. We're really excited about television, about media about what the 

power of data has for the experience for media and television. I use my app every day. I love 

what it does for me to help find something to watch. And I think that we not only need to do a 

better job as an industry to clarify what are some guiding principles. But as an industry, we need 

to develop a better sense of what this data does for the consumer and actually realize that. 

So part of the educational gap happens when we've provided sufficient value to the consumer 

that they don't feel like there's this unknown thing that could happen in the future or that they're 

surprised when they find out that their TV is doing something. If it's something that they're 

immersed in and they actually get the benefit of it, then there's no surprise at all. And so we need 

to be more innovative. We can do more as an industry. 

I think it's helpful to have guidance, leadership. There is a regulatory gap or a vacuum that has, I 

think, in recent years or maybe in recent months caused flare ups in the press. And certainly in 

the legal environment, there's been some class action lawsuits that aren't helpful. That in fact, we 

as startups, as software companies, as innovators, hardware companies in this space actually 

benefit from clarity. Innovation sometimes requires rules of the game. Actually it definitely 

requires rules of the game. And we need to quickly put those in place. So it's helpful to have the 

leadership of the FTC. And we appreciate that 

MARK RISIS: It's hard for me to add to what my esteemed panelists have summarized quite so 

well. But I guess just a parting thought, the television market-- and this is what Josh started with-

- so take it full circle. Television market is essential for the health of commerce of the country. 

And it supports so much from everyone engaged, the advertisers, everyone who works for those 

companies, the networks, the consumers. And consumer behavior, consumer purchase drives so 

much of our economy. 

But the stark reality is that market is driven by data that was created in the 1950s. And the 

consumers live in 2016. And there is simply no way to get from 1950s to 2016 without a rich 

amount of data available for experimentation and innovation. And deprived of that, I think the 

market will fragment and-- God forbid-- collapse. And that would be systemically damaging to 

quite a bit. 

KEVIN MORIARTY: Well thank you all again so much for your participation today. We really 

appreciate the opportunity to have heard from all of you. So we're now taking a short break. 

We'll be back at 3:15 for the second panel of the day. 

[APPLAUSE]