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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
These days, if you sign up for a new streaming service, you generally have two options: Either pay a massive premium for an ad-free experience, or endure frequent commercial breaks and all the sneaky tracking that comes with ad targeting.
Web data aggregator Bright Data has been pitching streaming service operators on an alternative approach for apps running on Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s webOS platform — one that comes without ads and sky-high fees. All publishers have to do to unlock a new revenue source is integrate the company’s Bright SDK into their TV apps and convince viewers to opt into Bright’s monetization network.
“We don’t do any kind of tracking,” explained Bright Data’s chief product officer, Ariel Shulman, during a webinar for streaming industry insiders two years ago. “We work silently in the background, and completely anonymously. Users don’t actually see or don’t feel anything.”
The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists. The gathered data is then resold to companies to train AI models, among other things.
Here’s how Bright’s smart TV partnerships work: When a consumer downloads and installs a participating app, they’ll see an opt-in screen asking them to confirm their willingness to participate in Bright’s proxy network. For instance, for an app called Petflix that was until recently available on the Roku app store, the note reads:
“To enjoy Petflix for free with fewer ads, you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and IP address to download public web data from the internet. Bright Data will only use your IP address for approved business-related use cases. None of your personal information is accessed or collected except your IP address. Period.”
“Our network is based on consensual individual participation,” explains Bright Data spokesperson Jennifer Burns. “All users can opt-out at any time via a fast two-click process.”
Once a consumer opts in to Bright Data’s network, their smart TV starts downloading publicly available webpages as well as audio and video data, which is then forwarded to Bright’s cloud servers. The company claims to only do so when it doesn’t impact the device’s bandwidth or processing capacities, with Shulman saying that individual devices download only around 50MB of data per day. In reality, there is no way for a user to know whether the SDK downloads web data at any given moment.
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