The real price of a free TV

03/10/2025

On The Vergecast: a new generation of HomePod-y smart speakers, life with the free Telly TV, and Chunk.Oct 3, 2025, 1:33 PM UTCDavid Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.Back in 2023, Telly CEO Ilya Pozin came on The Vergecast and made a surprisingly compelling case for the existence of a TV that doesn’t cost you a dime — but shows ads all the time. It’s a reasonable business model, and a pretty good deal for consumers! But as The Verge’s Emma Roth discovered, the reality of the situation is a bit different.On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about Telly. But first, The Verge’s Jen Pattison-Tuohy joins David to go through all the smart home and smart speaker news of the week, from Amazon’s many new Echos and Kindles to the handsome new Google Home Speaker. A lot of companies are currently betting that the current generation of AI tech can help make the smart home work for people, and the hardware involved is getting better fast. The software, though? Debatable.After that, Emma joins the show and we get deep into life with Telly. Emma tells us about the TV’s unusual hardware and impressive feature set, explains the deeply odd AI newscast that shows up every time you turn the Telly on, and walks us through how it actually feels to have a bunch of ads running all the time. We also wonder: what if, instead of being free, Telly was expensive? Could it be more compelling?Finally, in the lightning round, the hosts discuss Sora deepfakes, Copilot Portraits, Ring cameras, Spotify taste profiles, and Waymo rides. And Chunk. Chunk is the most important.If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first in Amazon and Google smart home news:And in all things Telly:

I spent three months with Telly, the free TV that’s always showing ads
Telly’s free TV could shake up the entertainment business

And in the lightning round:Most Popular
Source: theverge.com

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