Telly, a new company from the co-founder of Pluto TV, has unveiled its plan to offer free TVs that come with two screens. In spite of only just being officially announced, Telly says it has been working on the new TV for the past two years.
Powered by the company’s TellyOS, the new TV features two separate screens. The first is a traditional 55-inch 4K display while the second acts as a smart screen that displays various information, including the latest news, sports scores, weather, stocks and more.
To explain how Telly is offering these TVs for free, the company is attempting to fully subsidize the cost through the use of ads. In a similar way to how streaming services offer free access to live TV and on-demand content through the use of ads, these TVs will also be offered free through the use of ads.
The second screen is key in this sense, as it is this display that will be able to continuously display an advertisement, along with the information (news, scores, and so on) it is programmed to show at the time. Essentially, these TVs will always be showing some form of an ad when in use.
For those interested in potentially getting their own two-screen, ad-supported TV, the company is now accepting reservations via its website and says that the first 500,000 free TVs will begin shipping out this summer.
In terms of the streaming capabilities, the TV actually ships with an unspecified 4K Android TV streaming stick. In other words, in the same way a Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick can be connected to a TV, users will be able to access their preferred streaming services through the included 4K Android TV streaming stick.
The TV does also come with three HDMI ports so there is nothing stopping the user from connecting their preferred streaming player and accessing their streaming services that way.
If you ever needed proof that advertising makes money, this might be it, and one of the original co-founders of Pluto TV likely knows this better than most. Pluto TV, now owned by Paramount Global, has gone on to become one of the biggest free services around, and helped pave the way for the vast number of free streaming services on offer today.
Considering the TV has, for a long time, been one of the main vehicles to deliver ads into homes, the idea of offering one free through the ad-supported model is interesting, and according to Telly, now possible.
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