My background is in TV SoCs, so I can definitively say that this whole industry has been a very low margin business for years. Mr. Funai, who ran the Funai brand that owns Sanyo and Magnavox brands, used to negotiate with us and was taking off fractions of pennies for certain features. That was over a decade ago...
SoCs have changed a lot since those days (waving at DivX). Yet the most important features of the last decade driving increased margins from a pure display perspective are HDR / wide color gamut, quantum dot and OLED, and even those TVs are starting to become more "mainstream" in some respects.
The other half of this is streaming services, and this is what modern SoCs can finally provide. While boxes like Roku were predicted to go the way of the dodo and haven't, most brands have an app platform that supports not only streaming media, but analytics (read: data collection) as well. Some set-top boxes / streaming players (and I increasingly suspect TVs) have microphones to collect ad impression information for advertisers, but the terms controlling this data collection will be buried in some contract of adhesion aka EULA you click through to get access. Even Android phones going by Cast devices or Apple phones going by AirPlay sinks can and often do collect this information today for Google/Apple. Remember that Vizio was already caught in a scandal fingerprinting image buffers once a second and sending that to third parties, so the flippant attitude of the interviewer is both humorous and frightening.
What the interview doesn't discuss is how far this will actually go. I, like many /.ers, will simply not connect our TVs to a network and use our player of choice, like Kodi on a Pi3 or HTPC, plus an antenna for the tuner. Today's ATSC tuners will go the way of the dodo, and in a few years they will be relegated to having a 16:9 SD-ish signal of a limited number of channels for a few years until they shut that off and ATSC 3.0 becomes your only choice. Even tuners will not be protected long-term, as various sub-committees in ATSC, EBU and others are talking about having a 5G modem in displays and set-top boxes to collect viewer information using some IoT stack even when not connected to the user's network. It won't matter if there isn't PII, as statistical correlation and deep learning with this and other data (e.g. mobile network location) will be enough to pinpoint not only your house, but who is viewing what at a given time.
As frightening as all of the above may be, it means we need to be vigilant. Security researchers need to keep on top of these privacy violations and monitor not only network traffic but wireless as well. When the 5G IoT data collection really starts rolling out, we'll have to look at the FCC filings for the devices and see which have these radios in them. I hope it doesn't get to the point where I have to start cutting traces and clipping MMCX antennas out of a display, but I'm ready to do it. We need to use privacy enhancement tools on more open platforms and at low levels of our home networks and reject the closed ecosystems and control of embedded devices. Most importantly, we need to be very vocal and very public in calling out privacy violators. Everyone is trying to establish economic rents, but it can't be at the expense of individual privacy simply because the inevitable data breaches will inevitably expose too many of us to unwarranted public scrutiny.