That's my guess. If the telemetry they're getting never gets any bigger then the actual bandwidth it uses and the revenue from selling advertising packages, etc, would likely make up for it.

Any time I've guessed something along the lines of "there's no way a company would do that" or "people wouldn't let a wiretap inside their home" I've been wrong. The pure TV market is essentially tapped out so the companies in that space are expanding by gathering more and more data so they can grow to make shareholders happy. Eventually there's no more data to gather with current hardware limitations, so they have to get more creative in how they package the same old data into a new product.

I don't doubt for a second that the hardware won't be built into new smart devices after a certain point. Maybe as part of a TV branded "cable service" over 6G, maybe as a requirement for warranty past whatever the minimum is. Who knows how the companies will pay for the NRE because they'll make it back on selling the telemetry to advertisers and marketing companies with subscription services for gravy. Maybe they do point to point connections so that if your neighbor has the service then your TV can talk through theirs. The point is there's a business case to be made for investigating whether it's profitable or not, and the testing like the guys in the video are doing will now require specialized RF equipment that'll be easily out of reach from a cost perspective for a while.