TED Foundation VPPA Settlement: Do Nothing and You Get Two Free Months of TED Membership. Cash Takes a Claim by October 26, 2026 — Then It’s $5 at Most, From a $350,000 Pot Whose Leftovers Can Go Back to TED.

As of October 13, 2026, the claim form for the TED Foundation VPPA settlement is open on TEDVPPASettlement.com, and the claim deadline is October 26, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. The settlement offers three things, and you can only have one:

• Do nothing: you “automatically receive two free months of TED Membership,” which the notice values at “at least a $10.00 value,” “subject to their agreement to activate” it. TED will email an activation link after the settlement takes effect.
• File a claim and pick cash: “a cash payment for $5.00, subject to a pro rata reduction.”
• File a claim and pick the donation: your cash share is “remitted as a donation to TED Foundation Inc.”

Choosing cash or the donation means giving up the membership: “If Settlement Class Members select either the cash payment or the donation option, they shall not receive the TED Membership Benefit.” Two months of a membership you may not use, or up to five dollars in hand — that is the whole choice. You are in the class if you are in the United States and, between October 19, 2021 and July 14, 2026, “was a TED account holder and watched a pre-recorded video on the website TED.com or on TED’s iOS or Android mobile applications.” A free account counts; the class is not limited to paying members.

The cash side is capped. The official site: “In no event shall the amount Defendant pays in cash to said Settlement Class Members exceed $350,000.00.” If cash claims add up to more than that, the administrator “shall distribute the relief on a pro rata basis, reducing the value of the cash payments.” By our arithmetic, full $5 payments fit up to 70,000 cash claims; above that, everyone’s check shrinks. Nobody has published the class size or the number of claims so far — the FAQ says you can ask class counsel for the claim count.

The detail most summaries skip is what happens if claims fall short. Section 2.5(e) of the settlement agreement: “To the extent that Settlement Class Members do not submit sufficient claims to exhaust the three-hundred and fifty thousand dollar ($350,000 USD) Settlement Fund, within one-hundred and twenty (120) days of the distribution of payment … any unclaimed funds shall, subject to Court approval, revert to Defendant.” So the $350,000 is a maximum, not a guaranteed payout; money nobody claims does not go to a charity or to other class members, it can go back to TED if the judge allows it. Donations also go to TED, which the notice describes as “a registered 501(c)(3) private foundation.”

Timing depends on final approval. The FAQ says that “60 days after the Settlement has been finally approved and/or any appeals process is complete,” class members get the activation link or the cash. Cash comes “in the form of a check, unless you elect to receive payment by PayPal or Venmo, and all checks will expire and become void 180 days after they are issued.” The agreement’s “Effective Date” adds ten days after the judgment becomes final, so if the court approves on November 13, 2026 and nobody appeals, payment would arrive in early 2027 at the earliest — our estimate, not an official date.

The lawyers’ money is separate. Class counsel Bursor & Fisher may request “settlement administration costs, attorneys’ fees, and expenses of no more than $700,000.00,” plus service awards of up to $2,500 each for the three class representatives, paid by TED and “not … deducted from the Settlement Fund.” Counsel filed the fee motion on September 10, 2026; we have not seen the amount requested. TED also agreed to change its practices: an “affirmative consent option” before account holders’ event data goes to OpenWeb, and it will “cease the transmission of U.S. account holders’ first and last names or e-mail addresses to Mixpanel.” TED says it no longer uses Leanplum.

• Cash or donation: file at TEDVPPASettlement.com by October 26, 2026, 11:59 p.m., using the Claim ID and PIN from your email notice. “Each Claim ID may be used for one claim only.” A paper form can be printed from the Documents page and mailed.
• Membership: do nothing now; watch for TED’s activation email after final approval.
• Opt out: mail a letter to TED Settlement Administrator, 1060 Broadway, Suite 310, Albany, NY 12204, by October 26, 2026, with your name, address, signature, the case name and number, and a statement that you want to be excluded. Opting out is the only way to keep a right to sue TED yourself. The donation is not an opt-out: donors are “still … bound by the terms of the Settlement, including the release of claims.” Under the agreement TED may walk away if more than 500 people opt out.
• Object: file with the court and mail copies to class counsel and TED’s counsel (Paul Hastings LLP), postmarked by October 26, 2026.
• Hearing: November 13, 2026, 11:00 a.m., Courtroom 905, 40 Centre Street, New York. The original date was November 12 at 3:00 p.m.; Judge Ho’s order of September 28, 2026 moved it “due to a scheduling conflict on the Court’s calendar.” The site’s home page shows the new time, but FAQ answer 19 still says 3:00 p.m. — the court order controls.

The deadline used to be October 12. A joint letter of August 11, 2026 explains that the administrator, Fidexis, LLC, needed more time to send notice, so the notice date moved from August 12 to August 26 and the objection and exclusion deadline from October 12 to October 26, 2026. If you saw an older article with October 12, that date no longer applies.

The court-approved email notice comes from noreply@tedvppasettlement.com with the subject “Legal Notice of Class Action Settlement” and carries your personal Claim ID and PIN. It is sent to class members “for whom a valid email address is available in the Settlement Class List” — in other words, TED’s own account records. The agreement also requires a reminder email “seven (7) days prior to the Claims Deadline,” which by our count means around October 19, 2026, so a second email is expected and not a red flag.

To check, do not click through blindly: type tedvppasettlement.com into your browser yourself and enter the Claim ID and PIN there. The administrator can be reached at 1-888-312-3966 or TED Settlement Administrator, 1060 Broadway, Suite 310, Albany, NY 12204; class counsel at info@bursor.com. If you have no Claim ID, the site says to contact the administrator. How do you find out about class action settlements like this one? In this case, through a court-ordered notice sent to the email address on your TED account, which names the official website.

A related question that shows up in searches, “Is FitOn being sued?”, concerns a different case. FitOn’s video-privacy settlement, Hoffman v. FitOn Inc., Index No. 542301/2025, is in New York state court in Kings County, offered $10.00 subject to pro rata reduction under a $2,500,000 cap, and took claims through August 31, 2026; filing in the TED case does nothing for FitOn, and FitOn users should check FitOnVPPASettlement.com.

The suit was filed on October 19, 2023 under the Video Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2710, the law that bars a “video tape service provider” from disclosing what a consumer watched without informed, written consent. The plaintiffs allege that TED’s website and apps passed names, email addresses, user IDs and the titles of videos viewed to analytics services — the settlement agreement names Leanplum, Mixpanel and OpenWeb. TED denies it: it says it “never discloses account holders’ names or email addresses together with their video views,” that the data is encrypted and encoded before transmission, and that its use falls within the law’s ordinary-course-of-business exception. The court has not decided who is right.

TED lost its motion to dismiss in January 2026. MediaPost reported on January 29, 2026 that Judge Ho rejected the argument that free-account holders are not “consumers” under the law, and the argument that the law violates the First Amendment, writing: “If TED added a checkbox during account creation that required approval of TED’s sharing of video-viewing history, the [Video Privacy Protection Act] would no longer bar those disclosures.” On February 20, 2026 he denied TED’s request for a stay and for reconsideration. The parties scheduled a mediation for May 29, 2026, and the court granted preliminary approval on July 14, 2026.

A large part of this settlement’s value sits in a membership TED itself sells, and unclaimed cash can return to TED. Those are design choices the court will review on November 13, 2026, together with the fee request. Until then, the practical decision for anyone with a TED account is simple: file by October 26, 2026 if five dollars or less in cash matters more to you than two months of membership.