The only reason TV’s are getting cheaper is the business model changed. Now your viewing data (and perhaps conversations) are part of their product offering.

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klausa 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is just straight up false.

OLED productions costs have fallen, and the yields have gotten better — displays of all kinds have gotten cheaper, not just TVs; OLEDs have started showing up in products they haven’t before for cost reasons, etc.

The manufacturers make some profit on the data they harvest, sure; but the biggest BOM costs of TVs have definitely also dropped sharply.

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rpdillon 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's probably mixed. I think Vizio's financial statements suggest they lose money on TVs and make it up on user data, but I'm not sure this holds for other manufacturers. I agree with you that TVs have gotten much cheaper to make, which probably incentivized the "collect it all" mentality, since their reach has increased and they can target more customers with lower prices.

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dd8601fn 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The margin on tvs is slim.

Companies like Vizio make vastly more on the ads and data than they do on the tvs.

Some quarters they even take a loss. They took a $7m bath on hardware while booking about $120m on ads and data.

We’re never getting good tv’s back. It’s only going to get worse. Now they’re starting in on monitors.

The only lifeline would be consumer protection, which obviously won’t happen in the US.

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hdgvhicv 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So they shouldn’t bother selling the TVs at all?

When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.

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HPsquared 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems conditions are such that the TV selling business is worthless (i.e. unprofitable) without collecting the data, and the TV data collection business can't work without selling TVs.

	▲	hdgvhicv 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Or just sell the tv for a higher price rather than using it as a loss leader?

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nottorp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Some quarters they even take a loss.

They have good accountants isn’t it?

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jurf 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Both can be true.

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klausa 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The person I’m replying to said “the only reason”, so no; they can’t.

	▲	seanieb 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're correct. And yes, I shouldn't have said “the only reason”, I'd amend that to "one of the reasons".

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8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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derf_ 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't need the TV to be cheaper. I can afford to make up the difference for whatever few hundred dollars extra they would earn selling my data. But the expensive ones do this stuff, too.

	▲	fidotron 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them. Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
	▲	OroPla 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I recently solved this problem by buying the Dell U5226KW. It has the same height as a 16:9 42" TV, but is 21:9, so a lot wider. It costs about four times as much as a similar sized 16:9 TV and you can't get it any bigger.