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Comment by daveFNbuck | Hacker News Reader

What are the chances that a new tv will break during a 3-day trade show? I'm going to be generous and guess it's less than 10%. If the conference bought TVs for everyone, plus an extra 20% to cover the ones that break with extra breathing room, it would cost $600 to get a TV.

This assumes the conference throws out the TVs at the end. The rental company is supposed to be able to amortize these costs over years of renting the same TV. Even at the 10% breakage rate, you'd expect to rent a TV 9 times before it breaks on the 10th rental. This should allow you to rent a TV for closer to $50 plus labor and a little margin for profit. That's why renting is usually much cheaper than buying and not slightly cheaper than buying 2.

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You never produce a live event like that without spares, everything can and will break.

Your idea about the conference buying spares for everyone is interesting. Unfortunately for one, the financial incentives are just not setup in that way. Generally each booth is responsible for its own gear. Second, everyone needs different sizes, resolutions, mounts, color profiles, refresh rates, input types, network control options, blackout behavior, etc, etc.

Also, the discount vs extra expense of the gear is correlated to the cost of the gear. A $100,000 projector (mid-range) will obviously costly less to rent for three days, and is well worth it. With a TV though, they rental company is able to charge a premium because their customers simply will not purchase that type of equipment for all of the reasons above.

If we're just saying that the rental companies can charge $900 for the TV because that's what people are willing to pay, the same applies to paying $450 for bracket installation. In a competitive environment, you should expect the price to be close to the marginal cost of providing the service.

The marginal equipment cost for providing a TV is the cost of the TV divided the number of events you expect it to last through. This doesn't change if you have spares. To get close to $900 for a $500 TV, you either need extremely high overhead and labor costs or TVs that break a little more than halfway through the rental. If a TV can generally survive 30 days of use, equipment costs only justify $50 of the bill for a 3-day rental. I don't see how you would get anywhere near $900 from there.

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