And yet...
And the perfect example! If I was choosing between two otherwise-equivalent hot tubs I would /definitely/ pay more for one without the ability to call home. Are there enough people who would also be willing to pay more, and pay enough more to make up the difference in lost advertising revenue? I guess...not?
> There's a hot tub brand who include LTE radios in their hot tubs
Only source I've seen so far for this ridiculous claim is "an executive of Sony said so in an interview". Yeah, a really neutral source of information, indeed.
55" open cell panel costs less than $100 and this is by far the single most expensive component in a TV.
So a $300 Walmart special Roku TV might needed to be subsidized a little, but doing the same on a fancy LG, Samsung or Sony would be purely out of greed.
I read some representative from Nvidia Shield explaining that they were forced to add a Netflix button to their remote in 2019 because Netflix would no longer allow their app to be installed on devices without a dedicated button.
Some smart TVs can milk money from subscription partnerships, but on a per-tv-sold basis it's not really that much.
I mean, I can understand the value of user data from Facebook but a stove or a fridge? What exactly are they selling?
Edit: realized now we're talking about TVs but still, is that data really worth that much?
I'd like to see sources on that.
Amazon's tablet is like $20 cheaper if you buy it with integrated ads. A TV will have a hard time showing so many ads through the day that it'll halve the price.
I just checked a (Swedish) price comparison site and the cheapest 65" 4K TV currently available was literally less than half the price of the cheapest Not Smart TV.
Also with Smart TVs I had a choice of over 200 different models, while with Not Smart TVs I had a choice of 2.
What we do know is that even the least price-sensitive consumers, that buy the most high-end TVs, aren't given the option:
Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program...
Appliance companies seem to be barely making margins anymore, so it's not like they're robbing you blind, more that a startup would need to create a simple device that is also twice the price of everyone else.
You'd hope that there's be enough of a delta in that "pay more", and enough folks who would do so, to make a market. Shame it seems like there isn't.
See also: US made hand tools. Everyone seems to yearn for the old Craftsman days, but not enough people want to pay that premium. While Harbor Freight seems ever expanding...
I'll probably never buy a television again, since it seems you can't buy a decent non-smart panel without crossing into the enterprise (and adding an order of magnitude in price). And I'm not alone! How is there not a single manufacturer making a single modern non-smart LCD TV? Hell, call it the "HNTV" and expect to sell no more than...20,000? At 200€ in margin that's a 4m€ product line, surely worth throwing off given that the R&D is just removing hardware from an existing model?
Doing it yourself would be way too risky.
But be prepared for the big guys to absolutely bury you once you show any inkling of success.
I think it's a great idea, but I can see why nobody has tried the space. I sure wouldn't.
- Producing and especially shipping and storing huge and/or heavy appliances is expensive AF, which means you need a lot of upfront capital for inventory and warehouses
- Getting onto Amazon is easy, but almost no one buys a fridge on Amazon - which means you have to establish a relationship with brick-and-mortar retail, and that is difficult: the retailers expect free demonstration units for each location or subsidy for advertising, as well as have ridiculously long payment schedules (depending on whose rumors you listen to, some chains want up to 1 year of time from product delivery to payment due date!).
Basically, it boils down to the question on how and where to get money to disrupt an industry that has enormous cash requirements, low margins and an extremely niche target demographic. Your best bet is a benevolent billionaire willing to put up cash for decades.