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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

Look up "large format display". Its basically a TV sans any smart shit. Used in commercial display applications, dynamic menus in restaurants, info panels etc.

They are mad expensive because presumably they are not subsidised by the shitware that "smart" tvs ship with.

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I'm sure the ad revenue is part of it, but the commercial ones are also built for 24/7 operation over the course of years. And I expect another part of the added expense is that they know commercial purchasers aren't as price sensitive.

If you buy a model that's one or two years old, they aren't actually that much. E.g. My company paid €700 for a 55" Samsung digital signage display.

I'm not sure about using it as a TV (no speakers, matte display), but as a monitor it looks really nice.

The higher cost is because the hardware is designed to run for years 24/7, and the compute hardware is (a little bit) more powerful than regular TVs.

The entire reason that smart TVs are cheap with ads is because consumers "prefer" that. If (most) people bought expensive TVs with no ads, companies would, you know, sell that.

Consumers only have a choice among what is already been made available in the marketplace.

Even the high end $3,000, $4,000+ TVs have ads. Show me a mainstream TV that doesn't.

Nah, that's upside down. Consumers buy what they can afford. Wages are low, but companies still want to sell TVs. Advertising to the rescue! And so, as ever, good ol' capitalism pushes quality down while telling the consumer "you've never had it so good!"

Which is of course why cahble TV, which consumers chose as an ad-free alternative to over the air TV, does not have ads.

And it's also why premium streaming, which consumers chose as an ad-free alternative over cable TV, does not have ads.

You can't buy your way out of ads because paying just means the advertisers have extra incentive to put shit in front of your eyes.

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