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Comment by boelboel | Hacker News Reader

The bottom of the line TVs are basically commoditized and are sold at a loss. There's few tv manufacturers and they mostly compete on price, only the top of the line models have pricing power and only for 6-24 months for new models. A supermajority of consumers don't care if they're tracked all the time and a large fraction don't mind ads everywhere either (they're used to it).

A new display plant costs multiple billions.

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> A new display plant costs multiple billions

To be fair, most TVs on the market are buying panels from the same few manufacturers. For example, Hisense sources panels from part of LG. I think Samsung is another manufacturer.

So a new company could theoretically access these panels to make a privacy friendly TV without as much capital.

But like you say, it wouldn’t be able to compete on price, because the ad tech lets other companies sell at a loss.

> only the top of the line models have pricing power

And they still do it anyway because why wouldn't they? My $4K+ TV still wants all sorts of "personalized viewing experience" access.

They would care if they understood it. They shouldn't have to care–they deserve consumer protection regardless.

Well you can say this about dozens of products. People basically only care about price and perceived status for some products. Repairability, privacy, sustainability ... are not important for 90% of people, when government tries to they get pissed annoyed having to pay more.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/07/only-4-of-ios-use...

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