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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Good point...

Would 'heavily subsidized by' work as well?

Subsidized implies that the revenue from advertising defers the cost to the end user. This isn't generally true for TVs.

With TVs, the sticker price pays for the hardware. The ads pay for the extra house the manufacturer's CEO feels he's entitled to have.

Not so much. That's why, as a bunch of other comments mentioned, there's commercial displays available with equivalent specs to smart tvs that are essentially dumb terminals with no smart functionality that cost more than twice the price.

Your data is subsidizing the low hardware costs.

I think this is a question that doesn't have a well defined answer. Most likely raw hardware cost is smaller than consumer price, which is smaller than what the consumer price would have been if the manufacturer weren't able to get extra profit by selling your privacy and/or attention. So who's getting the money from selling you to Facebook depends on what you think the "right" price without that would have been, and there's always a wide range of possible prices for any given product.

The saddest part is that it's not even "heavily". From a profit margin perspective it's huge, because those are so thin on a product like a TV. But from a sales price perspective it's not even that notable of an amount.

You mentioned commercial displays costing a lot more but those are a different market entirely, and the extra price is only slightly motivated by the lack of advertising.

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