Production difficulties are less impactful on the price than post-purchase monetization. Which is a fancy way of saying “they collect watching behavior and other metadata that the device can detect (WiFi/bluetooth devices in your house, for instance), send it back to their servers, and sell it”.
Comment on We don’t need 75-inch TVs, we need 75% off basic survival. 💀
Gladaed@feddit.org 22 hours ago
Issue is that entertainment and electronics are getting easier to produce. Food does not. And the free market is coming for you.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Gladaed@feddit.org 20 hours ago
Production difficulties are extremely important to the price. 10 years ago displays were much small not for lack of ads, but because semiconductor manufacturing changed. You used to be unable to produce them in that size and error rate.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
My point is that a 75” 4K OLED display would be $3-4k without post-purchase monetization, and that you can find them for $1-1.5k as a very direct result of post-purchase monetization. They sell them at a loss these days. And honestly, I don’t think they care much about the enthusiast fringe that goes out of their way to firewall and sandbox those devices so PPM doesn’t work, because the vast, vast majority of consumers don’t know, don’t care, or both.
morto@piefed.social 16 hours ago
Considering the entire production chain, from mining and extractivism, to engineering, design, manufacturing, logistics, etc, I strongly believe that it’s only possible through a strong exploitation and asymmetrical relationships between countries in many ways. Also, electronics are only cheaper than groceries in very few countries
theparadox@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
A lot of it is actually data collection (mass spying and surveillance) being used to harvest and sell vast quantities of data… and that subsidizes the price of the device.
Basically, if we make the devices cheaper and spy on every customers, it becomes more profitable to sell at a loss to get more customers to spy on.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
They kind of do this with your “rewards card” or “club card” though.
theparadox@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
That’s your buying habbit. They’ve had that for a while now.
For TVs a single sale gets you a microphones for “voice features”, maybe a camera for web video chatting, and can take snapshots of your screen every X seconds to ID what content you are watching, and so much more.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Also with everything that used to be a proof of purchase that now requires a scan of your receipt, box tops for education for instance.
ieGod@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Maybe. But the tech is getting cheaper to produce. Monitors are very cheap, and they aren’t part of this business model.
theparadox@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
While I technically agree, they are trying…
https://cybersecuritynews.com/lg-monitor-app-installs-adware/
Gladaed@feddit.org 22 hours ago
That’s not really the only thing going on in tech. Sure TVs are a very competitive market where that is being done in part. But a vast majority of the price cut must be attributed to technological advancement.
theparadox@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I don’t disagree that manufacturing costs have gone down, but I question whether that or ads, data collection, and other new smart TV “features” have most contributed to the lowering price of TVs and other electronics.
howtogeek.com/…/tv-manufacturers-make-more-from-a…
Gladaed@feddit.org 21 hours ago
That’s bookkeeping magic. They are not talking about the cost of tvs and to consumers but their profit.
Their lower cost divisions such as ads and sponsorship can only operate for they sell tvs. I.e. their cost isnt reflected accurately.
They even talk about how the hardware section’s revenue is much, much greater. But when you got those bonus earnings you can undercut your competition ever so slightly or even sell at a minor loss in the manufacturing while still making a profit. But this barely matters to the price the consumer actually pays.