How did TVs get so cheap? (construction-physics.com)

I suppose it would take a seperate article to dig into the financial aspects—advertising and data collection as revenue for the manufacturers.

chinese (slave) labor. in fact, look at anything primarily imported from china - very cheap compared to 1990s. look at things that cannot easily be exported from china like housing or education. expensive.

the world has never been cheap, we're just better at arbitrage now.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906

One place where "TVs" still remain fairly expensive is in large format touch screens. Outside of using IR frames, getting a large (40 inch) touch capacitive display still requires quite a lot of legwork. I've been trying to find them for my DnD map system Table Slayer [0] and I had to contact factories in China directly. It's still many hundreds of dollars per device even for raw hardware.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com

Moore's law. TVs went from vacuum tubes to transistors.

I guess the fact that Netflix, Disney and others paying smart TV companies to be there have big part of reducing the price. When I think about it, most of the remote controls I saw in recent years have Youtube/Netflix/ buttons on it also

We may do well to ask the same of what we call phones. Our use of them may be more valuable to others than to ourselves.

Are TVs cheap, or does someone else pay the hidden cost?

Food would probably be cheaper, if that was traded as freely as TVs. But since there seem to be good reasons to regulate prices that farmers allow to work, not every domain of production outsources environmental costs to non-citizens or nature in general.

Using cost per area metric for LCD panels when we stopped for the most part increasing resolution means you will find that the main driver of lower costs is the cost of glass.

Basically, we have been, since 2018 (I incorrectly wrote 2010 here earlier), only spreading out the same number of pixels on larger areas of glass, so the number of pixel components per unit area has decreased.

I have tried to price out 8K TV/monitors and they are horribly expensive (also not supported on MacOS). Probably both because of the larger number of components and we haven’t yet achieved economies of scale.

The answer is almost always either "sales trick" or "slave labor".

I think economies of scale, while only mentioned in the penultimate paragraph in TFA, is an underrated factor. Whenever something looks like alien technology but is available for $200-300, I assume an economy of scale helped.

TFA goes into the industrial engineering efforts associated with LCD manufacturing, but I don't think those wins would have shown up without a huge market for TVs.

One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled than the items that haven't.

I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."

Don't jinx it!

https://www.notebookcheck.net/TV-prices-set-to-rise-over-mem...

Most smart TVs have advertisements and spyware that yields additional profits. Same with some electronic devices: Apple devices and Windows laptops sold directly by Microsoft have less advertising and spyware, but at a higher price.

Years ago I got so fed up with the smart TV experience that I bought a $200 dumb TV at Walmart, only had one HDMI input and terminals for a local antenna - hooked an Apple TV into it and had such a good experience.

It is easy to lose sight of how much money is made by collecting data on people and advertising.

Who wants to be a co-founder with me on a company that's focused on just making dumb appliances? We can start with TVs - just remove all the smart stuff, make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device, and that's it. Start building trust with consumers and find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed. It's just a boring company forever.

Economy of scale would be against us, but maybe there is a way to surpass it. Fun thought exercise :)

I think it's also understated that competition in the consumer TV market is very strong. South Korean, Chinese and Japanese manufacturers are all fighting each other and it's a market where the average consumer wants the lowest price/size. No one player controls over 30% of the market. [1] Competition is good.

[1]https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

Chart on the site reveals that anything that's propped up by the government/tax payers inevitably exceeds inflation since the government becomes the piggy bank and inefficiency becomes the norm. Government backed student loans and Obamacare subsidies are just examples

Ai spyware.

TV is a mind-control system. Even if they were expensive to make, they would still be given to the proles at minimal cost.

Something I haven't seen mentioned, the TV's got a lot lighter too. That's purely anecdotal from me having had to move TV's around for the past few decades, and that's not comparing CRT's to LCD's. Even the LCD's have become lighter.

because sociey values TVs more then cars, education, health, etc

The top-end TV's are still quite expensive, if you want the best possible picture.

I think because major manufacturing moved to Asia which drastically cuts labor and production costs. Almost 99% of the tvs are flat and require same uniform manufacturing

Now do that with houses.

TVs did not become cheap at all. The intermediate technology which is LCD, that became cheap. that’s like saying mechanical hard drives became cheap. But who’s buying.

Also article uses 50” as a benchmark. Consumer moves towards larger sizes and OLED.

Whenever cheap TVs with spyware come up I always have the same question — how can I detect /learn that the TV includes esim or other means of directly connecting to remote servers?

This is not a rhetorical question — do I read FCC, something else? Use SDR?