The falling price of a TV set
&gt;With less demand for actual TVs, there’s less reason for manufacturers to price them even more highly.<p>I don&#x27;t buy this reasoning. Tablets and phones supposedly replaced laptops and desktops (or so I&#x27;ve heard), yet the prices for those hasn&#x27;t really budged in the past couple of decades.<p>&gt;But the most interesting and telling reason for why TVs are now so cheap is because TV manufacturers have found a new revenue stream: advertising.<p>How big can the subsidy possibly be? If Facebook&#x27;s average revenue per user is $25&#x2F;year, and a TV lasts 5 years, that&#x27;s at most $125 of subsidy per TV. It&#x27;s probably order of magnitudes lower if you factor in costs for running the advertising platform, that you really can&#x27;t show that many ads as Facebook (it can show a sponsored story every few stories, TV producers can&#x27;t inject an ad every few minutes), and probably have worse targeting.