The business model of low-cost consumer televisions has already flipped. Many models now sell well below cost with built-in monetization via selling user data, app product placement and streaming app rev share on subs. My Sam's Club has a pallet of this Vizio D-Series 24-inch D24f-J09 "Smart TV" for $88 (https://www.vizio.com/en/tv/d-series/D24f-J09). After retailer margin, IP licenses, packaging and shipping, Vizio is collecting less than $40 for the hardware. Less than a screenless, caseless Raspberry Pi 4.

I bought one to use as a secondary wall-mounted display for my custom home theater in the dedicated attached restroom (no need to pause the movie if someone needs to go to the restroom). It's on a controlled power outlet which turns it on via a motion sensor when anyone enters. So I just needed the TV to power up and display the video signal on the external HDMI input. This turns out to be impossible without heroic intervention because the TV is rife with dark patterns to prevent it being used solely to display external video sources (which earn them no revenue / provide no user data to sell).

To force buyers to put it online, they leverage an interlocking loop of requiring accepting the EULA/privacy policy and forcing an online update of those. You can get it to display external input without agreeing to the EULA or putting it online but this requires aborting the EULA screen with the remote control and navigating their built-in menus. Actually getting a firmware upgrade requires creating a WalMart account(!). Either way, it will not power up and simply display an external source (despite an explicit setting claiming to do so). It works as expected with all their internal app $ources but for external sources it will flash the source for a second then blank the screen (despite all power save, screen blanking being turned off). In all my testing, I discovered the TV also counts how many times it's been turned on. If it's been turned on ~10 times without have an internet connection sufficient to phone home, it will auto-boot to the "Configure Wifi" workflow screens - even if it's never been online. Once past all that, the owner still must interact via multiple IR inputs to get an external source to display. I finally forced it to remain offline and just power on and display an external input (like every 'dumb TV' ever made) by using a home automation IR dongle and emulating the remote button presses under script control.

The only reasons I persisted are A. The home theater was already under sophisticated home automation control for things which actually need control so I only needed to add another wireless IR emitter in the restroom, and B. I needed a small screen of no more than 24 inches, with an advanced enough video decoder chip to handle the range of HD, 4K, 24/25/30 & 60 fps (with drop-frame variants) and HDR10 being fed to the high-end laser projector in the main room from various live TV, streamers, UHD discs and PS5/XBox consoles. Obviously the TV's cheap screen doesn't have 4K pixels or HDR dynamic range but it does convert those signals into its low-end resolution, dynamic range and quality. Having tried half a dozen 20 and 24-inch TVs, this is the only one with an advanced enough decoder chip to do that (another indication how much Vizio values the post-sale monetization).

Note: if you have one of these and find this post via a search, don't bother trying to put it online or upgrading the firmware in the hope it'll behave better. After much experimentation, the only way to get offline external source display (and circumvent the "Wifi Config" screen every ~10 power-ons) is either manual or automated remote button presses. The only good news I have is, if you go to the trouble of 'de-eviling it', it's actually a surprisingly good display for the $88 price if you configure the color profile settings properly (I'm a video engineer).

The frog boiled itself. Consumers decided they want lower prices rather than privacy.

This is old news. The vast majority prefer free with ads over paid.