If you are big TV brand player, the way it works is you go to a contract manufacturer and say you want to do a TV. They will tell you what options you have – what sizes, features, quality levels etc (configuration) and at what price they will sell to _you_ at different order volumes and the timelines for them to deliver to you. The offer you get will not be same as the offer they make to a bigger player who is a more favored partner to them. They will tell you if you become big, you will get better deals. You come back home. Then, you do your market research and decide where in the market's price/feature/quality curve is an opportunity for you today and what is your 10 year strategy to become big. Then, you also find out someone is doing a higher quality product but somehow pricing it lower - they are cross-subsidizing it. In the recent decade that has been through data/ads deals. Then, you study what happened to those players who didn't do data/ads deals and launched the product at actual the price with some decent margin built-in. They didn't do so well. Consumers cared more about feature spec and price deals than about data/ads fine-print. A lot of the features are to do with software OS. Then you discover that the software OS vendor has lock-in contracts with the contract manufacturer. You want to use that manufacturer who has great quality TV hardware components, you don't really have a choice but to use that software vendor's OS that comes baked into the TV by the manufacturer and let them take your customer's data forever. That's the current world we are in.