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 local warehouse club has a pallet of this 24-inch Vizio "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 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 strip which turns on when I enter that space, so I just needed it to power up and display the external video signal arriving on the 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 data).

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. 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 on external sources it will flash up the source for a second then blank the screen (despite all power save, screen blanking being turned off). The user must interact via multiple IR inputs to get external video to display. I finally forced it to just power on and display an 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 is already under sophisticated home automation control for things which actually need control, 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).