Vizio's TVs and sound bars lost money, and what runs on the screen made it back
Ask most people how a TV company makes money and they will say it sells TVs. For Vizio, one of the most widely owned TV brands in the United States, the last figures it published on its own say otherwise.
In the first nine months of 2024, Vizio's device business sold 709.9 million dollars of TVs, sound bars and accessories and spent 723.0 million dollars making and delivering them. That left a gross loss of 13.1 million dollars. Gross profit is what remains after the cost of the product itself, before salaries, marketing and everything else. Over the same months, Vizio's other business, which it called Platform+, brought in 526.0 million dollars and left a gross profit of 302.7 million.
Platform+ is the software on the TV and what it sells : ads on the home screen, ads in Vizio's own free channels, paid placement for streaming services, buttons on the remote that partners pay for, and licences to use data about what owners watch. Put the two halves together and Vizio's hardware added nothing to its gross profit. All of it came from what happened on the screen after the sale. The filing does not report TVs apart from sound bars and accessories, so it shows a loss on Vizio's hardware as a whole, not on each TV.
The first reason is the screen itself
That does not mean ads are why every TV is cheap. The bigger reason is the panel, the flat screen at the front, which TrendForce, a firm that tracks the display industry, puts at about 40 to 50 percent of what it costs to build a TV.
Over the past decade, panel factories in China grew until they made most of the world's LCD TV screens. TrendForce projected Chinese makers would hold 70.4 percent of LCD TV panel supply in 2023, with BOE, CSOT and HKC ranked first, second and third. So much capacity has meant long stretches of oversupply. In late 2022, TrendForce reported that prices for 65-inch TV panels had fallen close to the cost of their parts, and that factories might run at only 60 percent of capacity, the lowest in a decade.
This is a long-run story, not a yearly one. In January 2026 TrendForce reported that panel prices and the cost of other parts were rising again.
Cheaper screens lowered the price of TVs for every brand, whether or not it sells ads. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that its price index for TVs fell 94 percent from December 1997 to August 2015. That index adjusts for quality, so it means a dollar buys far more TV than it used to, not that sets cost 6 percent of what they did. The ad business sits on top of this. It may give some brands more room to price a set low, but no published figure shows how much it takes off the price of any particular TV.
What a TV keeps selling after you take it home
A smart TV is a computer connected to the internet, with a home screen its maker controls. Vizio's filings describe three ways that screen earns money.
The first is advertising. Banners on the home screen are sold to streaming services, film studios and other brands, and the maker's free channels, which run shows with ad breaks the way broadcast TV does, carry ads the maker sells itself. The second is placement : a streaming service can pay to sit on the home screen or to have its own button on the remote.
The third is data. Many smart TVs use automatic content recognition, a feature that identifies what is on the screen, whether it comes from an app, a cable box or a game console. Vizio's version was called Inscape, and Vizio licensed the data it produced to measurement firms, ad agencies and networks to track who watches what.
At the end of September 2024, Vizio counted 19.1 million active accounts, TVs in use and connected. Over the preceding four quarters, its Platform+ revenue came to an average of 37.17 dollars per active account. That is revenue, not profit, and it is a yearly figure, not a monthly one. A TV sold once at a thin margin can keep earning for as long as it stays plugged in.
Roku shows the same split, at a larger scale
Roku makes streaming players and TVs and licenses its TV software to other brands. It reports the same two halves. In 2025, its devices made a gross loss of 82 million dollars, about 14 cents for every dollar of devices sold. Its platform business, made up of ads and the subscriptions it sells on behalf of streaming services, brought in 4.145 billion dollars, about 87 percent of Roku's 4.74 billion dollars in revenue, and earned about 2.16 billion dollars in gross profit.
Roku's devices segment mixes streaming sticks, Roku-made TVs and smart projectors, so the loss is not on TVs alone, and TVs other brands build with Roku's software are not in it. Its platform figure includes subscriptions as well as ads. The pattern is still the same as Vizio's : the hardware as a whole runs at a loss, and the money comes from the screen.
What owners agreed to, and what regulators said
The data side runs on a choice most owners make once, during setup. In 2017 Vizio paid 2.2 million dollars to settle charges from the US Federal Trade Commission and New Jersey that it had collected viewing data from 11 million TVs, with the feature switched on by default, without owners' knowledge or consent. Vizio did not admit wrongdoing. The order required it to explain the collection clearly and get owners' express agreement first.
In December 2025, the Texas attorney general sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL. The suits allege that the companies steer owners into turning content recognition on and bury what it means in dense legal text, and that the feature can capture what is on screen as often as every half second. These are the state's allegations, not findings about any particular set. Samsung settled in February 2026 and LG in May 2026, each agreeing to ask Texas owners for informed consent before collecting viewing data. When the LG settlement was announced in May, the cases against Sony, Hisense and TCL were still under way. Their status since then was not confirmed for this article.
The Texas attorney general's office has published a guide to turning the feature off. It sits in the settings under names that differ by brand, such as Viewing Information Services on Samsung or Live Plus on LG, and the TV does not always use those words at setup.
- FTC, Vizio, Inc. and Vizio Inscape Services, LLC case page
- FTC business blog, What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
- Texas attorney general, lawsuit against five TV makers
- Texas attorney general, agreement with Samsung on smart TVs
- Texas attorney general, agreement with LG on viewing data
- Texas attorney general, consumer alert on smart TVs and how to turn off content recognition
- The Record, Texas sues 5 smart TV makers over ACR tech
Only Vizio and Roku have shown the numbers
The clean split comes from just two companies, Vizio and Roku. Samsung, the world's largest TV seller by revenue, does not report what it earns from ads. LG gives one figure : its webOS advertising and content business, webOS being the software on its TVs, passed 1 trillion won in revenue in 2024. In 2025 the LG division that makes TVs and other displays had an operating loss of 750.9 billion won, while LG said webOS kept growing. LG does not separate webOS income from that division's result, so the two cannot be set side by side the way Vizio's can.
Vizio's own split ends in 2024. Walmart bought the company that December, and now counts Vizio inside its global advertising business, which came to close to 6.4 billion dollars in its 2026 fiscal year, without a separate line for Vizio.
So the sentence that holds up is this. A big TV is cheap mainly because, over the long run, its screen became much cheaper to make. On top of that, at Vizio and Roku the hardware as a whole made no gross profit, and the money came from the ads and data on the screen. How much that income takes off the price of a given TV, the published figures do not say. For other brands, the same pattern is a reasonable reading of what they say, not a measured fact.
