A new report from Omdia has highlighted the rising manufacturing costs of the current smart TV market and its relatively unchanged price. The report specifically looks at data from the first quarter of 2026, in which TV sales experienced significant growth. In recent years, smart TV makers have begun to rely more and more on ad revenue from operating systems to counterbalance the rising costs of components.
“What surprised analysts was that TV prices remained largely unchanged even as memory chip prices increased,” Digitimes wrote of the recent Omdia report. “The TV industry’s profit model is increasingly shifting away from hardware margins and toward advertising revenue generated through smart-TV operating systems and connected-TV platforms.”
A notable example listed in the report is Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, where data collected from Vizio TVs and within Walmart stores is used to serve targeted ads through Vizio’s operating system. The trend of leaning on OS ad revenue continues to grow overseas as well, with Omdia predicting that TV operating systems that didn’t exist in 2022 will “account for 28% of TV platform usage by 2030.”
