I'm going to contest that statement.

Really? It might just be my social circles, but we always thought of Vizio as basically the Walmart special that was somewhere, somehow, going to find a backdoor way to make up the profit margin.

Vizio was known for good value on price. However tcl and other Chinese brands took over that spot lately and Vizio never managed to recover.

Admittedly, I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to screen quality due to my specialization, but Vizio panels never seemed that good either. It was obvious they were using cheap panels to meet the desired price point.

With that said, most people were upgrading from either a CRT or an early 720p flat-panel and to them even the cheap Vizio panels were a big step up, so I don't dispute that there was a lot of value.

It was 15 - 20 years ago. For a short period of time tech reviewers where all Vizio fans. Basically all recommendation heavily favored Vizio, then they pretty much disappeared and now they are back in the press, but not for being amazing.

Hah maybe I'm older than I realise.

I think this may have been ten years ago. During the era of 3DTV and curved displays.

I thought they were reasonably well known to be cheap, so cheap infact that the hardware was sold at or below cost.

Thus the actual profit came from advertising and selling usage data.