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You never produce a live event like that without spares, everything can and will break. Your idea about the conference buying spares for everyone is interestin

You never produce a live event like that without spares, everything can and will break. Your idea about the conference buying spares for everyone is interesting. Unfortunately for one, the financial incentives are just not setup in that way. Generally each booth is responsible for its own gear. Second, everyone needs different sizes, resolutions, mounts, color profiles, refresh rates, input types, network control options, blackout behavior, etc, etc. Also, the discount vs extra expense of the gear is correlated to the cost of the gear. A $100,000 projector (mid-range) will obviously costly less to rent for three days, and is well worth it. With a TV though, they rental company is able to charge a premium because their customers simply will not purchase that type of equipment for all of the reasons above.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
If we're just saying that the rental companies can charge $900 for the TV because that's what people are willing to pay, the same applies to paying $450 for bracket installation. In a competitive environment, you should expect the price to be close to the marginal cost of providing the service. The marginal equipment cost for providing a TV is the cost of the TV divided the number of events you expect it to last through. This doesn't change if you have spares. To get close to $900 for a $500 TV, you either need extremely high overhead and labor costs or TVs that break a little more than halfway through the rental. If a TV can generally survive 30 days of use, equipment costs only justify $50 of the bill for a 3-day rental. I don't see how you would get anywhere near $900 from there.