Inside Best Buy’s push to sell shoppers on a new generation of TVs
In 2020, a record 47.3 million TVs were shipped to U.S. retailers, according to the Consumer Technology Association. Best Buy executives hope now is the time consumers who bought those TVs will upgrade, as the retailer estimates the average upgrade cycle to be about five to seven years.
Best Buy is pushing a new generation of RGB LED TVs, hoping that customers will find the technological improvements convincing enough to make an upgrade. The company said in June it had introduced the new TVs to stores and is the only national retailer to carry such TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL and Hisense — though this excludes manufacturers’ websites and regional retailers.
Best Buy said that by “combining thousands of precision dimming zones with dedicated red, green and blue LEDs,” the TVs can produce nearly 76% of colors the human eye can see, creating more lifelike images; are the brightest TV screens on the market; have great picture quality from different viewing angles; and are sharper and more detailed through AI-processed upscaling.
“We saw this as the first major upgrade to television screens since OLED, which launched almost 13 years ago,” Blake Hampton, svp and chief merchandising officer at Best Buy, told Modern Retail.
Jason Bonfig, Best Buy chief customer, product and fulfillment officer and incoming CEO, said on Best Buy’s first-quarter earnings call in May that the company believes the RGB LED TVs could be an accelerator for its TV business.
“The upgrade cycle is somewhere between five and seven years, so we’re getting to that point where we have a lot of customers that have products that are ready to upgrade, and there’s a new technology that’s being introduced that can be accessible to a lot of customers,” Bonfig said.
Consumer electronics sales at Best Buy were down year over year in the first quarter. The category — which includes televisions as well as products such as speakers and headphones, and is separately reported from computers, mobile phones and appliances — sank from $2.22 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to $2.15 billion in the same period of 2026.
Kantar retail analyst Dave Marcotte said because people have become less willing to upgrade their electronics, the TV business has been a very frustrating place to be for the last couple of years. “Things last longer,” he said. “The newest phone, the newest TV doesn’t do anything that much more amazing than what you have.”
Hampton said Best Buy got the exclusivity through existing relationships with TV manufacturers and conversations about how brands wanted the TVs positioned in the market. He said it’s especially important for consumers to see the TVs for themselves. According to a recent Best Buy survey, 72% of customers said they are likely to purchase an RGB LED TV next after being made aware of the technology.
Best Buy offered a large enough footprint for at least one RGB LED TV in nearly every store, typically displayed on end caps, as well as delivery and installation services for consumers, plus haul-away of old TVs. Best Buy also trained more than 15,000 employees as well as vendor representatives ahead of the launch, Hampton said.
“We felt like it was very important that we helped the brands tell their technology stories, and they saw it as a unique opportunity where, given the premium nature of the technology and their desire that this story be told in the right ways, … they saw value in what we could bring to the table,” Hampton said. RGB LED TVs can be quite pricey; the TVs listed on Best Buy’s website range from $1,200 for a 55-inch screen to about $30,000 for an 115-inch model.
Walmart and Target “sell some televisions, but it’s … not always about premium televisions, so it makes sense for the manufacturers to want to introduce this through Best Buy,” said Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at GlobalData Retail.
Retail and consumer electronics analysts are mixed on whether the new technology will be enough to boost sales in the TV category.
“I’m not entirely sure that the new technology is sufficient to drive people to come out and buy new televisions. Some people, yes, but the majority of consumers, probably not — not in this environment,” Saunders said. He added that the TVs seem like more of an incremental improvement than a wholly new experience, such as what 3D TVs were. “I think there is definitely upside [for Best Buy], but the question is how much upside.”
Paul Gagnon, a vp and consumer technology analyst for Circana, said the RGB LED TVs are the latest shot for those who make LCD TVs (the RGB LED TVs use LCD panels) to narrow the performance gap with OLED displays at similar price points.
“All the different improvements in LCD television technology have been aimed at being more competitive in performance against these OLEDs, especially in the more premium price tiers, where consumers … care more about picture quality,” Gagnon said.
The brighter screens are important for those who have a lot of ambient light, like via windows, in their viewing environment or watch TV with the lights on, Gagnon added. “If you live in a high-rise apartment building in New York and you get sun blasting through your window at the end of the day while you’re trying to watch TV, then that becomes an important factor.”