or worse, on a teeny cell phone. There’s something sad about that, and people all gathered round the old laptop to watch a band, or Titanic, or Star Wars or whatever. 
Who is buying all those humongous flat screen TVs, then? Are they only turned on for the superbowl?
I have a 42 inch TV I use as a computer monitor. I’ve never actually used it as a television and I intended to use it for a computer monitor from the get-go. It is much better than a dual monitor set up. I don’t think I would have spent that much for a TV set, but it seemed pretty reasonable for a monitor. 1080p is pretty good for a monitor.
A lot of TV gets watched at my house and I prefer to do my computer-ing at my desk and my movie watching on the sofa so the 46" TV gets used as a TV.
Sometimes my wife hooks her netbook up to it to watch Hulu or Youtube stuff. I don’t see it as any less of a “TV” though than when we use the blu-ray player or Wii.
Yeah, the idea of watching movies on my cell phone is not a pleasant one. On an airplane, sure, but that being my sole method of viewing a movie is not desirable. Sure my 5 year old Sylvania analog set isn’t fancy, but I’d rather watch a movie on it than an iPhone.
When my tv died in 1993 or so, we bought a beautiful 29" Sony Trinitron. Man, it was nice to have a beautiful big tv. As the years went by, I told myself that I would get a flatscreen when it died. Being a Sony, it never died.
I finally gave it away and bought a beautiful 55" Sony Bravia earlier this year and a Sony Blueray player. I am loving them. Netflix streaming is awesome and so is watching sports and HBO series in HD. It’s 3D ready but I’ll never use that. I’m sure that I’ll get something else in fifteen years or so. Who knows what that will be though.
Conventional streaming content (broadcast, cable, satellite, etc) might soon be an anachronism, but on-demand content is here to stay (HD cable, streaming netflix, hulu, youtube, piracy, etc). I can see the TV tuner dying out, but why anyone would want to stop watching flashing images on a giant screen is beyond me. Computers are for work, TVs are for sitting on the couch.
Bingo. We don’t have cable and we use the digital decoder box to watch t.v. now. I’ve got an HDMI cable to run from laptop to 30" wide screen t.v. set. It does the job.
Might get rid of the 4:3 t.v. in the living room for another wide screen, but that’s much more about respecting the proper aspect ratio that a movie was shot in, than it is wanting to upgrade just to get a new t.v. set.
I swore I would do the same with our huge flatscreen plasma, but it hasn’t been turned on in over a year. My wife is still resentful as we had it professionally installed with recessed wall and ceiling speakers, and integrated with an entertainment system in its own closet. It was an expensive lesson, which my wife points out at almost every opportunity.
Yep, my wife uses the one in our bedroom for the exact same purpose.
Desktop computer, laptop computer, smartphone, and e-reader.
A TV just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. I can get everything I like to watch online at this point, and I’m not tied to a broadcast schedule, and I have more variety, and from more sources.
I replaced Cable with Netflix Instant. $8/month vs $79.99/month for cable. Well, that was a no-brainer, and I can watch Netflix on any device I have, even on my all-but-useless iPad.
Although I still have my TiVo connected to the TV in the master bedroom, I haven’t checked the Now Playing list since…well, I don’t know when I last checked it, but it’s been a really long time, and I don’t record anything anymore.
Me too. I probably would have gotten more use out of netflix streaming if I’d had a way to hook it to the TV in my room (yes, I know the ways exist, but I didn’t possess one) instead because I do not enjoy watching TV or movies on my computer.
If you have a Wii or a PS3 connected to your TV, you can watch Netflix through it.
I have a 36" (?) Samsung in the living room; it was a freebie I got when I bought all new furniture after my divorce. It’s all hooked up to a cable box, along with a cheap-ass DVD player; I probably spend maybe two hours a month in the living room. I have an old flat screen thin model Sylvania parked next to my computer that I actually use; through some magic that I don’t understand, I actually get more channels on it than I do on the newer one, although none of them are HD. I catch myself more and more thinking that I actually WANT a nice flat screen TV in my bedroom. Of course I’d have to buy a nice table to set it on and that’s another expense. I need another TV like I need leprosy but I WANT one just to go to sleep with. Rampant consumerism, I suppose. I’ll probably actually buy one one of these days and then worry endlessly as to why I spent the money on something I don’t need.
Trust me, it is a less than pleasant feeling that’ll hit you in your solar-plexus every time you walk past it.
Onomatopoeia, if you’re having a pain in the solar plexus, maybe you need an operation. 
[Mixed metaphor warning]
Get rid of the bastard! And all of his illegitimate children. Put them in homes that want them and will take care of them. Or, if they’re sick and weak, just put them out of their misery.
[/mmw]
No reason to keep them and continue to suffer.
On a more serious note, it seems that you often watch alone, if your main entertainment devices are a desktop computer, laptop computer, smartphone, and e-reader. Is that one reason why you are no longer interested in TVs? Also:
I get the point of being to watch something whenever you want, but when you are watching online, why not (at least sometimes) use the big plasma screen? Isn’t the experience more … I don’t know … more immersive with a home theater setup?
I know that I have not purchased my last TV. Every TV that I have bought in the last few years has had a bigger screen than the one before, but thinner and lighter, and has had better resolution and/or better contrast, and overall better picture quality than the one before, and proportionately cheaper. I don’t see this trend stopping soon. Even when screens become the size of a wall and a few millimeters thick, there will be improvements in image and sound quality that will enhance the viewing experience.
BTW, I wasn’t sure if were defining a TV to be: 1) a display that is not part of computing device or is not designed to be connected to a computing device; or 2) a device with tuner and display.
It seems that you mean #1. Is that right?
If I had 7 TVs I’d probably never buy another one either, since their combined lifetimes, one at a time, is greater than the years I have left.
We have two - one cheap tube one in my daughter’s room, bought for her when my father in law was staying and monopolizing the real one, and a good one in the living room. None in our bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, garage or attic.
I hate watching on a laptop screen, or even a small lcd screen. We watch almost no network shows, but lots of DVDs of old tv shows, the news, TDS and Colbert, and occasionally hook up a laptop for Netflix streaming. I do puzzles while I watch, so I need a big TV a decent distance away from me.
Actually, my wife and I used to be somewhat avid TV watchers; we had our weekly shows that we used to record on TiVo, and would then watch them together. Before TiVo, we VCR’d just about everything. In the last 5 years, we’ve both slowly drifted away from TV, increasingly using the devices solely for watching DVD movies. Sometime during the last 2 or 3 years, we realized we’d stopped buying DVDs, and couldn’t remember when we last watched one from our library. We still watch a few shows together, e.g., Fringe on Hulu, a few series on Netflix, etc… but on the 27 inch iMac in my office, not on a TV.
Yeah, the plasma is large, and our media setup is somewhat impressive, but the room with the plasma is flyover country in our house; we rarely, if ever, go in there anymore. We’ll fire up the system when we have guests, but even that’s rare. Mostly we don’t think of it.
A combination. Our plasma TV has no integrated tuner. The tuner is a separate device in the entertainment closet. All other TVs in the house have integrated tuners.
I haven’t owned a tv since my second year of college, and I don’t miss it a bit. I even had the option for TV at my current place, there’s an unused DirecTV box and remote gathering dust in the corner and an unused TV in the utility room that my LL said I could use. Not interested. I refuse to watch/listen to anything that exposes me to commercials. If it were a DVR box I might consider hooking it up so I could fast forward through commercials, but most TV shows are total crap anyway. All I’d watch would be comedy central and late night cartoon network.
I guess I’ll have to learn to walk around it so I don’t run into it. Other than bumping into it physically, I have no idea what you mean by a feeling hitting me in the solar plexus every time I walk past it.
The deep, dark feeling of dread that slams you in your gut whenever you think you could have used that money for something more useful and practical. 
Sorta hijack following on the OP’s gut-reflex regret over spending on the wrong thing …
I mostly watch broadcast sports over the DirecTV satellite & DVR. I haven’t seen a movie in a theater or on a TV in decades. Just not interested. Ditto typical broadcast news, sitcoms, etc. Don’t care about surround sound or any other fanciness.
I have a 60" 4x3 format rear proj TV that’s getting long in the tooth. It’s my only TV.
What are my online options for receiving the equivalent of broadcast sports via computer so I can buy a big monitor & a media server PC instead of shelling out for a new HDTV and continuing to enrich DirecTV?