Why aren't people getting the message - the TV is dead!

I just don't understand why I still keep seeing articles like this that talk about doing computer stuff on a TV and why people haven't realized the concept of a "TV" is dead and was laid firmly to rest with last century. Think about it, the modern flat screen "TV" is basically a flat screen computer monitor with some extra analog inputs, maybe a tuner and perhaps some crappy speakers hung on the side. The irony is those features that set it apart before are now the ones that any modern user is least likely to use.

Speakers are obsolete because almost everyone will have some bling-bling 5.1 or 7.1 surround system hooked up. The tuner is obsolete since almost no one I know does anything other than watch cable or satellite via the appropriate external tuner box, perhaps with an intermediate TiVo or PVR box. And all those analog inputs are usually hooked up to big fat monstorously (pun intended) overpriced set of $100-$200 a pop gold plated cables that are completely obsoleted by a single skinny HDMI digital cable that can be had for $20 or less.

So what is that "TV" then?

Well it's what the rest of us call a computer monitor and I wouldn't use it as anything else driven with pure digital signals sucked straight from my hard drive. This is no secret to the home theater PC (HTPC) crowd, they've been doing it for years, ever since the first tuner or video capture PCI card showed up. I've been doing it myself for over a year now since a tiny USB HDTV tuner box arrived in my home. I get a couple of dozen channels of broadcasting in perfect digital goodness, and more are showing up each day. Where before I had fuzzy, low resolution and ghosted ATSC analog TV images I now have glorious 720p and 1080i digital signals.

Because all that digital content goes straight to my hard drive via software at 5, 10 or 20mbps I never again have to sit my bum in front of the idiot box when some advertising psychologist thinks I should. No sooner than the bits hit the disk my computer is analyzing the content to mark all advertising content so at my leisure I can hit a single button and skip the entire mind numbing commercial break. TiVo users eat your heart out, because that's right I don't even have to press fast forward and try to guess when the flashy splashy ads are done - with software like "Beyond TV" all it takes is "one click".

So while every company and his dog was building devices to get our digital content streamed onto the family TV I was picking out a nice 1920x1080 resolution monitor for my computer and listing the old and heavy Sony TV on Craig's List. That same computer easily hooked up to a projector for watching movies on the really big screen, and it also shared all its files so I could watch them via software alone on any PC in my house, or even over the internet to my laptop anywhere in the world. And because a perfectly decent computer sound system only costs a couple of hundred bucks and requires a single digital cable for input I didn't need to make any monster donations for audio cables. In fact via the magic of WiFi and a cheap box like the Sondigo Sirocco I don't even need cables at all to take sound to any room in the house that has a receiver with any kind of audio input.

And you know what the best part of all this is? Beyond the initial cost of the tuner
($150 from pcalchemy.com), the (optional) PVR software ($64 from pcalchemy.com) and an (optional) indoor/outdoor medium-range HDTV antenna ($40 from pcalchemy.com) I get all those channels of digital goodness and a heck of a lot of flexibility (more than TiVo will every have) for just $0 per month. That's right - zero dollars per month. No cable bills, no TiVo subscriptions, no nothing. Sure I'm not getting 500 channels of sports I'll never watch - it is just the local channels but that is actually all a lot of people want anyway, plus there are many extra local channels only on HDTV that many will not see on cable, plus the quality is amazing. All major network TV shows are now in HD including the sports when its on and there's no extra charge!

Since I have access to all the movies I could ever want via NetFlix I have no need for the movie channels or pay per view stuff. Since I've started consuming media on my terms, and without in your face commercials I've become a patient person and can happily wait the months it takes for some shows from HBO or other pay channels to show up on DVD along with the rest of my NetFlix content.

The upshot of all this is that I no longer have a TV-centric view of the world, as many are still adamant that we must. I don't worry about how everything will plug into some huge 72 inch monster that consumes my home like the elephant in the closet consumes hanging space. TV content revolves around me - when I want it, how I want it and where I want it. And every other kind of media I need from music, to video, to photos and web pages just fly around from computer to computer like so many bits in the wind, just as the Internet designers intended it.