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Comment by throwaway287391 | Hacker News Reader

What I find weird about most of my generation is not that they don't buy overpriced cable subscriptions, but that they don't buy TV screens and instead choose to stream video at home on a 15" laptop screen at best or a 4" phone screen at worst. TVs are obscenely cheap these days -- to the extent that it blows my mind that anyone doesn't have one.

(And then once you have a TV screen you might as well pay another $10 for an HD antenna, which gives you completely free access to unlimited content, most of which is admittedly total garbage. But even if you use it once a year to watch the Super Bowl, Olympics, or live coverage of some local emergency, the tiny cost is easily justified. The existence and free-ness of HD antennas seems more or less unknown to most millennials, who have a "mind blown" reaction when they come over to my apartment to watch the Super Bowl or NBA finals or whatever and find out I'm paying nothing for it.)

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It's not the physical space, it's the psychological space.

When I had a 50" plasma (this was a long time ago) all my furniture was pointed at it.

Now I watch the occasional movie or show on a macbook pro sitting on a coffee table (great screen and not much difference in relative size due to proximity) and my furniture, and the people seated on it, face each other at all other times. I find the room more inviting and conductive to conversation now.

A big part of the problem is effortlessly getting content from your phone (where it’s easiest to find) to your TV (where it’s best to watch) through the competing hostile ecosystems of Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook.

My HDMI cable would disagree with you on that one.

I understand a lot of people want the convenience of wireless / push to screen functionality, but it always makes me laugh when friends sit there for several minutes trying to get content on a screen, and I just bung a cable into my laptop and it's up and running.

In last few years, you can also connect HDMI cable to your phone; MHL has been a thing for a while.

Chromecast solves a lot of this. Rather under appreciated device.

For a lot of people like myself, the larger screen over a laptop is really only worth it when watching with other people.

Yeah, a laptop screen in your lap has nearly the same apparent size as a TV most of a room length away.

Having a bigger, further away screen may prove to help prevent myopia, though. Eyes focused on near objects all the time tend to go myopic. I'm not sure a few extra feet is that significant though, compared to looking out a window at the hills or clouds.

The picture-window-sized televisions that are common today look ridiculously large and tacky in a living room, IMO. I'd never buy one.

I'm with you on this, but numerous people i've said this to have snorted at it. Either it's a minority opinion, or people with massive tellies are so invested in having disfigured their homes that they can't admit it.

Anyway, i painted a wall silver-grey and bought a projector.

They’re probably too big for some rooms they’ve been retrofitted to. When I added a room a few years ago I explicitly kept a space for a wall- mounted TV. I often use it as effectively a big digital picture frame if I’m not actively watching something on it.

The strange pattern I've noticed is that the size of the TV is inversely proportional to the wealth of the owner.

It amazes me when I drive past some of the houses in my street and people are sitting 5 feet in front of a 60" TV.

Isn't that the necessary viewing distance to distinguish 4k anyway? I often hear people make the opposite scoff, that people sit too far from their TVs to take advantage of the resolution they're paying for.

I've got a 75" 4k about 10 feet from me right now. Plus it has the added advantage of being only about 15-18 feet from our dining room table, which means if we throw a game or the news on it during dinner, we don't have to squint to see the scores.

Most of the use of the TV is OTA (we don't have cable TV) but plenty of Netflix/Amazon/Apple/HBOGo type stuff. That said, we use it like old people; leave the news on as we do other things in other rooms. We don't have any shows we religiously watch.

Why do you need a separate antenna?

I live in the UK, and here, houses have antennas on the roof, with a coax cable running down to a socket the living room. TVs have a corresponding coax socket, connected to an internal tuner, so you just plug a simple coax cable into the wall and the TV.

How does it work in the US?

In your case, the antenna on the roof is your "separate antenna".

Depending on where you live and the transmission power, all you may need is a meter or two of a cable with a coax connector at the end, and you can watch DVB-T with that.

> TVs are obscenely cheap these days -- to the extent that it blows my mind that anyone doesn't have one.

TVs are big, stationary, and designed ad meatspace social gathering centers. Plus, people these days are used to always being engaged with personal portable gadgets, so using them for personal video consumption is natural.

> But even if you use it once a year to watch the Super Bowl, Olympics, or live coverage of some local emergency, the tiny cost is easily justified.

Is it? You can watch all of those (including live local TV channels) on a laptop, tablet, or phone screen, which has zero device cost for the purpose (because you have it anyway for lots of other purposes) low service cost, and you can do it nearly anywhere, and at typical use distances (except for the phone, unless you use an HMD, though that is an option) at least as much visual size and better resolution than a TV that is actually inexpensive.

Now, I’m a late Gen Xer and watch a lot of stuff on my TV (mostly through streaming services, but also satellite service) but I can totally understand Millennials not seeing a TV fitting into their life even with lots of video consumption.

I own several TV's but I end up watching a lot of TV and Movies on my iPad anyways.

It's nice to pick it up and take with me to the bedroom, my desk, my dining room table, the bathroom, etc. Wherever I want to go, it follows.

Also, movies in particular have terrible audio mixing for in home usage. The dialogue is way too quiet and the effects are way too loud. I end up adjusting the volume on the TV the whole time I'm watching it. This is less of a problem on the iPad because I'm a lot closer to it.

16:9 TV's are also bad for watching movies. If I want the movie to be a reasonable size on my TV, I need a much larger TV than I actually want to have. Again the iPad fixes this issue by being close to my face.

edit: Also, watching 90's TV on Netflix is fantastic on the iPad because it lets you zoom in to the center of the 16:9, remastered show for a full screen, 4:3 viewing experience. It's great for Friends, the West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is not on netflix anymore), etc.

If I lived alone, I'd probably agree with you.

I'd argue that there are still a large majority of millennials who are aware of antennae broadcasts. The oldest of this group is in their late-30's.

I've seen just as much shock and awe by older Gen X'ers and Boomers when they switched to HD broadcasts over the air and I showed them what's coming in now. "No more fuzzies!" was the generic response.

It probably is voodoo to my children's generation (Z). However, technology doesn't surprise them at all. They'd view the antennae as another app that just plugs straight into the TV. They're quite used to "there's an app for that"; even if they interact with a voice assistant to find it.

Wait, what? Young people are not buying TVs anymore? I understand not watching terrestrial TV but I've always had like a TV plugged in to my laptop to play games and stream youtube/twich. More recently I just bought a roku TV and haven't really played much games so phone+roku TV seems sufficient.

Completely abandoning TVs but still watching videos of one kind or another seems weird.

buying a TV (capable of receiving broadcast signal) is not the same as buying a _monitor_ that you need to plug into a computer/device. everybody, i presume, must have bought a monitor, but some people no longer buy TVs.

I just gotta say, all the pro-watching-video-on-a-laptop-or-tablet folks simply astound me. I'm only 37 and don't watch all that much video content (see my thread about how I can't understand YouTube addiction) but I HATE watching video on a tiny screen with terrible speakers.

Yep, that's what I do. I haven't owned a TV for 3-4 years now. I just prefer watching content on my iPad or laptop in bed. I think it might have to do with sitting all day for work. After a full day of sitting, I'd rather not go sit on a couch. Laying in bed with my iPad is much more relaxing.

After the changeover to digital tv nothing you can find at best buy or walmart for 10-50 dollars works worth owning in multiple locations in different states.

The switch to digital pretty much just killed free tv for a way bigger chunk of the population that people seem to imagine.

A tv is a worthless investment unless its paired with a $50-120 a month cable tv and a decent tv still costs 200-300. You are talking about an investment of 800 in the first year and 600 per year thereafter.

If we look at the 5 year outlook you are talking about 3200.

Honestly a tv is generally just a bad computer monitor with good multimedia connections, garbage speakers, a tuner to hook up to worthless free tv, and hardware to display cable tv and cable tv is just bad netflix where you don't get to pick whats on.

I see no reason for tv or cable tv to continue to exist as they do other than inertia.

I have a 60 inch TV in a room not connected to my cable. I use it to watch Netflix, DVDs, etc. it’s a much better experience especially watching something with someone than a laptop is.

Be aware that not everyone has access to OTA though. I live about 40 miles outside of a major US city and I have access to nada without a cable subscription.

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