Wading into the wonderful world of streaming
Wading into the world of streaming
The box was delivered while I was taking a nap. My phone pinged with the text telling me it was here, and I went outside to find it leaning against the side of the house.
My new smart TV – my new, almost embarrassingly huge smart TV. If it weren’t for the slim profile of the box, a neighbor might assume refrigerator. Or car.
This tech upgrade has been a long time coming. For years, I have done just fine with TVs that are somewhat unreliable, dumb (aka not smart) and, apparently, laughingly small.
“My computer screen is bigger than that,” said my son the last time he was here.
“You should have seen the size of the TVs we watched when we were kids,” I said, conjuring the old black-and-whites in the family room. Our dad, as all dads, would fuss with the rabbit ears just in time for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color to come into focus on Sunday nights.
By comparison, the TV in my bedroom is expansive, a 32-incher perfect for the 20 minutes of a show I stay awake for each night. I have no plans to replace it, despite my son’s ridicule. No, it was the TV in the living room that caused the upgrade. Somewhere along the line it croaked — I wouldn’t know when because it’s rarely turned on. But croak it did and so I dove into the new world of streaming, and bought the new smart TV.
Others, including my children, have even larger ones in their homes — sleek, gleaming screens that cover entire walls, turning bingeing into a drive-in movie experience.
“Get a 72-incher,” my son said, but I pushed back.
“I don’t want the television to dominate the house.”
Friends of mine think that way, too. They’ve always kept their small television in a corner of the family room. To further obscure its ascendancy, they fashioned a pair of curtains that cover the screen when nobody’s watching. It is not coincidental that theirs is a family of book readers. The screen is hidden away, like a Nutty Buddy ice cream bar tucked in the back of the freezer, to avoid temptation.
“How big is the new TV?” my son asked.
“About as big as Miss Beadle’s classroom chalkboard,” I said, but the “Little House on the Prairie” reference didn’t land for him, of course. The box was so heavy I had to drag and scoot it into the house. The next day the tech man came by to hang it on the wall. It’s 54 inches from corner to corner, four-and-a-half feet worth — the size of a 9-year-old child. What have I done to my space?
Until the thing is hanging on the wall you don’t feel the enormity. It would take yards of curtains to cover the thing. At least it’s thin and sort of melts into the wall, but there’s no denying it: the Samsung now owns the room.
Smart TVs work differently, and it will take a while for me to figure this one out. My kids tell me I’ll come to love it, and that everyone will be able to watch a show when they come to visit. But that’s not what visits are for.
They say the Pittsburgh-based hospital series “The Pitt” is good. Maybe that’s how I’ll christen the new TV. But first I’ll have to figure it out, and then get used to the bigness of everything.