The TV I have has never had an antenna cable plugged, or an internet connection. It’s, from day one, been a large HDMI monitor to an Apple TV, a Nintendo Switch and a C64 Maxi with some other devices plugged in from time to time.
It IS possible to ignore the TV’s software most of the time (mine, luckily, isn’t intrusive at all) and use it as a conduit for a much cheaper and easily replaced (or hacked) device.
I remember how surprised the engineers at [manufacturer redacted] were when I told them they had everything needed to turn their TVs into thin clients and meeting room monitors right into the Linux firmware just a compile away. I’d totally love a 35” X terminal in 2008 with Ethernet and a couple USB ports.
From personal experience, it really really is barely even an inconvenience. Especially in a world where YouTube exists and is accessible for free from a desktop computer. There's barely been anything good on TV for decades, and the older stuff probably only seemed good because of the difficulty of publishing any competition.
But I also know a hell of a lot of people who still massively prefer watching content the traditional way. As in, not just TV shows, but on a TV too. And I have no more right to tell them how to consume video content as they do to tell me how I should consume the stuff I want to read.
I sometimes suggest they’d do themselves a favor if they stopped watching Fox News and reality TV, that life is much better without that.
A disturbing proportion of my family spend more than half of their free time watching television (typically while doom scrolling tiktok). They don't "need" TVs - they need to find interests.
Besides, it’s not like TVs are the only industry where consumer choice is an illusion. You see the same problem in a lot of sports (I used to fence and there was a great deal of pressure to buy equipment from one specific manufacturer which charged literally 4x the price for their gear).
And it’s not just hobbies either. I need a car for family duties and there are plenty of parts on it that can only be replaced by an authorised dealer.
Nobody dictates that. What we do is to suggest there might be more rewarding things to do with their time off than watching TV between the dopamine hits from TikTok