What would be the downsides of simply buying a big computer monitor instead of a TV? It seems to me like an easy way to avoid all the crapware that comes with Smart TVs.
YMMV, but $900 for no crapware is a price I would happily pay. We don't watch TV in our house, so haven't updated it in over a decade, but our next "TV" will be a monitor.
We did purchase a Roku stick a couple years ago, but they wanted credit card info during the set up, which I thought was BS for something that I just wanted to use for our existing streaming apps -- so we never used it.
Ironically I bought a big TV to use as my computer monitor because it was so much less expensive. Never connected it to the internet or did any sort of "setup" other than setting it to HDMI mode.
Depends on your setup, but you won’t have any audio without a speaker system
The best way is to get a good smart tv (rtings.com) and do not connect it to your network. Use an Apple TV/Android TV/Fire TV device, it’s easier to avoid/disable crap.
That's what Chromecasts and its competitors are for.
You may say that that's the same as a Smart TV, and chromecasts come with their own crapware, but the big advantage is that they're separate devices. The Chromecast has no way to infect your monitor through HDMI.
If the Chromecast or whatever starts misbehaving, you throw it away and replace it with something else. You lost $50 instead of the $300+ that your Smart TV costs.
Large monitors are rare. I found Dell 55" for conference rooms. They don't have the features like HDR. They are expensive, the Dell is $1000, and cheap 55" are $300, decent $500, and good $1000.
For lots of people, the builtin speakers and apps are fine. I also got the impression that TVs have gotten faster and UI are less sluggish. Why spend $50 for Chromecast when TV already has Android TV, and cost $200 cause going in spare room?
Don't have to use the smarts of smart TV. I never use the apps on my TV, it displays HDMI. I could stop applying updates or unplug the Ethernet and it wouldn't change.
I use a computer pretty comfortably from the couch.
The computer is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Kodi/LibreELEC. It works just dandy. I usually use CEC to control it, though sometimes I instead use a cheap Logitech K400 compact keyboard/trackpad combo. Both input methods are convenient (CEC even uses the regular TV remote), and both were plug-and-play.
It doesn't seem hard to use this computer from the couch at all, and it lets my dumb TV remain dumb while still accomplishing much of the functionality that I want from a video system that lives across the room from the sofa.
(And for everything else, there's Chromecast and friends.)
