We could just stop watching TV but...

Uh oh! In Feb 2009, TV as we know it will die, and if we don't jump on the digital television train, we will not be able to watch our reality shows! Withdrawal will be ugly.

I don't know if we had a TV when we were very little kids in Texas, before I was 5. I do remember watching Romper Room at least once, and I have a memory of Mr. Greenjeans, so there must have been a TV around, but my mother was very big on DIY toys and going out to play.

When we moved to Japan we had a TV, but of course most of what we watched was in Japanese. The only TV in English was the Danny Kaye show, and then the "Moonriver" guy. The rest was samurai movies, incredible animated cartoons (I still remember the theme song from Obake no Q), and Japanese variety shows. This didn't stop us from watching, but we had to invent our own dialogues for the movies.

Once back in the US, in 1968, the three of us kids gorged ourselves on color TV in English, fairly indiscriminately. If it was on, we watched it.

When I moved away to go to college, there was a TV in the dorm lounge, and in various apartments I shared, but watching TV was not something I did much of. For the years of graduate school, my parade of roommates brought TVs into the house, but nothing fancy. Sometimes there was no TV. I spent more time watching movies at the cheap arthouse cinemas than watching TV, although we did go through a heavy McNeil-Lehrer period, and I did get hooked on a Venezuelan telenovela. I remember this Black Flag song "TV Party" from those years.

When I moved to Minnesota, I got my first credit card and bought my first TV. It still works and we still watch it. No cable, no DVR, no satellite, just regular broadcast TV with crappy reception. No remote, so we change channels or volume with the little buttons. We do have a VCR and a DVD player hooked up to it, but now the laptop is my preferred way of watching DVDs (did I say we have no remote? can't watch the special features without one) because the quality of the image is so much better.

So this summer I think I will take old faithful to the electronics recycling center. The question I have now is, what now? I think I could live without TV again, but I'd like a better monitor for watching DVDs, etc.

One solution is to bet an HDTV to use as a monitor and hook it up to a Mac mini, thereby having a TV-computer set up that allows one to browse, show photos, etc as well as watch TV. Or I could buy and iMac and get Apple TV. I want to leave room for future developments in receiving and broadcasting multimedia content.
The geeks who game and have been doing all this stuff for years with their tinkering and hacking have all kinds of scorn for either solution, but I am that Mac customer who wants to take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it. I don't want to have to spend hours and hours doing research, buy features I'll never use, or pay twice as much as I need to.