You could stash a LOT of drugs in that TV. Shit, I’d be happy if it was unusable space altogether, just to have the fucking buttons back Buttons! That do stuff! That aren’t hidden on the back, or nonexistent altogether!
More of this, less of everything else, plz.
Why the fuck no-one has yet marketed a TV with a ‘find the remote’ button, and a remote that goes ‘beep’ when said button is pressed, I do not know. Who wouldn’t buy that?
The first new TV I had as a kid, had a single button remote, also using the rod-striking technology. You could preset any of the VHF channels as active channels. Click once and the TV comes on. Click again and it turned the channel dial to the next preset channel. To turn it off, you had one unused channel that you preset as your “off” channel. Tune to it, and when the TV detected no signal for about 5 seconds, it turned itself off. It would also shut itself off when a station went off the air, which they did back in those days. So you could fall asleep watching Tom Snyder, and not wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of static.
B-b-b-but that would ruin the retro appeal of listening to something with shitty sound and it would force us to actually make it worth the price gouge we’re charging hipsters for a novelty item.
Edit: I’m for ACTUAL ON TV SET KNOBS THAT DO THINGS… but it looks like the shell is el cheapo plastic that’s not even trying to look good, and the wasted back space? Pfft. On the one hand good way to hide cabling I guess. On the other. Look. How easy will it be for me the end user to mod this to have either decent speakers or make use of the back space? It won’t be I’d wager.
I love th idea, but make it as an actual flat wall hanger tv instead of completely replicate the shitty tv stand look. That itself would be kinda neat. walk to the tv wall and click click clickclick til you find something. Then again I kinda want one of these BIGGER. Lots bigger.
What a great idea! Except I think they use infrared (at least my 6 year old TV does) and that wouldn’t work unless the remote was in view of the tv. So they’d have to add something like a car key-fob panic button that (I guess) works by radio. Or an RFID chip maybe?
…Resisting urge… the jokes… they write themselves…
Kidding actually. Loved Tom Snyder.
No reason a TV can’t use a bidirectional Bluetooth signal instead of IR. Yes, it will piss off the universal remote people. But, it may be a fair tradeoff.
His show was great. He had guests that you wouldn’t see anywhere else. The night he interviewed Public Image Ltd. is still burned into my mind. And his non-stop smoking would never get on the air today (the irony is that the show was only created to make up for the revenue lost by the removal of all cigarette advertising from TV). It was also famous for having John Lennon’s last interview. And it was also where the original SNL cast first appeared together on TV.
Unfortunately, they ruined the show when it become Tomorrow Coast to Coast and they teamed him up with Rona Barrett. Nothing about that was a good idea. She basically killed the show.
I don’t see the separate UHF nob. 
Bah! These folks did a slap dash effort and went home early!
MISSING: 1) Rabbit ear antennas 2) Huge dimple sticking out the back of the set
WRONG: Aspect ratio is much too wide to be 4:3
Some innovative engineering is needed to restore the full experience those of us from the 60s and 70s (and earlier) who enjoyed watching the big glass boob tube. Like having the set take a few minutes to warm up enough to show a picture. Like having the image flip over vertically from time to time, showing the “ultra black” bar that was used to provide vertical sync. Like watching the image invert and tumble and having the sound frizz out whenever there was any kind of signal interruption, like an airplane within a few miles or a passing cloud.
My favorite is having the image shrink down to a little dot in the middle of the screen when you turned the thing off. Until they figured out how to control this, the picture tube would always get a little burned-in spot in this location long before the rest of the phosphor wore out.
Does it come with a little brother?
Patent it quick!
Yeah! They should also add a digital recording that would pop in every now and then: “This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. In case of a real emergency, you would have been instructed to tune to an emergency channel. Repeat, this is only a test.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.”
Not to mention, “The problems you are experiencing do not originate at this station.”
And the test pattern! Don’t forget the test pattern.
Ah, nostalgia.
If it doesn’t have an Indian head, there is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture.
Hmm. All I get is some kid playing noughts and crosses with a creepy-looking clown doll.
Unfortunately, this is sometimes a well-founded concern. It’s one that vexes me greatly.
Potentiometers would be a wonderfully convenient thing if it weren’t for the fact that, with repeated twiddling, contact wear causes their resistance values to start to drift, sometimes to the point of making a volume control knob or the like nearly unusable.
And both the price and the complexity go up considerably when you move up to optical or hall-effect rotary encoders. Very, very, annoying.
Some of these newer Smart TV or Dumb-TV that are running the same OS of a Smart TV take 30 second to boot and display a picture, and accept commands from the remote, like the ones that are marked “Philips” nowadays.
When with the digital switch over I’ve used the now empty VHF I band to distribuite in the home some satellie channels. I could have the analog recive experience on modern flat panel TV too, and know then a thunderstorm is approaching!
There were VHF-only TVs in countries with very few channels.
