Can you even get a dumb TV anymore? I found it surprisingly difficult when I replaced mine 2 years ago. So far I've been OK with simply not plugging it into the Internet.
At Best Buy, their store brand (Insignia) is not "smart". Everything else seems to be.
Yes. Sort of. You can buy a commercial display, the kind used for digital signs. But, those probably cost 10x more than a consumer TV.
Not really, to be honest. I don't consider this 43" 5000:1 2160p 350cd/m^2 screen ( https://iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite-le4340uhs-b1/ ) to have a bad price @ 580 EUR. Unfortunately it seems to be limited by 8bit sRGB when it comes to using that contrast. They do have HDR screens though.
Wow maybe this is a US to EU mismatch but I just got a 4K 65” HDR screen for $500 including tax? That seems very expensive by my standards, as $500 ~= €448 and €580 ~= $650
Can confirm, low-end prices for HDR-capable non-OLED (so, worse blacks than higher-end screens but still much better than most of what was typical, say, 10 years ago) 4K screen @ 65" is like $500. Under $400 for 55" and same quality.
Mind you, this is a 18/7 screen with an insane viewing angle. Your eyes do not have that much in-picture dynamic range; you only see it when the content is dim. (I have an older version of this on my desk.)
Piggybacking on this, I contemplating the same problem and was wondering whether I could create a new wifi network which can only access hbo go domains and let the TV use that network only.
Is something like this possible without any additional device in the loop? Just tweaking the (ISP) router and forget about it?
Probably not. The HN advice always seems to be to use your ISP-provided device only as a modem and plug a separate router into it. I don't know how many people actually do this in practice - probably the same proportion of vim users who actually have Caps Lock remapped to Escape.
Well, I'm doing this but my Caps Lock is mapped to Control. Anyway, you are probably right, there are dozens of us. On the other hand I've seen couple of discussions here around Ubiquity and MicroTik in consumer environments some maybe it's not that rare.
There are certainly dumb displays. You'd have to decide if they have the characteristics that you want.