Just as in the movie "Bull Durham", one must learn the cliches.
"Pulling the pin" refers to arming a grenade.
"Pulling the plug" refers to stopping life support in a medical facility.
The latter is a more appropriate cliche for this business decision.
Heh. Yes, I thought the same. Except I imagined Sharp standing there dumbly still holding the grenade after pulling the pin (and letting the lever flip off, for you weapons perfectionists.)
What's laughable about all the TV manufacturers blindly staggering around, searching for some kind of marketing gimmick that could keep the sales flowing (despite broadcast TV dying since fewer and fewer people want to watch the shitty programs and lying news), is that there's an obvious one they are missing.
What's the hottest market in the whole home computing field?
Top end 3D engines, for gaming.
So turn the 'TV' into a computer peripheral, that is a self-contained 3D engine. Include an ethernet port with 10/100/gigabit speed, and a protocol to allow a PC to offload the actual 3D scene drawing to the display. The PC just sends the scene model, textures, viewpoint, etc to the screen. Updates that dataset only when something changes. The engine in the screen does all the frame generation grunt work.
The screen should also be able to generate 2D screen images, for OS GUI interfaces, etc. Except it should be able to texture those 2D GUI images onto surfaces in 3D scenes. Viola... the basis for implementing a truly 3D OS GUI environment. At f-ing last.
Another benefit of this functional refactoring, is that with PC-to-screen data flow being TCP/IP, you could suddenly have any combination of multiple PCs and screens you liked, with screens showing duplicate or unique scenes. Or one screen easily used as an interface to many PCs. If there's no change of a screen's content, there's no data traffic.
A mating product would be a broadcast tuner as a standalone TCP/IP peripheral, with control and A-V-out via the LAN. Then people could have just one, or enough to capture as many channels simultaneously as they wished. Or none, for those not interested in broadcast garbage.
However I have no expectation that the consumer electronics industry could ever get such a concept working. They are the same ones that couldn't get HDMI to provide universal remote control capability for multiple devices over HDMI. Because they collectively have no imagination, or ability to construct flexible, extensible protocols. Also for 'universal remote control' there's a method they'd absolutely have to adopt since it's the only workable way to do it, but they never could since it's fundamentally incompatible with traditional ideas of product styling as a sales feature.
And let's not talk about USB being master-slave, instead of peer to peer. Shudder.