The best Computing and TV for Seniors

Staying at home has launched me on a mission to work out what would be the best computing and TV station for a senior.

It worked out that I needed to abandon cable and Windows and a PC and their many annoyances and costs.

Instead, I needed to adopt what is new and more advanced, and a lot cheaper.

That consisted simply of a 24in TV which also served as a monitor or display, an assortment of so-called sticks, and a Chromebook with a 15 inch screen.

I could find only two such 24in TVs out there and both are fine. One is an Insignia Fire TV from Best Buy and the other is an LG. I also put to use an old HDMI display.

The Chromebook is an HP.

To make efficient use of space, this equipment sits in a bookshelf with one shelf extended out to accommodate a keyboard.  I sit three feet away from the screen.

All are connected direct through ethernet and avoid slow Wi-Fi where possible, such as Roku and Amazon Fire.

I run online media on the display while at the same time also using the Chromebook for computing. I can also deliver the Chromebook screen to the larger display.

This arrangement then opened up a whole new world for me.

The Roku Ultra stick especially opened up a huge array of services.  

I decided to go for broke by adding a Fire stick and a new TiVo stick, which applies TiVo tools to ease navigation. I dispensed with the Chromecast because the other sticks perform the same functions.

The array of services was dizzying at first. It took a while to find out what I really wanted and then weed out what I did not want, such as subscription costs.

I was able to get free all the local TV channels plus also the Philadelphia channels, both live and on-demand. Newson is

an app which gives access to local channels.

I did subscribe to Peacock, which offers a wonderful library of NBC and associated media. I did that also to eliminate commercials. I needed the Tivo stick for that.

There have been more and more services offering a cable like program guide. These include NBC above, and also Pluto, and as I say more and more others.

A favorite service is Acorn, along with Hulu Amazon Prime.

There are also many other services which offer media with commercials, especially movies and TV series.

I had used many of these services on my cell phone and simply had to activate them for the large screen.

These included music services such as Amazon and YouTube Music and Pandora, along with Spotify.

it is possible to subscribe to services such as Sling which give access to TV shows on demand.  These cost $20 a month and up. I avoid such costs. Sling does have some free content.

If you want to watch nearly all German TV series and movies it is possible to get them both live and on-demand via Youtv.    That is NOT YouTube.

You can get two shows at a time free or for less than $10 hundreds at one time which are downloaded for access. Wish we had that here. Yes, there are subtitles in German. Just tap on UT at the bottom of the screen.

For $5 a month I subscribe to a service which provides Canadian and Australian news TV as an antidote for our local news. Newsy is an interesting free USA app which avoids opinions.

The hardest part about the whole effort was learning how to navigate to find the best content.

Both Roku and the TiVo stick and Amazon Fire have voice input to make that easier.