This thread got me to thinking. Dh and I went to Best Buy and ended up buying a new smart TV and a new (very smart) laptop to control it, plus a wireless keyboard. Here's how it's going to work. The TV will have an HDMI cord attached to it. When we want to stream from the computer, we will plug the laptop into this cord to connect it to the tv. The wireless keyboard will be kept next to the couch, and we will use that to control what we see on the tv. Basically we will be using the tv as a huge computer monitor to stream things such as Amazon prime movies (and anything else we sign up for). My understanding is that this eliminates the need for extra boxes such as Roku, etc. One caveat for this -- be sure the laptop has a separate graphics chip (which makes the streaming seamless).
There is a ***lot*** to know before you make a decision. We were very impressed with the quality of the people who helped us at Best Buy. My dh has worked 40+ years on mainframe computers and thought he knew enough, but even he admitted that he got a lot of additional information that helped make our decision easier.
The laptop/smart TV route is not the only way to go; it was just what we decided was the best for us.
I think that you can buy a regular tv and, as long as you have a wireless internet setup within your house (or an ethernet cable connection to the internet), you can buy add a Roku unit to stream internet to your tv. With Roku, for example, you can subscribe to Netflix and get Netflix movies streaming. Roku offers quite a few others channels too. This could be considerably less expensive than the route we went. Here is a link to Roku info:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...4203847AAbMFuo
There are media streamers other than Roku that are possibilities as well:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-th...rsus-apple-tv/
If you are near a Best Buy, I think it is well worth carving out a couple of hours of time to go there and start asking questions. Have a good idea of your budget and what you want to watch. (For example, some of the stuff we get for free on Amazon Prime is much more attractive to us than Netflix offerings.) Just be prepared to spend at least twice the amount of time you think you will need, and plan more than one trip if necessary. We didn't learn all there is to know about smart TVs, but did learn enough to know what we wanted to get.